4 Aug 2015

How to boost your business with Social Media

Since the launch of Facebook in 2014, social media has really taken off and become one of the sole marketing techniques for many businesses.
Here at Salon Tracker, we specialise in salon management and intelligent marketing.  We are exhibiting at the Manchester Professional Beauty event this September, where we will be running demonstrations of how we use social media to help improve salon businesses.

We have introduced SMS and email marketing, that we also link up to Facebook reviews, therefore allowing customers to have the chance to leave feedback after a particular salon treatment.  The beauty of social media is that it promotes your business at a lower cost.  It is free to sign up to the majority of social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.  As long as you then market to clients that you have a social media page, you should start getting the following that you need to help you to communicate with your target audience successfully.

So how do you use social media to boost your business?

Once you have got yourself set up on the platforms that you believe are most relevant, it is good to plan content regarding seasonal events, any upcoming offers you may have and also any relevant media topics that are currently in the news.  Your information has to be relevant, there is no point in posting about something that happened months ago, or likewise don’t introduce an offer that will be coming out in 6 months’ time.  People are likely to forget and insignificant information will just get lost in and amongst the other millions of statuses, tweets and photos that have been posted that day! Similarly, you have to make sure that your information is consistent.  It is no good opening a Facebook account for your business, promoting it to clients, to then only post something say once a fortnight.  It has to be regular and the content has to be creative. Also, try not to post overly branded material all the time, as this can become a little tedious to your site visitors and almost makes your social media page become an elaborate news release. Social media networks should be a relaxed forum where conversations between you and you’re clients can be a little less formal and more personal.

So how do you stand-out on social media?

There are billions of social media networks across the globe, with each of those platforms collectively posting millions of times per day.  Therefore it is important that you know how to use your social networks to the best advantage for your business.  As I earlier discussed, making sure that your content is relevant is even more so important in regards to ensuring that your business stands out.  There are methods in which you can use to improve the amount of views a social media post gets.  Hashtags is the main one.  SEO is another.  Google some key words to see which are the most fundamental words or phrases that people search for in regards to the nature of your business. This way, your post is more likely to reach an individual if it contains those particular words, via hashtags or even if they are just implemented in the text of the post. Secondly, make sure you post at reasonable times where your information is most likely to be seen. Think about the daily pattern of your client database, know your customers’ habits!  Do a little consumer analysis and consider what time will they be commuting to work for instance, when will they be on lunch or do they have any free browsing time? These are all things that need to be taken into account as again you could post something really important, but if it is released at the wrong time that could too be easily missed and overshadowed by other updates.  Once you have been on your social networks for a few months, you can actually download analytics that will highlight information about past posts, including how many times each particular post was viewed, how many people it reached and if it was shared by anyone at all.  By measuring these results it will then indicate which the most popular posts were and from here you can see what time in the day these were released, to then use this information for future planning.

So there is a little bit of advice as to how you can use social media effectively for business growth.  Think of it as a free advice and tools page for your business, where you create a loyal fan base by posting creative content and imagery that will capture the attention of your target audience.  As I previously mentioned that our company, Salon Tracker, integrates with Salon Facebook pages to request reviews from consumers via SMS message, reviews are a fantastic element to also have on your social media page.  They create reassurance regarding your business to any new visitors of your social media networks, if they can see previous testimonials from current clients.

We will be showing how this works for our current clients at Manchester’s Professional Beauty North across 20th and 21st September, so come and see us at stand B35!

Salon Tracker x

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