Ideas for Marketing Your Salon on Twitter

Ideas for Marketing Your Salon on Twitter

Its “real time” orientation and short status updates also present marketers with limitations, as well, so understanding what Twitter is best at helping you achieve when it comes to salon and spa marketing and how to use it most effectively is important. After all, in the salon and spa marketing realm, it’s not unlikely that you have gone from communication with your customers by phone and in person only to now communicating via email, Facebook, Twitter, texting and other platforms – all in a few short years.

First, you need an audience. Not just numbers of followers, mind you, because you could get thousands of followers on Twitter, but if none of them are members of your ideal client type categories or if they are, but none of them live within a reasonable geographical radius, who cares?

To market your salon or spa effectively on Twitter, you need to establish a Twitter account and then you need to get your customers to ‘follow’ you on Twitter. And then you need to find ways to get them to ‘retweet’ your status updates so that their friends and family (who hopefully also fall within your desired client type/s) find out that your business exists and so that they want to find out more about your business.

It’s a tall order, isn’t it? But it can be done!

• Put your Twitter URL (like mine, which is “www.twitter.com/beinpulse”) on your business cards, your menu of services, your website, your Facebook info page, your LinkedIn profile, your postcards, your email newsletters and anywhere else that you list your basic contact information.
• Find your customers on Twitter and ‘follow’ them (many will ‘follow’ you back as a result) .
• Run Twitter follower acquisition campaigns. One easy way to do this is to reach out to your customers, let them know where they can ‘follow’ you on Twitter and hold drawings or contests on Twitter itself; such as, entering all of the Twitter-ers who ‘retweet’ one of your posts on a given day into a drawing for a free gift card or product. I personally like the idea of awarding gift cards because they’re only redeemable in a visit to your business – a visit which gives you the opportunity to potentially wow and win over a new client.
• Use your city name in hashtag form (such as, #seattle) on your tweets to increase the chance that your posts will be seen by others in your local area (read more about hashtags here).
• List your business in Twitter directories such as twellow.com, the business yellow pages of Twitter, or Twibs.com.
• Create a Twitter network by following (and hopefully being followed in return) by other businesses, political figures, the leaders of PTAs and other community influencers in your area – this is another great way to partner with other businesses to share contacts. If you are part of any buy local organization, create a social media directory which can be printed up to be given to the customers of all participating businesses or shared as part of a local online business directory.
• Create content that your followers are likely to retweet, such as inspiring quotes, links to awesome hair styles or celebrity looks, links to important health and wellness information or links to community human interest stories, events and other local information.

• Make announcements about your salon or spa – special sale? extended hours? snow day closure? power on when everyone else is out? air conditioning relief in the heart of summer? model call, free demo or another event?
• Tell followers about new or improved products or services which are on the way or have just arrived
• Welcome new staff members to the team
• Talk about particular staff strengths, achievements, awards, certifications or new classes taken
• Point Twitter followers to your blog to read your beauty information posts, see your before and after pictures, or get other valuable tips
• Links to celebrity styles, fashion trends, and how-to hair, makeup and nails information
• Ask provocative questions
• Solicit advice or local referrals (such as when you or one of your customers needs the name of a good plumber or painter)
• Poll followers as to their interests, what they like to do, what they like most about your city and other personally interesting topics
• Post job openings
• Talk about your referral or frequency rewards
• Hold contests
• Share inspiring quotes
• Links to YouTube or powerpoint step-by-step demos
• Retweet retweet-worthy tweets of your followers
• Share quick beauty tips
• List last minute cancellations or openings on the books
• Tweets to help fill the books during slower hours (such as some type of reward for booking during slower hours)
• Cooperative marketing with other local independent businesses
• Local human interest stories that would be of interest to your followers
• Share announcements from local schools (or other community organizations or non-profits) and help promote their fundraisers
• Thank people for following you in Tweets, such as “@beinpulse, thank you for following (your salon or spa name here)”
• Thank customers for coming in in tweets using their Twitter handle, such as “@beinpulse, it was great to see you today, come back again soon!”

You can post to your heart’s content on this social media platform – and with so many topics offered up above, with a little time and attention you should be able to establish your presence on Twitter to market your salon or spa in a short amount of time. Remember that it will take time and consistency to build a following.

And as with any other social media network, marketing your salon or spa on Twitter will only be as effective as you make it (1) relevant to your followers and to the extent that you are (2) present and active — marketing your salon or spa on Twitter on a regular basis.

So what are you waiting for? Now is the time to make using Twitter part of your salon or spa daily marketing activities. Happy Tweeting!

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Elizabeth Kraus is the author of Make Over Your Marketing: 12 Months of Marketing for Salon and Spa as well as the 2012 Salon and Spa Marketing Calendar – your salon and spa marketing blueprint for 2012!