Social Media Story Time
I happened to be working the front of house of a busy salon when social media started positively impacting business. I posted the first tester pic on the salon page: an overly warm-filtered pic of one of our stylist’s shoes (a pair of clean two-tone high-top Jordans paired with bright red skinny jeans, side-bar to the side-bar; many of my deepest memories are emotionally attached to clothing).
It was cutesy, it was cool, it was effortless, and it was fun. Those days have become complicated and transformed into something entirely different. Back then, we posted heavily filtered before and afters on Instagram and utilized the stalker app FourSquare to get better review exposure. This approach also complemented the advantages we gained from our news media relations. Stylists didn’t prioritize social media as part of their appointments. The busiest stylists rarely took photos, and the junior stylists didn’t do much more. Instead, they participated in whatever the salon did to market for them. The salon was curating the image and brand completely.
The explosion of social media was actually more of a creeping takeover of our daily lives and then our thought processes behind the chair. We didn’t have a group announcement one day that we would be required to take pics with certain standards. We didn’t even have standards. Those came slowly over time as the caliber for photos became more and more glamorized and as cameras got better. There was a point we had a professional-grade salon camera, but without a photographer, results were inconsistent.
Now? It’s democratized. That means more pressure on each stylist to make appealing pictures in the style and language of the salon. It means adding the right hashtags and background for maximum exposure. Knowing the principles of good lighting for hair color is good, but it's even better if you know how to pose your client and flatter her facial features to get a coveted straight-on shot, which gets more exposure on platforms. It involves understanding how algorithms function, similar to staying informed about the weather. What’s trending? Not only that, but what’s trending with your niche audience? What exactly is your niche audience? What time of day is your niche audience most active on social media platforms? And then scheduling posts for that window. Are you checking your metrics? Which metrics affect your bottom line the most? What is your bottom line? Before you know it, all of the information that you think you’ve finally harnessed has shifted into something else with an app update. The game has changed, and you have to start all over again like that reel you perfected, but when posting, something went wrong with the internet, and the draft was lost. It makes me wonder if Kim K herself knows this struggle, or does she have a team of people who relentlessly save their work to a hard drive so that if such an event happens, they won’t skip a beat?
You’d probably agree it’s the latter.