What if your team doesn’t want to be part of your social media presence?
There’s no real trick or quick fix on how to handle this. I am big on being consistent and just showing up, putting the work in, trying to be consistent and really gaining confidence along the way, while you’re doing it. And this rings true for your team as well. The more that you do it, the more that you kind of make it a part of their job or an expectation, the easier it does get. In the past I have had employees that were really really unwilling to to be on socials themselves, and they were unwilling to do the things that I had asked them to participate in (reels and even team photos) But 95% of my employees over the years have been happy to do it. Some were nervous, I think a lot of it comes from self esteem issues and nervousness, but I just try and talk them through it like, “You are literally only going to be on screen for one second and everybody else has got to do it as well, so no one’s going to be looking just at you. And let’s think about the workplace and the wonders that this reel will do for our engagement and letting people get to know us letting our audience get to know us and kind of thinking of the greater good here instead of just focusing your attention inward solely on yourself”. So I really try and take them out of that negative mindset.
Also practice makes perfect; the more often you do it, the easier it gets for yourself and your team in creating consistent content for your salon. And eventually they realise that it is part of their job.
Aside from that, they would be silly thinking that they could totally get away with not doing any sort of social media now, in a salon, in 2022. We do need to show our salons and our teams – THAT is what our audience is craving. So if it is made clear that it’s a requirement that they participate in social media and they’re being paid, really, there’s no excuse for them to refuse. I currently don’t have any staff that don’t want to be involved in our socials, we make it a really fun thing; we don’t take it too seriously. So yeah, not a simple answer.
My team are happy to participate in socials, but do they feel they can come to me with ideas on what we can do for reels or on stories?
Yes! We actually have a team group chat on Instagram and we quite often share reels and posts of cool stuff we’ve seen on Instagram and we use it as inspiration and we use the chat to discuss ideas from other reels or even from a static post or a meme that someone thinks we can make that into a reel and then we’ll all throw a few ideas around. And yeah, we make it really a really fun, collaborative process and sometimes I’ll go into the salon to film reels myself, and then I’ll just end up talking to one of the girls that doesn’t happen to have a client at that moment, about what I’m going to do and they might offer to actually film it themselves. So they’ll be in the real instead of me! Which is great, because I don’t want to be in every single reel; I want to keep people guessing and I want our audience and our followers and clients to see different team members participating because it’s really fun!
Lauren x
