Many of our Austin beauty school students aspire to, or already own their own businesses. Social media is a valuable tool to help you advertise and market yourself. It’s the perfect platform to show off your work and style, while connecting with clients and industry experts. The following social media tips and tricks can help you make the most of your online efforts.
Social Media Tip #1: Share Your Story
You can share perfectly-filtered photos of great hairstyles all day long, but to really reach hearts you need to sell your story just as much as the service or product you offer. Who are you? What was the driving passion behind your business? What struggles have you faced as a small business owner? Share your message as professionally as possible, while showing people the human behind your talent.
Social Media Tip #2: Keep work and personal accounts separate
While sharing your story is important, there’s a fine line between personalizing your account and breaching into unprofessional territory. Save your family photos and pictures from your best friend’s wedding for your personal social media account. Make social media pages that are 100% dedicated to your business, complete with a description of your services, location, creative hashtags and so forth.
It’s never too early to create your account and start sharing your work and skills with the world. We encourage beauty school students to start their social media accounts while they’re still in school.
Our Austin beauty school students and graduates are slaying it on social media!
Social Media Tip #3: Always take before and after pictures of your clients
Make a habit of taking before and after pictures of your clients to share on social media. Just make sure to get permission from each client before taking or posting a photo of them online.
Social Media Tip #4:Interact with Others
72% of people said they were more likely to make a purchase from a small business after interacting with them on Twitter.
Social media offers the perfect vessel for you to communicate with all different types of people, aka potential customers. The more profiles you interact with, the more followers and potential business you could attract. Communication must be authentic though, so make it count by liking and Instagram relevant posts, leaving thoughtful comments and regularly sharing interesting content.
Social Media Tip #5: Learn from the pros
Don’t go at it alone! Take the time to read blogs intended to help you navigate social media with more efficiency, such as Social Media Examiner, Socially Sorted, or Unmetric. Continue reading these blogs to gain valuable insight into what big and small businesses are doing to remain relevant on social media.
We highly recommend checking out fashion and lifestyle blogger Aimee Song’s best selling book Capture Your Style, in which she explains how she used Instagram to make her mark and launch a dream career she could have only dreamed about when she was younger. She clearly has some tricks up her sleeve, after all this badass babe has over 4.6 million Instagram followers.
Social Media Tip #6: Enhance your photos with the right editing apps
There are a variety of photo editing apps that can take your pictures from ‘nice’ to ‘WOW.’ The right or wrong filter can literally change how much engagement a photo receives—so filter wisely. Some great apps for enhancing photos include: Facetune, Lightroom, Color Story, and Snapseed.
Social Media Tip #7:Track Results Any Way You Can
Your goal is to gain more followers, not lose followers—the best way to do that is to constantly supply your followers with content they crave. Unless you have psychic superpowers, you’ll need help from online tools to accomplish this. Apps like Brand24 auto update every time someone mentions your brand online, offering real-time access to valuable information about your current reputation and your audiences’ wants/needs. Additionally, Facebook analytics allows you to track post engagement so you can identify what your audience likes and loves and even hates.
Social Media Tip #8:Provide a Readily Accessible Link to Your Website
Potential clients or customers can only learn so much about you from your Instagram or Twitter profile. At the top of your profile provide a link to your website (which should be desktop and mobile-friendly) that describes your business or services in more detail. Use Bitly.com to create shortened links you can track to see how many website visitors generate from different social media platforms.
Did you know…
Avenue Five Institute currently has an in-house photographer and marketing manager who is available to help students just like you. This is your chance to learn even more about what it takes to successfully market your business on social media. Together, we can enhance your social media efforts!