Social Media is Excellent PR
We recently shared some knowledge with our class at the American Board of Certified Haircolorists (ABCH) Educational ‘Summit’. For us it was a snapshot of 40 education-hungry colorists and what they knew about using social media to help them promote their business. Only a few understood it much at all.
Of course everyone was on Facebook, but few people knew beyond the photos/videos tabs, the wall, and how to send messages. Only one person had a plan and strategy for being there and was using it to attract more clients to their salon.
Back to Beauty School – Social Media Beauty School.
You know you can’t create a ‘look’ for your client without knowing the ‘techniques’ of how to get hair to do what you want it to do, right? You have to know how to use a comb, scissors, razor, brush, dryer, iron, and chemicals before you can even begin to craft a look. Each ‘look’ uses slightly different techniques and some tools more than others.
It’s no different for social media. You have to understand the tools and what they can do for you before you can use them collectively to cultivate your own ‘look’ using your PR (and your marketing in general).
Bottom line: Go back to school. Use the same mindset you used when you knew you wanted to get started in the beauty industry. Break out the books and mannequin heads (just kidding about the mannequin heads), and start reading, learning about your tools, and practicing basic skills.
Make the Investment
You aren’t going to learn about, or get good at social media strategy or technique in a couple of sittings, or with someone’s ‘get-rich-in-friends-quick’ book. Think about it. It took you over a thousand hours to learn just the basics of cosmetology in beauty school, didn’t it?
What makes you think you don’t need to approach social media with just a little bit of the same dedication you put into learning your beauty skills? OK, not 1,000 hours, but still … take it seriously. Start with the basics … read, and practice.
Resources
There are zillions of resources for information and technical expertise in each of the social media disciplines out there. There’s certainly no shortage of internet marketing and social media gurus (most have become experts in the last year or so) vying for your dollar.
Who do you trust? Where do you find them? It takes a time and searching to find the good guys.
Save your money. Read for free, you’ll learn whose stuff you really want to buy along the way. Most everything you need to know is already out there and costs nothing. You just need to find it and that’s what the download link is all about.
Here it is … and Yes, It’s Free
We’ve saved you a lot of time and searching by assembling a starter list of ‘trusted’ resources for Facebook, Twitter, LInkedIn, and Blogging knowledge. These are tried and true experts who are really experts. These are the people we learned from. They’ve been at it the longest and have risen to the top of the heap. We prepared it for our class at ABCH and it’s filled with great people and information to get you moving ahead.
Some First Ideas for you to Consider
- Subscribe to BeautyPRpro and join our fan page on Facebook. (Had to get a plug in for our blog
). - Make the commitment to spend one hour a day reading and practicing.
- Start with Facebook. Read up on how the individual pieces and parts of Facebook work. You’ll find much of that information in the writings of the experts in the download PDF below.
- Settings (account, privacy, application) and their impact on all the other parts of Facebook.
- News feeds (top news, most recent),
- Friend filters
- Events
- Messaging
- Groups
- Profiles (personal and Fan pages)
- Browse and read the articles and posts in the download PDF about how other companies and people are using Facebook, LinkedIn, blogging, and Twitter to grow their fans and build their businesses.
- Subscribe to some of the blogs of the experts you will be reading and follow in their footsteps. They’ve been there and freely share how it all works.
- Questions? I sure hope so. Drop by BeautyPRpro on Facebook and our blog. Ask the new found experts whose articles you’ll be reading from the download list by leaving comments/questions on their blogs and websites. All of us that blog love to hear from you and know that what we are giving away is being appreciated and doing what it is supposed to do.
