We’re now in a world where people are constantly
checking their social media pages, so if you don’t already have social media
accounts for your salon, well you’re missing out! The best thing about social
media is that its FREE, yes you read that correctly, free! Facebook, Twitter
and Instagram are the three main social media platforms with over 2.8 billion
active monthly users combined, so why not use them to your advantage! Maybe you
already have accounts but they aren’t really working out for you? Well fear
not, I’m going to give you our best tips so that you can improve your social
media and make it worth your time.
When you Google a salon name, the salons Facebook
page will be often be one of the top results, and its where potential customers
will be able to see what people think of that salon. Facebook reviews are seen
as a saviour for many people, and they will often help them to make up their
mind on whether they want to visit your salon or not. They can give a potential
customer that extra level of trust that you’re going to do a good job and not
‘ruin their lives’. So, my top tip would be to ask your customers to leave a
positive review on your page, if your page has a bucket load of 5-star reviews
it could be the difference between someone visiting your salon, or going to
your competitor down the street. Persuading your clients to leave you a review
isn’t as easy as it sounds, maybe start by asking your most loyal customers who
you can trust to leave you a positive review. The last thing you want is potential
customers seeing a bad review on your social media page, so we recommend that
if someone does leave a bad review, you immediately reply quickly and
positively, even apologising when they are in the wrong. This will often lead
to them deleting their review, or even posting a new, more positive one, and
even if they leave it be, potential customers will be able to see that you have
at least attempted to resolve the issue.
I know it can be hard finding the time to post on
your social media pages, especially when you’re a salon owner. But there’s no need to panic, there are
plenty of websites out there with a sole purpose of helping you, well not just
you but you get what I mean. A great online scheduler, that’s once again free,
is ‘Hootsuite’. Hootsuite is the perfect way for your business to plan ahead
with your social media, anytime you have a free hour or even a few minutes you
can schedule some posts that will then automatically post on the date and time
that you want. It’s important that you plan your content, and make sure that
you’re not only keeping your customers up-to-date with the latest salon news
and offers, but you are also posting more personal and relatable posts. Social
media however is the best place for you to be posting any offers or deals that
you are currently giving out. Your customers or any potential customers will be
able to just view your social media pages and immediately see that you are
offering these deals without physically having to visit your salon. You need to
be using these platforms to show your best work off to the world, so why not
ask your customer if you can take a quick picture of their latest hair style,
or set of nails, and then post it on your social media. Instagram probably
first sprung to mind when I mentioned posting pictures, and obviously it’s a
great platform to use, as people will go to your Instagram expecting to see
pictures of your work, but make sure you don’t shy away from posting them
across all of your platforms. If potential customers can see the great work
that you have been doing, then this could, again, be the deciding factor in
whether they visit your salon, so why not give it a go?
Hashtags can be both brilliant and off-putting,
all depending on how you choose to use them. Although hashtags allow you to
reach out to a wider audience, which is great, if you use them incorrectly it
can take away from the message you’re trying to send out. Twitter was the original
start-up for hashtags, paving the way for them to be added to almost every
social media site, you can even search for them on Google. On Twitter, using
hashtags can improve engagement by 2x, but using over two hashtags can actually
reduce engagement by 17%, so be wary of going overboard, especially with the
newly introduced 280-character limit. Hashtags haven’t quite got going on
Facebook, so I wouldn’t really recommend using them, it turns out posts without
hashtags tend to do better than posts with hashtags. With Instagram using 11+
hashtags is the way to increase your interactions, although you may want to add
them in the comments or separate them slightly from your caption, as users may
assume they are spam and you, again, don’t want to avert them from reading the
caption. All in all, as long as you use hashtags correctly, they can only bring
more engagement and interaction to your social media counts, but over or under
use them, and they will be pointless.
Although all of the platforms I have mentioned
above are free, there are some methods that you can use that will cost, but
it’s an extremely low cost for the money that it might bring into your salon.
If you didn’t know already, Facebook bought Instagram in 2012, and through
these platforms you can create adverts for as low as $1. You can tailor your
ads so that they are only reaching people that you think will be intrigued by
what you have to offer, so you might want to add a location field to it so that
only people in your local area will see it on their timeline. You might as well
test it out with a low budget and see if it works for your salon, maybe give
out an incentive like a £5 voucher for new customers. Then ask the customer to
show you the advert in store to receive the discount, this will allow you to
see how much reach the advert has had and if it’s worth sending out more in the
future.
You can find plenty more tips and tricks for
improving your salons social media on the internet, but these are just a few of
our tops tips, we hope that they can help you out in way!
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