5 Instagram Tips That'll Transform Your Lash Business!

Boost Your Lash Business: 5 Instagram Tips EVERY Lash Tech Should Know!

Social media is an ever-changing business tool which can help you grow your client base, connect with potential customers, and get to know what they want from their Lash Techs 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 Instagram 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 that'll make other people follow you?

Simply put, great content is all the things your target audience finds interesting. What constitutes as 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 Lash Trainer looking for students? A supplier looking for professional Lash Artists to try your products?

The first thing to focus on is understanding who your audience is. Once you've identified who your audience is, then you'll need to think about what they might be interested in. 

For a Lash Technician, your biggest target audience is more than likely women aged between 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 lash extensions, this isn’t really going to be interesting to clients. While it is good to show off your technical skills so your clients know that their Lash Technician is highly skilled and will keep their natural lashes safe, 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 treatments done. Before and after shots show your potential clients how beautiful their lashes will be when they leave your salon, and how amazing they are going to feel.

Other examples of quality Instagram content are:

• Photos of your beauty salon where they will have their gorgeous new lashes created.
• Photos of yourself and your professional and friendly team who will make those clients feel fabulous.
• Posts about your personal and professional achievements. 
• Educational posts e.g. eyelash extension aftercare advice, the differences between different types of lash extensions etc.
• Reposts of your clients’ selfies with their beautiful new lashes - these work really well as it’s basically another way to review your work!

As well as feed posts, use your Instagram stories to show potential and current clients that you're approachable, professional, and dedicated to your art, making them want to come to you over any other lash salon or Lash Artist!

Tip 2: Interaction 

Posting something cool is just the tip of the iceberg, and interaction goes both ways. When you have people commenting and asking questions on your posts, it's important to respond to their comments, answer their questions, or even just ‘like’ the comment, showing them that their feedback or queries are of value to you and acknowledged.

It’s also important however, that you don’t get lost in this ask and response cycle, so set aside some time each day or every couple of days (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: Using 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: Using The RIGHT Hashtags!

You know that you can add 30 hashtags to a post or comment, but making them relevant is key to getting them to be seen by who you want to see them. If you're a Lash Tech looking for new 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 – use hashtags like ‘eyelashextensions’, ‘lashlove’ ‘eyelashextensionsLondon’ etc. – tailoring 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, so to make this easier and save you some time, create a list on your phone/computer of all the hashtags you want to use on your posts.

Tip 5: Utilising Your Instagram Stories

Not only is the Instagram story function fun, but every time you add something new to your story you'll go to the front of the storyline on top of everyone’s feed**. Instagram stories allow you to link to products you're using and in your online store, to your appointment booking system, and to your YouTube videos. You can also run polls and get your client's opinions quickly and easily in a fun way – questions like ‘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 eyelash extension course simply by seeing how many of your existing clients would love this lash service.

Your Instagram stories are great for showing your clients, customers, and followers who you are in a more casual way – it's easy to try and 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 – an Instagram story takes you from being just 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 things that work for you and your lash business, and even then - experiment with your content and layout until you find what works best.

**2024 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 are engaging enough that your clients come back time and again to see what you have to say!