Social media is an ever-changing business tool which can help you grow your client base, connect with potential customers and clients, and get to know what they want from their lash artists and suppliers! Instagram can be a minefield if you’re just getting started, with almost weekly adaptations and a huge number of ways to get your content seen, so London Lash founder Hanna Putjato has put together her top 5 tips for a business boosting Instagram account!
Tip 1: Great Content
The content you post on social media is going to be the difference between whether someone follows you or not – posting photos of trees, sunsets and flowers is pretty and will make your grid look nice, but it offers very little else in terms of making people in your target demographic want to follow you.
So what is great content which makes other people follow you? 🤔
In a simple way, great content is all the things your target audience finds interesting. What constitutes great content is going to be a little bit different for everyone - are you a lash technician hoping to appeal to new clients? Are you a trainer looking for students? A supply shop looking for professional lash artists to try your products?
The first thing to focus on is to understand WHO your audience is. As soon as you understand who your audience is, you need to think about what they might be interested in.
For a lash technician, your biggest target audience is more than likely women aged 18-40, who want to feel beautiful as soon as they wake up and at every moment during the day. If you are posting photo after photo of close ups of one eye with lashes, this isn’t really going to be interesting to all potential clients; this is good to do sometimes - it shows off your technical skills and everyone loves to know that their lash technician is highly skilled and will keep their lashes safe, but the truth of the matter is that clients want to look beautiful. They want to roll out of bed ten minutes before they need to leave the house and look like they spent an hour getting ready - show them pictures that will fill them with confidence that you can deliver this!
With this in mind, ask yourself what you would most like to see when deciding if and where to get your beauty treatment done. Before and after shots show your potential clients how beautiful they’ll be when they leave your salon, and how amazing they are going to feel! Perhaps they’ll even meet their soulmate on the way home and their life will change forever 😄
Other examples of good quality content:
- Photos of your beauty salon where they will come and feel like a movie star 👑
- Photos of your professional and friendly team who will make them look like a supermodel 💁♀️
- Posts about your personal and professional achievements 🏆
- Educational posts (how to look after lashes, the difference between different types of extensions) 👩🏫
- Reposts of your clients’ selfies - these work really well as it’s basically another way to review your work! 🤳
As well as feed posts, use your story to show that you are all approachable, friendly, professional and dedicated to your art, making them want to come to you over any other salon or lash artist! 💪
Tip 2: Interaction
Posting something cool is just the tip of the iceberg, and interaction goes both ways. When you then have people commenting and asking questions on your post, it is important to answer their questions, respond to their comments, or even just ‘like’ the comment, showing them that their feedback or queries are of value to you on a deeper level than just being another statistic.
It’s important that you don’t get lost in this ask and respond cycle, however, so set aside a little time each day/every couple of days/once a week (whatever works for you) to respond to messages and comments the way you would respond to emails. The great thing about social media is that you can log in from a mobile device and respond on the go, just remember to give yourself some relaxation time too! 😌
Tip 3: Tags and Hashtags
You’ve posted something really great, now it needs to be seen. On each Instagram post, you can tag up to 20 other accounts. This almost guarantees you 20 likes on your post, so it goes a little way to beat the Instagram algorithm. Next, you can add up to 30 hashtags to a post/comment at a time. These are best separated from the main body of your caption as it looks a little tidier, our favourite way to do this is to put the hashtags in the first comment – they still work in exactly the same way, but this keeps our caption tidy and informative, with just as much information as we want to put in there! 😄
Tip 4: Hashtags!
You know you can add 30 hashtags to a post or comment, but making them relevant is key to getting them seen by who you want to see them. If you are a lash artist looking for clients and you use hashtags such as ‘eyes’, ‘girl’ or ‘world’, you might get some likes but not from the people you need. Make them specific to you – ‘eyelashextensions’, ‘lashlove’ ‘eyelashextensionsLondon’ etc. – tailor them to your location and your work and the likes will follow! This is even more important now that Instagram has introduced a feature where you can follow hashtags – think how much further your post could go if people are following the ‘russianvolumelashes’ hashtag you put on your pictures! ☝️ Of course, manually adding 30 hashtags to each post is time consuming – make this easier and save time by creating a list in your phone of all the hashtags you use on your posts.
Tip 5: Insta Story
Not only is the story function fun, every time you add something new to your story you go to the front of the storyline on top of everyone’s feed**. Stories allow you to link to products in your online store, to your booking system, and to your YouTube videos. You can run polls and get your client's opinions quickly and easily in a fun way – questions such as ‘do you want me to offer Russian Volume lashes?’ could help you decide how beneficial it could be for you to get booked onto a new course simply by seeing how many of your existing client base would love the service.
Stories are a fun way to show your clients, customers, and followers who you are in a more casual way – it's easy to be so professional on your social media accounts that you lose sight of the fact that people love to support and buy from people they like because they trust them – a story takes you from a business to a nice, cool, approachable person with a business.
Instagram is always evolving and so are you! It’s important to try out new things until you find the thing that works, and even then - experiment with content and layout until you find what works for you!
**2022 update - while this was once true of Instagram stories there has been a shift in the way Instagram displays content, with the accounts you interact with most being shown in the stories bar as well as throughout your feed. You do have the option to change this in your settings, but few people actually do this. With this in mind, make sure you are using those interactive features such as polls and question boxes, and make sure your stories and engaging enough that your clients come back time and again to see what you have to say!
Written by Hanna Putjato,
Edited by Laura Brown
