Odds are, everyone reading this has opened the Pandora’s Box of social media for their salon. It’s a mistake not to, because there are so many wonderful opportunities inside. However, oncethe box is open, you must be very careful to control what you let out. As a marketing consultant, I find myself spending more and more time helping people rein in many of the negative impacts of social media.
To help avoid letting loose all the evils of social media into your world, make sure you have these seven simple things under control.
Claim your social media presence on all social media sites. Make sure you have control of your own brand everywhere you can, not just on Facebook and Yelp. Have you updated your Google business page (you have one whether you know it or not)? Have you claimed a Vine account in your company name, just to make sure you control your own brand?
Keep control of your social media login information. Just because you have a great employee that has 15,000 Instagram or Facebook friends, this doesn’t mean they should have control of your accounts. Each week I’m approached by a salon that had an employee set up social media accounts, and now they can’t access them because they employee is gone.
Respond appropriately to the negatives as well as the positives. Be careful how you reply, but reply to those that say good or bad things about you online. If you’re angry when you’re about to reply to that Yelp comment, count to ten and re-read what you’re about to send.
Be active. Don’t post on Facebook once every 6 months. If you drive up to a restaurant and see no cars parked in the parking lot, you’ll assume they’re closed…in the same way, if someone visits you online and the last activity is a haircut in the previous year, they’re not going to think a lot is happening at the salon.
Be engaging. Don’t talk to people, communicate with them. Before Facebook, you didn’t simply stand on a street corner with a bullhorn yelling about what you’re doing, so don’t do that now. Engage your friends in conversation.
Be relevant. Don’t post things that don’t matter and aren’t related to your salon or your clients.
Be sensitive. When you share that bit of humor, make sure you consider how everyone will respond to it. The world may have grown a bit overly sensitive to being politically correct, but you do need to make sure that your sense of humor fits that of your followers.
[“source-salontoday.com”]
