If you think that getting your salon Instagram-savvy is a waste of your time, it’s absolutely not. Instagram is the perfect place for beauty and image-related businesses to showcase just how good they are, show off their favourite products and work, and get to know what other people are talking about. It’s free, and has over 200 million users.
Get your salon in with the Insta-crowd and you could find a few minutes of strategic picture posting will spread the word much faster than any run of the mill Facebook promotion could.
Top tips for making your salon Instagram-savvy in minutes :
Make sure you stay on trend – check out which hashtags are trending (which means the subjects are popular) and use them yourself to get more people looking at what you’ve posted. It works really well with occasion-themed hashtags like #mothersday as there will be lots of people using and searching them – so your images will show up in a high number of searches. Posting a gorgeous picture of a gift set that’s perfect for a mother’s day gift, with #mothersday and add a location so that people will be able to find you, too.
I searched #Ipswich, scrolled down the list to #Ipswichnails and found 782 posts with multiple people posting under that hashtag.
#Brightonhair has almost 800 posts (and there are a lot of variations on #Brightonhair as a hashtag) and some beautiful images.
#liverpoolsalon has 4822 posts.
Get yourself in on those hashtags and showcase your work to local people.
Before and after beauty salon shots
Hair and beauty salons really get to use Instagram to its advantage with before and afters. Ask your clients if they will be photographed for your social media as a before and after – show potential customers what you can do with their hair, eyebrows, nails or lashes. A review or good testimonial is fab but you know what they say – a picture paints a thousand words and Instagram is the best place to paint them.
Show your salon’s personality
Remember that on Instagram the user base is young, and they know what’s fashionable. Hungry for the latest trends, they’ll be looking for somewhere that they connect with as well as that’s technically awesome.
Using memes (I’ll tell you where you can create those for free in another post) and fun quotes/posts to brighten up your business Instagram feed helps to give your salon a bit of a personality.
Get people talking
Word of mouth is a fantastic way of getting more clients, so try asking people to post their own images of what they’ve had done, and hashtag it with your salon name.
Get more buy in by giving clients an incentive: “Upload your nail pics from #mysalon and we’ll give you 10% off your next set of nails” or similar. They get a discount, you get exposure and their friends and followers all get to see you too. Win win all round!