I follow a lot of beauty salons, cosmetic tattooists, lash artists, nail artists, hairdressers and many other service providers within the hair & beauty industry, and I have noticed that so many of us, aren’t really getting overly personal on our socials. We are only showing two of our content pillars; our work, our services (before and afters and results, client testimonials, reviews, etc. We’re marketing ourselves, we’re marketing our business, and we’re educating our clients. We’re sharing content from the education pillar. And educational content can be anything from how to wash your lashes and how to keep your blonde hair toned to how to properly do an at home facial.

But what we’re really missing from our content is relatable and personal content from us. As service providers, we’re not showing our space enough and we’re not showing our faces enough or the faces of our team members. The reasoning behind this is because people only buy from people that they feel they know and that they like and they trust. So if you are not talking on stories or you’re not sharing images of yourself, your team, your space, then you’re not allowing people to get to know you as the service provider. They can’t form any sort of connection with you. Basically, you are a nameless, faceless brand. And you don’t want to be like that. Social media is called social media because it’s meant to be social. You need to be social. We’re not meant to be trying to sell 100% of the time.

Why? Because clients are going to feel way more inclined to book in with the salon that shows a bit of their personality, their team’s personalities. They let their sense of humour shine through or their wacky little idiosyncrasies; funny things that you might be interested in. That might be the gateway for a certain client to actually connect with you on a deeper level. Like if you if you share that you are into astrology and you want to put daily horoscopes on your stories, that might appeal to a whole number of clients or potential clients that are into the same thing. And normally we attract people that are like us into our businesses, and they are essentially our ideal clients. So when you let more of yourself and your own personality shine through your socials, you are just going to attract more and more of your ideal clients. You should never be trying to please everyone. And when you try and please everyone basically at the end of the day, you end up pleasing hardly anyone; nobody sometimes! And if you are constantly sharing the same type of content – Marketing, Marketing, Marketing, lash photo, lash photo, lash photo, brow photo, brow photo, brow photo, before and after brow photo, review about brow service – essentially it’s the same type of content and you are going to cause audience fatigue. 

Now, when your audience is fatigued with your content, they know what to expect from you all the time. And they just scroll straight past it. So if one of your posts does make it into their feed, they’re going to scroll straight past and not engage with that content at all because they’re sick of it. They’ve seen a million lash photos from you. But hey, you know what would stop the scroll? A really cool photo of you introducing yourself or telling a story about you know, some results that you got your client or something that happened in the salon or some education that you did on the weekend and how you’re levelling up your skills. People connect with people. They don’t connect with nameless, faceless brands. I bring this up because so many people at conferences and other events, they’ll come and introduce themselves and there might be someone that I have interacted with quite a lot on Instagram, but I actually have no idea what they look like! I know the name as soon as they say which salon they’re from. And it’s a real shame. Especially if you’re a solo operator – people should associate your face with your brand name and even more so if you’ve got a business name that doesn’t have anything to do with your name – which is great by the way. I recommend that you 100% do that all the time, because you don’t want to be another lashes by Lauren, it’s just been done so much before. I think if you’re going to have a legitimate business, you should have a legitimate business name/salon name for yourself. But that is a whole other topic that I could make another post about. You are going to get more engagement, people are going to get to know you a lot better if you show more of yourself and I know that it is difficult. I know that it is very hard to get on stories and just be talking, feeling really comfortable, feeling confident enough in yourself to just get on there and talk and a lot of people will say to me that I come across very confident on stories and I just want to say that it hasn’t always been that way and it is always a conscious effort. Yes, it has gotten easier over time. And I do believe that talking on camera is something that you are not good at instantly. You need to practice and the only way you practice is just by getting on there and doing it. 

I’m sure if someone had a screen recorded a story of me from 12 months ago, and compared it with a story that I recorded yesterday you would look and sound very, very different because inside that 12 months, I’ve been consistently doing it at least every second day. And it’s like a muscle – you need to consistently work at it, to build it up and make it better. 

Tricks I would use if you are feeling totally out of your depth talking on stories:

• Start off small – put a photo or a boomerang up of yourself and write a caption on the image or you can talk while the camera is focusing on something else and add closed captions in. So people get used to the sound of your voice while you get a little bit more confident in speaking or being recorded speaking, and then work up to actually speaking while you’re looking at the camera.

• Look straight into the camera when you’re talking so don’t look at yourself on the screen. Your eyes will look like you’re focusing in a weird, weird way and you’re not looking directly at the person so you need to know where your camera is located on the front of your phone/iPad and look directly into that. It’s a mistake that I see a lot -people talking to the camera and not looking at it.

Don’t try and be perfect from the beginning. Nobody is, and remember that you are always going to be your own harshest critic. I actually don’t watch back any of my stories where I’m talking because I just start critiquing myself, picking myself to bits and it’s not a good place for my head to be at so I usually will just record it, go back once and put the closed captions in and then I’ll hit post. I don’t even worry if I say “ah” too many times. Now, it doesn’t bother me if I stuffed something up I just try and correct myself and move on because I don’t want to get stuck in a cycle of recording one, one minute story sequence for over half an hour. And trust me, I have been there and I have done that. I have recorded things 15-20 times because I thought that they weren’t good enough. We all go through the same doubts and fears of being judged when we’re recording ourselves talking. But the more you do it, the easier it gets and the more confident you will feel and the more clients you’ll attract. 

So I’ll say it again – the people that feel that they have a connection with you, they feel that they know you – they are going to be way more likely to come and spend money in your business. They’re going to feel like they can contact you and ask questions about your services or prices or anything that you have available. Because they already feel as if they know you so they’re not going to be scared to reach out. I know that I don’t feel comfortable reaching out to brands or businesses on Facebook that aren’t very active on their posts or aren’t very active on their stories because I don’t really know who I’m talking to. Wouldn’t you rather address a business by the person?

Think about what you look for in a business when you are choosing somewhere to go for a service. I’m sure that you would rather approach the business that shares more funny things that you have in common with them, or shares images of their space and their team having a fun time because the vibes are good. If I go into my Instagram insights for my salon, Allure Lash & Beauty Bar, the posts of individual team members or the team together, whether they be reels, static images or carousels are our highest engage posts from the last two years. 

Always, always, always get more engagement on Instagram with quadruple 10 times more engagement from the posts that feature our team faces and some sort of story than just sharing images, your company setup volume lashes you know an awesome set of brows that we did or something like that, or a quote or a meme or something, something similar that you know people have seen before and they get to see it again. Have a look at your insights have a look at what has worked in the past if you share an image of yourself or your team. I’m sure it’s going to be out there as one of your most highly engaged with posts. If you want to succeed in this social media game, it is a good idea to check your insights seeing what has been engaged with the person in the past and creating more content because

if you’re not doing it already, put yourself in your feet put yourself and your team in stories. Video content works even better than images, so reels lives and just talking on stories. They will work wonders for your engagement rate.

Lauren x