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Salon Blog and Twitter – A Yummy Combination
Get ‘Engaged’
As our BeautyPRpro blog subscribers know, Sharon and I are great proponents of using social media to help you get closer to your clients (and the media), attract new clients (and the media) that don’t know about you yet, and keep you more ‘connected’ to all them … regularly. Today’s social media tools allow us all to do that simply and economically.
The Power of Example
Doing our own blog, being on Twitter and Facebook (Sharon and Alex), and several other SM resources, have greatly expanded the universe of salon and spa owners around the country we ‘converse with’ regularly. As a business builder for us, it’s been great. We never would have been able to meet and share with so many of you ‘directly’ in our daily travels.
As we became more available to you here on our blog, sharing helpful information in our area of expertise, many of you discovered us. You came to know us, what we believe in, who we are, how we think, and that helped you feel more comfortable about calling us to learn more about what we do and how we work. Some of you have chosen to work with us on your ‘special projects’ needs. (That’s how it works :-))
Who’s Else is Doing it Right?
There’s nothing like hearing from other salon or spa owners about their ‘first-hand’ experiences. We’ve begun asking those of you we see “doing it right” how you did it. We will share those experiences and that knowledge with you here from time to time. Drop us an email or comment below, to share your experience out in the ‘Twitterverse’ and ‘blogosphere’.
Poza Salon – Charlotte, NC
Poza Salon and @pozasalon
We spotted Pooran & Zahava ‘doing it right’ about a month ago and have followed their tweets and blog posts with interest. We tweeted them and asked if they would do a guest post for you on our blog. They said sure … here it is
We launched our web site for Poza Salon last October and added our blog section titled ‘Features’ as a way to reach a broader audience and drive new traffic.
Initially we focused on finding topics that would interest our target audience (i.e. future clients, beauty junkies) and surfed the web to find places to post. We needed to find a place other than our own site to promote our articles and was introduced to Twitter.
It didn’t take us long to see a huge opportunity within our own industry and was shocked at the level of access to high profile individuals we had. Just posting a cool article can make you a micro-celebrity within hours. You can’t buy that kind of attention! With Twitter we have been able to meet like-minded people, share links, and ask questions.
Commenting on others tweets and retweets has also been great for building our little community. On Twitter, it has taken us less than a month to get over 300 followers! Some of whom are in the salon industry, but the majority is regular people who are interested in what we have to say.
Typically we spend about 2 hours every morning sifting through articles; videos and pictures that we think will grab their attention. Every couple of tweets we will throw in something from our own web site. We do this mainly to gain respect and not look like we are always trying to toot our own horn.
For anyone thinking to themselves “Where do I start”?
1. Open an account with Twitter. Look around the site to get familiar with the territory.
2. Decide on who you want to be to your followers.
3. Talk to people about THEIR interest.
4. Ask questions. (Twitter is great for getting opinions and feedback.)
5. Follow those who can help you learn all about social networking. There are countless tools with twitter that can help you with every aspect of networking and everyone has a trick or two when it comes to finding interesting stuff to post, even me 😉
I will be happy to share if you follow me @pozasalon on Twitter!
Next Steps for Poza Salon (and You)
- Find the names and contact info for local newspaper and magazine’s beauty & grooming and lifestyle editors, and other freelance beauty journalists who write for those publications. Learn about them. Do they twitter? Does the newspaper or magazine blog? Figure out a way to get them included in your opt-in email blog posts. It’s a process.
- Discover how to geographically locate Tweeple (other twitterers for the twitter-challenged J) in their geographic area (area code, zipcode, city) and begin adding them to their ‘followers’.
Last Word
Don’t neglect your traditional media work! Social media is very cool and viral, but don’t neglect the ‘ink’.
Leave a Comment!
How Are You Using Social Media?
Do You Have a Blog and Twitter identity?
Related Posts
http://www.beautyprpro.com/the-pr-power-of-the-blog-for-salons/
Ice cream photo by cogdog
I’m excited to get into this. I just happened to attend a meeting about the social media craze yesterday with the Scottsdale Chamber. I feel there is a lot to learn and there is a time committment. Should I jump in or study it more?
Hi Terry. Great to hear from you. You don’t have to jump into deep water. Wade in. Start checking out the many blogs that share excellent info on Facebook, blogging and Twitter. Here are a few to start off with:
Twitter:
http://davefleet.com/2008/10/practical-101s-getting-started-with-twitter/
Great ongoing help at
Facebook:
http://www.allfacebook.com/
http://www.facebook.com/fbsitegovernance?ref=ts#/facebook?v=app_10531514314&viewas=516912344
Creating a consistent identity is an important guideline. Your name/handle should be consistent between all your SM destinations to serve many purposes. When people look for you they will search by your one name and find all your SM locations. A good guide for establishing your main personal identity is to begin to create a Google Profile.
Reminder: Write down all your accounts and passwords (Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) You will need that reference as time goes on I assure you.
Go for it and have fun!