Have you ever had such an awesome experience at a hotel, spa or restaurant that you felt like you wanted to tell the world, and went straight onto social media to post about it? It doesn’t happen very often, which is what makes it more special. If you could optimise your businesses chances of getting glowing reviews and also get seen by as many people as possible, why wouldn’t you?
Face Bragging – social media showing off
It’s not 2008 anymore and Facebook is not the only social media, but it’s still one of the most popular. With instant ‘look at my life’ apps like Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram as well, the opportunities for clients to tell the world how great their last treatment in your salon was are limitless.
Encourage happy clients to check in, review and comment about your business. Start promoting yourself on social media by talking about what you’re doing in the salon, not just ‘we have a special offer on this week’ but talk about the treatments you enjoy doing for clients, what’s involved, how they work, who they suit.
Watch what people say on social media
Unless people comment directly on your page it’s not possible to see what they are saying about you if they have their profile set to private. You could try a hashtag search in Facebook (they work on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter but haven’t really taken off as well on Facebook) to see if your business comes up. Try it on a big brand like #Clarins and you’ll see what I mean.
You can also try a technique called a Graph Search to see what’s being said or posted about your business. That involves changing your language in Facebook’s settings to US English and searching on something like ‘people who like Clarins’. I’ll explain Graph Searches for you another time.
If nothing pops up for you, try looking on Twitter where most things are public. I searched under a local spa name and all the tweets they’d been mentioned in came up in a long list. You can also use Google to see what people are saying about you. If you have analytics on your website, click on the links that referred people to you and see whether they’ve come from a blog post, forum or social media comment somewhere. There are tools you can use that let you see the links people have followed to get to your website and these can prove really useful.
Use your social media apps to make your salon stand out
People remember when you’ve gone the extra mile; it gives them a warm fuzzy feeling. You can help solve your clients’ problems, both on social media and in-salon, and they’ll talk about how great you are and come to you in the future.
Take some time to get a reputation for being knowledgeable and helpful. You could try setting up a weekly ‘clinic’ on social media. It’s so easy now with apps like Periscope where you can broadcast live via Twitter and people can ask you questions, or even Blab where you just broadcast yourself and interview other people too. Rumour also has it that you can live broadcast on Facebook but I haven’t tried that yet!
YouTube is another great option, if you prefer to record your advice and not go out live. Promote your YouTube channel on your website and social media; make sure that people know every time you update it. This popular beauty channel has over 70,000 subscribers and is regularly updated with likes and dislikes, it’s not a big budget, highly produced effort, just a normal, friendly woman talking about beauty. That could be you!
https://www.youtube.com/user/MissBudgetBeauty
If the thought of broadcasting on Blab scares you, there’s a lovely cheap Udemy course you can take that will guide you through how to make it work for your business, and the link is here:
https://www.udemy.com/blab-15-ways-make-more-sales-with-blab/#desc