Three Ways to Increase Your Salon's Instagram Following

I’m going to be honest: there are actually seven ways. I have seven secrets to help you increase your Instagram followers by 500%. To give credit where it’s due, our sister company: Meet Your Stylist has this amazing guide called Seven Secrets on How to Increase Your Instagram Following by Over 500%. That’s where I got the ideas for this post. But I’m going to focus in on three of those ways in particular.

First, I want to ask: why do you want to do this? Why increase your Instagram followers? Here’s one good reason: in 2015 only 27.6% of the U.S. population used it. Now, in 2016, we have 89.4 million users a month in the United States, and worldwide there are 300 million users per day. To put it plainly, Instagram is blowing up! Because millennials are the main users of social media, particularly Instagram, it’s essential to consider that demographic when trying to increase your Insta following.

Step 1: Define Your Unique Selling Proposition

What does that mean? It means asking yourself what sets your salon apart from others in your area. Let’s imagine that you specialize in crazy hair color; blues, greens, pinks, reds, orange. If that’s your specialty, create an Instagram stream around that, and you’ll start attracting individuals who are drawn to that type of service. Defining your salon’s unique selling proposition will differentiate your Instagram posts from those of other salons. It will increase interest from your target market.

Are there services or products that you provide that others don’t? Do you specialize in certain haircuts or hair coloring services? Maybe you offer a guarantee that no one else does.

Your Instagram shouldn’t cover every single aspect of your salon, but should hone in on some of your top unique attributes and services, and use those to gain a community of interested followers.

Step 2: Frequency and Consistency

Frequency is important, but consistency matters even more. If you don’t have time to start an Instagram page for your salon, wait until you know you can commit to it. If you’re not ready for it, who could potentially help you? If you do choose to have someone else run your account, however, I would choose someone who already works at your salon and has a knack for Instagram.

Frequency matters. You don’t want your current followers and potential audience to miss the opportunity to engage with you. I recommend posting consistently each day, but that can vary between each salon. You may post morning, afternoon, and evening every day or you may start with just once per day at first. Just be consistent! To make it easier, I would highly recommend using a social media scheduling program. A couple that we’ve used are Mass Planner and Hootsuite (which is cloud based and can be accessed anywhere). With these options you can spend some time one day of the week and schedule your Instagram posts for the entire week and then get right back to work.

Step 3: Use Hashtags

There are a ton of people searching specific hashtags on Twitter and Instagram. It’s definitely in your best interest to use them on every post. Hashtags are essentially keywords that Instagram users can search to find related and interesting posts and pages. Therefore, it’s important to include hashtags that are relatable to your target market in every single post. The more hashtags you use, the greater chance of increasing your followers. You’ll also want to have some specific branded hashtags just for your salon.

These are just three of the ways to increase your Instagram followers, but the rest of the list can be found by entering your email at MeetYourStylist.com. I know these steps work, because they definitely worked for us. When we implemented these seven strategies we actually did increase our following by over 500%. There are four other secrets left that I didn’t cover in this post, but they’re all equally as helpful, so I certainly recommend checking out the link to the full strategy list.

Being actively present on social media, giving value to your followers, and creating a community is an extremely cool and important part of owning your salon. Even if your followers don’t become clients, they are becoming your advocates, and in a social presence that is a huge asset for the positive reputation of your business.

Share your Instagram ideas with other industry professionals by joining our sister company's private Facebook group. We all work together to empower others and build one another! We can't wait to meet you!