How to use Social Media to Gain New Customers

How to use Social Media to Gain New Customers

There is nothing worse for the morale or the turnover of a salon than a lack of customers. Once upon a time, customers would have been passers-by on their way home from work or whilst out and about, with people rarely venturing too far from home for salon treatments or services. Word of mouth and customer recommendations from neighbours and friends or family were key. However times have changed considerably over recent years and people are no longer happy to just go local. They want a convenient, high quality service and are happy to travel further afield to get it. As customers are no longer just the local community, marketing practices need to change in order to entice in new customers and fill up appointments. Here we take a look at how this can be done by utilising social media.

What is social media?
In order to entice new customers via social media, it’s important to understand what social media is. In a nutshell it is social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Linked In to name just a few. The idea is to get your salon and it’s services in front of as many people as possible and get them to endorse you through ‘liking’, ‘following’ and even engaging with you through ‘tweets’ or ‘comments’.

How can a salon use social media to gain customers?
In order to utilise the huge marketing powers of Facebook or Twitter, you first need to set up an account or create a salon page on Facebook. This is relatively easy to do. Next you need to spread the word that your salon is available through social media. Ask your existing clients to ‘follow’ or ‘like’ you and in turn their friends and family members will be exposed to the page too. If they then see content that they are interested in such as special offer announcements, new service launches or anything else, they will start to engage with the salon page too. Your salon then has the potential to grow its sphere of reach and capture new customers.

Gaining new customers is much harder than retaining customers but it can be achieved either cheaply or free by utilising social media sites.