Here at Salon Tracker, we just wanted to give you guys as salon owners a few tips on how you can use social media to your advantage and hopefully increase profits by doing so, whether this be through paid advertising or a bit of free PR:
- If you haven’t done so already, set your business up on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and Google +. Company pages are FREE to set up, and whilst these channels may not necessarily apply to every business, for salon owners, Pinterest and Instagram are great places to visually showcase your salons’ work and to also gather inspiration. Facebook, Twitter and Google+ are the three other most popular social media channels, in which engagement is key on Facebook and Twitter and you can gather customer reviews through Google + and also Facebook again.
- Now you’ve created the above, it’s time to plan your content. For those of you that are worrying about managing these social media networks around your busy salon schedule, there is no need, as there are websites out there to help you. A great one is the specialist social media management scheduler ‘Hootsuite’. Hootsuite allows businesses to plan their Tweets, Facebook and Google+ posts for weeks/months in advance, meaning that whenever you have a spare couple of hours, you can schedule your messages that will then be posted automatically at your chosen times. Again, this site is FREE to sign up to and gives you the peace of mind that your social media is under control whilst you are busy keeping an eye on the salon. Another great tool on Hootsuite is their ‘auto-schedule’, which after you have been using the scheduler for a couple of weeks, it will automatically post status’s/tweets/updates at optimum times based on the performance of your previous media.
- Create a professional company website. Along with the increase in social media, comes the rise in people browsing the web, in which now many businesses have had to ensure that their website is optimum for mobile, as over 50% of people searching the web use their smart phone in which to do so. (Dailymail, 2015) Another plus of having a website is that your salon business is present on google, in which enhances your search engine optimisation (SEO). This evidently meaning that when it comes to your target market searching for salons in your area, or salons that offer similar services, your salon will appear higher up in the google ranking dependent on your SEO. SEO is improved the more content that is published containing a back-link to your website, which will be increased through reviews, conversations on salon related social forums, such as Salon Geek, and also though blog posting – which we will come on to next.
- Create a company blog and have your professionals showcase their work and styling tips through content. Not only is this interesting for your followers and a great place for them to gather inspiration, it will also as mentioned above, increase your company SEO. Use your employees expertise to create engaging content and share these on your social networks to gain yourself a further chance of external sharing and backlinks to your website. You can also share these posts yourself on your google+ pages and salon forums to improve the readership level and to increase brand awareness.
- Facebook Ads! 9/10, Facebook is one of the main social networks, especially for salon owners and one of the main platforms that their target market will be using. FB ads are extremely simple to create and aren’t too text heavy, meaning that they are easy for consumers to interpret, providing that a powerful image and caption is used. Facebook is a fantastic platform for B2C marketing and also, an excellent tool to attract further consumers as your updates can be shared and updated among individuals & their friends. You can set budgets per month for your Facebook ads so that initially you can test out a couple of layouts to see which would work best for your business and also, so as to ensure that you keep within your marketing budget until you have seen the ROI from your campaigns.
- Engaging content that is posted at Optimum times! It’s alright being present on all the relevant networks but you need to make sure that you are scheduling updates to be posted at the best possible times in order to achieve a high level of engagement. According to the Huffington Post (2016) for maximum viewing and re-tweets on Twitter, content should be posted at either 12pm (to attract people on a lunch time) or between 5pm/6pm (attracts people on commute from work.) For Facebook, according to Microsoft (2016) the best time to post to achieve maximum shares and FB likes is on a Friday afternoon between 1pm & 3pm, as the average post life is much longer on a FB newsfeed as a pose to on a Twitter feed. Plus, the more likes a post has, the higher up the feed it will appear, meaning that it will be shared constantly through in to Friday night. Instagram is slightly different again, as the main achievement here is to gain as many likes on pictures as possible, as the more likes your content has, the more likely it is to appear on the main Instagram news page. According again to Huffington post and Latergramme (2016), Wednesday at 5pm is the best time to post on the Mid-week commute. For many consumers, they will scroll aimlessly through their social media channels until they come across something enticing or entertaining, therefore make sure that your content is always No.1 relevant, and No.2 interesting, to capture the attention of your target market. Then be sure to check that your content is constantly refreshed and you’re not repeating yourself too much. That way, you are ensuring that the consumer then remains a follower of your social media pages and hopefully, will help to promote your content to others in order to achieve a greater following.
Hope these tips helps, Happy Marketing!
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