Is Social Media Actually Hurting Your Salon?

What if the one thing that most of you are actually doing to market your salons isn't just giving you poor results or no results? What if it's actually hurting your business? Hello, hello, hello my salon friends, Phil Jackson here, your queen of salons, coming all over the internet again to give you another dose of my Wise Owl Wisdom. How on earth are you? Achingly well, I hope. 9th of October, it's my birthday tomorrow, terribly excited and also recording this ahead because I'm celebrating my birthday in hopefully sunny Spain. So what are we talking about today? Well, we're talking about, well actually we're building on last episode where I said that email deserved a bit more attention, maybe a bit more attention than we're giving social media. And I mentioned that social media might actually be harming your business and that's what I kind of want to build out today. It was a useful point. I didn't want to rush it, my loves. I think you deserve a full explanation of what's going on in your Uncle Phil's mind. I don't just make this shit up. I do think things through as well. And I want to talk about why social media might actually be harmful for your business. So not just a zero-sum thing, not just it doesn't do any harm. I think it actually might do harm to at least some of your businesses. How so, Uncle Phil? Well, the first thing I want to talk about is the amount of money that we are losing through social media. How can we be losing money? This is free marketing, Uncle Phil. Well, and I'm not talking about paid marketing. Actually, I think paid marketing is the one thing that social media does very well. I'm talking about the amount of time that you're putting into social media in terms of coming up with content ideas, filming them, editing them, posting them. The time has a real cost attached to it. So it might feel like you're just doing some social media content. But actually, that time, if you put the value on it that you could be earning through delivering service in the same amount of time, I think it's a really expensive investment. So let's say that your hourly rate is, we're going to go with £60 an hour. I like £60 an hour because it's a pound a minute. That makes sense in my head. And let's say that you're taking four hours a week just coming up with content ideas, filming, editing, posting. And four hours, I think, is actually pretty conservative. That's £240 that you're spending every week on social media. If I gave you somebody who had been spending £1,000 a month on email marketing and it wasn't working, do you think that person should sack that email marketing copywriter? Bloody right. And yet we are so invested in social media and we've got it so ingrained in our heads that this is just what we have to do that actually we think that's worthwhile. Extrapolate that with your profit margin. Let's say to spend a pound in your business, you have to make £5 in turnover. Actually, that's £5,000 worth of service you've got to do just to put stuff on social media. It's insane. Absolutely insane. Why is it ineffective? It's because it's the wrong audience. What we're trying to do is convert people to coming into the salon, spending money with us when they're not interested in that on social media. They're not in the mindset for buying from a salon. They're there to be entertained. They're not there to shop. We know how irritating it is when we're watching something on TV and the adverts come along. Do you know, in the old days, when I was young, back in the 1800s, there used to be, and this is actually true, because there were so few channels, it meant that everybody was watching the same stuff on TV. And the power stations had to know when the commercial breaks were coming in programmes like Coronation Street, because that's when everyone walked out of the room and put the kettle on. And it's the same thing when we're watching TV now. Do we actually watch TV when the adverts are on? No. We pick up our phones, we pick up our iPads, we entertain ourselves for the three or four minutes, and then we go back to the content that we're actually interested in. Same thing on social media. They're not interested in adverts. They're not interested in buying. They'll scroll, they'll skip, or they'll close down the app and go and do something else instead, because that's not what they want at the time. So chasing bookings through that mismatch, through having the wrong audience with the wrong intent, is exhausting, and largely, it's a complete waste of time as well. The next thing I want to highlight is actually a little bit more subtle, and I think more insidious, and that's this comparison trap. And this isn't just about salons. This is actually a personal thing as well, and it's a personal thing that I feel very keenly. I think that constant exposure to what other salons are doing and how well everyone else is doing can actually, over time, erode your confidence in your business. It can make you question your decision-making. It can make you feel that you ought to be doing that thing as well, when actually there was a good business reason why you were on a different path. I think it happens personally for us as well. I think that comparison, I think that seeing people at their best, seeing people when they're the most groomed, the most polished, even when they're pretending to be vulnerable. Nobody goes on Instagram looking like a sack of shit to be vulnerable. They're looking vulnerable when they've had their hair and makeup done and looking fantastic as well. I just think it's a really, I think it's quite debilitating in a lot of ways, and I think it drives a lot of doubt and burnout through social media as well. It's because I think if you had a dinner party with 12 of your friends, there would be someone around the table who is struggling with their husband. There'd be someone around the table who is struggling with their weight. There'd be someone around the table who is really overdrawn and facing bankruptcy. There'd be someone around the table who's been given notice that they have to leave their house or their apartment because the rental term is up. All of these struggles happen around the table. The problem is if you take 12 people on social media, you don't see any of those struggles because you see everything apart from the struggle. You only see the good stuff. And that's why it's so humiliating sometimes to see what other people are doing. And I know that's a strong word, but actually I do keenly believe it. The next thing is around the risk that there is around some of these platforms, building visibility on a platform that you don't own. And we talked about this when we were talking about social media. You don't own that list. You're renting the access to your customers because you're a content monkey. That's the price you have to pay to reach your customers. You can't control the list. You can't export it. There's algorithm changes, there's shadow bans, there's hacked accounts. And it means that your business's marketing foundation is genuinely very, very fragile. The other thing I think we need to be very careful of and very mindful of at the moment is a huge trend and a huge push towards privacy. And I think there's going to be people that are much less willing to even share who they are on social media. And you see this if you've got a business account on Instagram. It happens to me every single day. New follower. First thing I do is see whether I can follow them back. I want to support my salon business owner friends. I want to be supporting your salon business, following your hair salon, your beauty salon. I want to see what you're up to. I want to see what you're posting. I want to learn from you as well. So many times private account can't see a damn thing. And so it's not even giving you any information about your audience either. You don't even know whether they're looking at your stuff most of the time. And we're being crowded out. Every hour on social media is an hour spent on channels that don't convert. And it takes so much more than an hour to actually have a bloody conversation on social media. By the time you've resisted the scroll, we've actually sunk a huge amount of time and effort and energy into keeping that platform alive. And I think it will be better to spend that time doing emails, looking at referrals, having in-chair conversations. I don't think social media is neutral. I think it has an opportunity cost. Now, I'm not suggesting that you quit social, but you could. I don't know. I don't know. I would love to hear from you. In fact, I'm going to put my email address on the screen right now. I do this a bit further, a little bit further down the line. I'd love to hear from you if you've made the decision not to use social media to promote your business at all. I'd love to speak to you. I've only come across it once. And basically, it was a salon that was a hair salon run by two guys. And what they'd done, instead of having social media accounts, they made everything they were doing very Instagrammable. So that everyone else was doing the social media marketing for them. I thought it was genius, I have to say, because it has a lot more authenticity if the content's coming from your customers rather than from you. But if you decided to quit social media, drop me a message, phil at buildyoursalon.com. I definitely, definitely want you on the show talking about that decision. Personally, I think you need to be there a bit. I think you need to show that your account is alive so that if people do want to check you out because they've seen some of your marketing somewhere else or they've heard about you from a friend, I think people want to see that the business is open. I think they want to see that you've put a post about your Christmas opening hours, that kind of information. But honestly, I think one or two posts a week just to keep your account ticking over, maybe three posts a week. I think that will be absolutely fine. I think this slavishly posting every single day, content after content after content, I think it's not only futile and not only ineffective. I think it's harming your business as well. But what do you think? What have I missed? Are you actually slaying on social media? I know there are some of you out there that have turned this into something that successfully pays you, that actually puts money in your till. But I know one or two people like that. And I'm in touch with hundreds, maybe thousands of salon businesses around the world right now. So reach out and let me know your angle on this. I'd love to hear from you. If you want to take email seriously, head over to queenofsalons.com and click the button that says links. I've got my little guide on getting started with email marketing in there instead. If you just want to change things up a little bit away from social media, I hope it serves you really, really well. Just a few short days until I'm coming all over the internet again with another dose of my wise hour wisdom. And until then, take care.