Jessica Turner As social media is the cheapest, most targeted platform for advertising, it’s important to choose the right channels to engage your audience.
And, due to the visual nature of Instagram (with an emphasis on beauty) it makes sense that aesthetics professionals capitalise on it – indeed, the mobile/internet platform which allows users to publicly share photos and videos boasts 200 million active users.
However, winning legitimate followers (and likes) and creating engaging content for your profile can be challenging as the best-practice parameters are ever-evolving.
“For owners of day-spas, beauty salons and medi-clinics, success isn’t truly measured on the amount of likes or followers per post, but the specs of those people engaging,” says Daynah Hamilton, sales and marketing director at Max Media Lab, an agency well-versed in social strategy for businesses.
“You should be looking to capture the attention of your current customers and potential customers, rather than having hundreds of thousands of irrelevant ‘bots’ on your profile.
“Content needs to be remarkable to win organic engagement, so if you pay for followers or likes, they won’t be authentic and you’ll loose credibility as a result
“This is because the amount of people who organically see your posts will plummet, as the Instagram algorithm is programmed to spot fakes.”
With a growing fan-base of 23K followers, Instagram beauty influencer Alana Quartly has managed to grow her presence organically over time.
She shares her top tips on generating Instagram posts that help build an authentic brand voice and increase your presence to a unique, target audience.
Show Yourself
Quotes or written messages are a great way to show your personality as a business, but be creative about how you showcase the message. So, rather than using a computer generated graphic with text I love posting a picture of a quote from there, an actual book, words on paper. I like to stay true to who I am. I’m a songwriter, so when it comes to gorgeous writing, I love to share it. I’d recently bought a book “High Poets Society” it has some truly beautiful words, inspiring and heartbreaking, pulling on nearly every human emotion.
Repost ‘Right’
Reposting content is an excellent way to spread the word about what you do in the right networks, but it’s important to only re-post what’s relevant to your business. As an owner of an aesthetics practice you should be looking to share posts from industry influencers, your clients and the brands you stock. So long as you credit the image to the original poster tagging the name of their profile, you don’t usually need their permission to share.
Sharpen Up
Whether you’re posting a video, using a new feature like Boomerang, or simply posting a photograph, make sure your images are bright, clean and crisp. If you’re not the best photographer, perhaps someone else in your business is, so ask them to take pictures. You can also ask the brands you stock if they have any styled photographs would be relevant that you could use. While you can now post all kinds of photo-shapes and frames, the original square format tend to work best visually.
Own It
Reposting content generated by other users is great for the times you don’t have any of your own pictures to post as “fillers”, it keeps your business out there and in peoples feeds but always aim to mix it up with your own pictures. Spa, salons and clinics, you should aim to have 50% of your own, unique content.
Surprise Element
While it’s important to remind users about discounts and special promotional packages you might have, don’t be afraid to experiment with fun posts that might resonate with your audience on an emotional level. Like any business strategy, when using Instagram you should always aim to be learning, always looking at how to improve and you’re always playing a game of trial and error. See what gets a good response and what doesn’t and stick to the things you’ve found worked.
Delete If You Need
You have the ability to delete a “mistake” off your feed, you can’t always delete the mistakes you make while building your business so take advantage of that delete button on instagram if you end up not liking something you posted or it had a bad response.. get rid of it! Or if the worst case scenario happens and you’ve offended your audience in some way (and people have complained) make a public apology.
Instagram handle: @alana_q
*Alana Quartly is a Sydney based social media star, model and musician with a growing following of 23K on Instagram.
