If I could only give every single hairstylist in America one piece of advice, it would be to keep crafting their social media marketing skills. There is a lot of information out there and this is my simple guide that will help you speak directly to the salon clients you should be speaking to and turning likes and follows into clients and dollar bills!
Here is the thing with social media marketing, you cannot ever feel like you’ve got it all figured out!
Never get comfortable with how you are using your salon’s social media account because not only do new platforms come around but existing ones change as quickly as the weather. There are a few things you can bet on always helping you along your way when it comes to marketing your salon on social media.
1. You can ALWAYS expect to get more engagement the more you engage!
If you are taking the time to engage with PEOPLE on a social media platform that are supporters or potential supporters of your business and I mean really engage not just a like or a follow.
Search for people in your area that fit your ideal client using hashtags or location settings. Read their long post or give them valuable advice to something they post about. You can expect that person will take the time to actually check out your profile if you like, comment and follow them way more than if you were to do these things using a two-word generic comment. You might even get a follow and a loyal engager on your page for many months to come.
If there is one thing everyone across the board says they don’t like about social media is how fake everything seems. This year everyone is looking for authenticity. As much as we want the posts of our work to be as perfect as possible we also want to be real and show some behind the scenes stuff.
I am assuming you are reading this post because you are trying to bring more traffic to your salon business so when I say keep it real maybe you keep you stuffing your face during your 5 minute break or how exhausted you are at the end of the day to yourself but you show a picture of you doing a blow dry or mixing up color. Talk from your heart about what got you into the beauty industry and why you are still so passionate about it today.
Which leads me to my next point…
2. Getting a ton of likes and follows doesn’t mean anything if your community is full of people that aren’t your people!
If you are actively trying to grow a following or get a lot of likes on your pictures then you are probably getting a lot of random follows. If you use a specific hashtag you will notice accounts with similar names will out of nowhere start to follow you.
Right away this seems good and it is but….really, if you are getting shallow engagement and empty follows your reach won’t actually raise and the platform you are using won’t actually give you any additional boosts.
This is going to take a second to explain so let’s break it up into two parts…
- Reach
- Additional boosts
Reach is how many people your post is getting viewed by. This is just one of the many numbers you should be paying attention to in your Business Profile Insights. We will get into insights later but reach is what you are actually wanting your platform to help you with.
You see, you have your core group of current followers and fans that will maybe see your posts depending on their engagement with your profile and you are really relying on the platform you are using to give you the other views.
Additional Boosts is the times they put your content in front of people for free. The platforms are smart these days and they want for the posts that they are putting in front of people for free to be quality content. The way they determine quality content is by measuring your insights. If your posts are getting high engagement they view that as quality and will then reward you with more free reach.
I keep saying free reach because if you do have your account set up as a business (which you absolutely should) then you have the option to pay to boost your posts. This has its benefits down the line but I am a firm believer that you need to do a lot of posting and analyzing your insights before learning what posts are valuable enough to pay for boosting.
If you aren’t taking the time to properly analyze your posts you are simply throwing money into the air and hoping some of it lands back in your pocket. I promise you whenever people do this they end up disappointed because they saw no return on their investment and now claim that it doesn’t work at all. Trust me I have been there and learned the hard way!
This brings me back around to the original point, if your community is full of your people then they are actively engaging in your posts and the platform you are on will recognize this and hook you up BUT WAIT…there is many more variables to this equation so don’t forget to not get comfortable!
3. ALL social media platforms praise CONSISTENCY!!
Most of us actually do know these points above ( we even really do know this one) but let me stress it because these are the stupid easy social media marketing tips that never go out of style no matter how many algorithm changes happen. Your account will never grow if you do not stay consistent with whatever schedule you give yourself.
This is the beauty, you can pick how often you post, what you post, what time you post…you just can’t do it for a week or two and tehn sto pfor a week or two and then get back on and then fall off and then get back on and then fall….you get it right!
You HAVE to stay consistent!
Consistency in your pictures is also strongly suggested. You obviously don’t want every post to look exactly the same but you can read my guide on Setting up a Photoshoot Worthy Salon Suite for Social Media Marketing to learn how you can set up space in your salon studio just for mini photoshoots before and after appointments. This will ensure that you have high quality images to use for social media and your website!
Stay consistent with your posting schedule will come with a tiny bit of variables at first because you will be testing out times and days that work for you and that work for your audience and as your audience grows this may change as then you should!
This is where your insights come in…
In your insights section of almost all social media platforms, it will actually break down for you the day and sometimes even time of day that your account gets the highest engagement. It will also tell you the content that has gotten the best engagement in the past.
These are clues as to when you should be posting and the kind of content your audience responds well to.
Do not then only post on the exact same content on those exact days at those exact times but make sure that you are incorporating them into your posting calendar that way you continue to hit the engagement jackpot as much as possible to tell the platform “Hey, look over here at all of my good content!”.
4. You have to become an expert at pivoting!
Most of us already have a vision for how we want our brands to look and the message we want to put out there but remember if your message isn’t being received at all maybe your delivery needs to be switched up a little.
I am a big believer in making sure your business has solid branding and a mission statement that is loud and clear to everyone who is associated with your business but I also believe that just as we as people evolve over time our salons need to also!
I do not recommend doing this often but maybe once a year, do a little check in with yourself and go over your business’s look and feel as if you are a customer and give it a little love if you need to.
Remember, social media marketing is all about the visuals. so you want to make sure the homepage of your account feels clean and clear and if it doesn’t feel that way right now go through it thoroughly and remove the images that don’t feel like they fit.
I promise you Samantha from high school won’t be contacting you to figure out why you deleted 10 pictures from 6 months ago off of your business account BUT when someone you have engaged with clicks on your profile to check you out she WILL be impressed by your accounts professional look and feel.
Which is the perfect segway into my final tip for today…
5. Tell your customers what you want them to do next!
Not that I want you to talk to your viewers like they are stupid but I kind of want you to really spell out for them what you want them to do. I’m sure we have all seen the now infamous “link in bio” line at the end of a post but have you ever thought about why so many people do that?
When you can get a viewer to go from reading your post to going to your profile and then clicking the link in your bio, first of all, everything we have learned so far is working if you can do this but then it gives us the opportunity to take that little bit of trust that viewer has given us to use their time and fingertip to visit our personal website, article, form, etc…
When you can get even the tiniest bit of trust out of a view on a social media platform it opens you up to being able to get them to trust you with a lot more. It is up to you to decide what you want your viewers to do after they have read your post.
- Do you want them to go directly to your booking page and book a consultation/appointment with you today?
- Or maybe you just want them to answer a question you have about what types of shampoos they are enjoying right now?
These are great examples of things you can tell your customers to do while they are reading your post on social media and it is also an example of a big ask vs a small ask!
In the first question, you are asking your customers to trust you to the MAX….equivelent also as asking a first date to marry you! Yikes! This type of ask in your post is probably not going to get you much return if you have a small following and are new to your community.
The second question is a zero commitment ask. These types of questions are perfect if you are just starting out! The viewer gives you quality engagement signalling your platform to give you an extra gold star and giving you an in to possibly getting full trust from them down the line.
This is another point where pivoting will get you to where you want to be!
When it comes to marketing on social media the only thing you can rely on is that these 5 tips will help in some way shape or form if you are making sure you are working all 5 of them into your social media efforts!
If you are needing help when it comes to learning how to speak to your ideal client or even if you aren’t sure who your ideal client is and creating goals for your business and actively working towards them, you should definitely check out my 5 Day Workshop, Attracting your Ideal Salon Clients and Mastering Momentum! I know this 5-day workshop will not only be used once but over and over as you and your business continue to evolve and uplevel!
Cheers,
