Mastering Instagram so your salon can make a splash on reopening
Test and analyse your Instagram posts
“If your focus when you come back is to grow your social, you’re going to be doing a lot more than you did before lockdown so test now, says Tammy Koslowski, founder of Naf Salon in Glasgow, and Instagram pro. “Doing chatty Instagram Lives with another tech or beauty therapist is a really good way to test different times because you can see who’s online and watching, so try different times and see when people are actually on their phones.
“You can test all the time and look at your analytics to see what’s done well but remember it could be the time, type of content, your caption, what hashtags you’ve used. If you’ve been active on your stories that day, a grid post will most likely do better than if you’ve not been active too, so there are a lot of factors to consider.”
Start scheduling now
“If you use a scheduling programme, you can test very easily. We use Sked Social, which is a paid service. There are free ones out there but we’ve tried a lot and that one works for us. You can set a queue and post to your feed and stories really smoothly and see all your analytics easily,” says Koslowski.
“A scheduler is going to be so helpful once you’re back at work because you can pre-set dates and times of every post and story so it helps you stay consistent without having to constantly be on your phone. If you’ve got loads of nail photos and you decide you want to post every day you can just spend a few minutes scheduling them for the full week, for example. If you’re working alone that’s even more essential.
“Automate what you can without taking the heart out of it. It’s OK to automate replies on your DMs to say ‘I’ll get back to you when I can’, but do try to set aside some time to have those conversations and get back to people. But in terms of making your socials look good and keeping them consistent, scheduling really is the only way to free up your life a bit.”
Treat your salon or yourself as a brand
“You can put up beautiful nail pictures but it’s the person posting them that people really buy into. I didn’t come from a salon background. I’d done session work or friends’ nails but never worked in a salon environment originally, so when I opened Naf, I took the approach to our social channels of using them like you would for a brand instead of a salon account, which might usually have the sole purpose of getting bums on seats,” says Koslowski.
“When we opened five years ago, there wasn’t really a salon like this in Glasgow or nearby so we had a different environment to show on Instagram, which got attention, and we chose to do new looks so that helped us, posting original photos.
“Clients want to see what you’re up to behind the scenes and we’ve always shown that too. I know that word authentic gets thrown around a lot on social but I think authenticity is the best way to grow your brand.”
Tammy Koslowski is the owner and founder of Naf Salon in Glasgow, nail product brand Naf Stuff and Naf School training. She’s a session tech with has a background in fashion and has more than 122k followers on her Naf Salon’s Instagram account.