Tips to beautify your social media content – it’s all about engagement, not followers!

Why engagement matters more than followers

Having suffered three national lockdowns, like most hair and beauty salons, Lucy and the team were forced to refocus their business using social media to sell online. She quickly realised that success was about consistency, focus and being brave enough to try new things. Do all of that and engage with the followers and success will follow.

"The only ways we could stay connected to our customers and clients was Facebook, Instagram and our mailing list to promote ourselves. We couldn't perform our services so we heavily relied on social media to promote our products and little treats during lockdown,” says Lucy.

One lesson learned early on is that the demographics for Facebook and Instagram are very different, therefore require a slightly different approach. The channels attract slightly different clients, with Instagram all about teen and early 20s, and Facebook being more of a mix of ages but including an older demographic. The Boutique aims to post different things to different channels. They are very aware of their client base, what they are looking for, what posts they engage with and which channels they prefer. So they factor this into their content and posting schedule to ensure they are engaging and engaged at all times.

Lucy knows that variety and relevance is important to keeping their social media content in optimum condition. She experiments with Instagram Reels to showcase client transformations in different ways.  The Instagram grid is The Boutique's shop window into their business. They stick to a pattern on their grid for consistency and brand recognition. They post images in patterns of three. First they use an illustration in their brand colours, followed by two images. They've found that posting multiple images has been a real engagement driver for the Boutique.

“Being relevant is really important, don’t just post because you have to, if it doesn’t mean something to your client it isn’t good enough," says Lucy.

Another top tip to drive engagement and ultimately sales, is to ask questions on post. As lockdown ended, people became less active on social media. The Boutique were seeing likes but no comments. So they began to engage more by asking questions and hosting polls. They saw that the deeper engagement drove sales.

Lucy recommends keeping people at the centre of content. Stock images earned less interaction than a post about the team or real customers. This approach creates human relationships which not only drive better engagement, but give customers a sense of who they are supporting and buying from.

Lucy finishes by saying: "Success for us is business growth. Having 10,000 followers doesn’t matter, you need to get people to engage with you. It doesn’t matter how many followers you have. You need comments. The proof that what you are doing is working is engagement."