Promoting Your Nail Business on Instagram

We'd like to share with you some of the tips that we have found extremely helpful over the last few months.  We are by no way experts, but with many of you also running your own mobile nail/beauty salon businesses, we thought you'd find this very useful. 

Instagram is a great social media platform, and I have to say its our favourite at the minute.  According to many sources Instagram has a greater engagement level than twitter and facebook put together.

Use Instagram as free advertising. It's there to be used and is a good way to get more customers through your doors. If you have a good following and your pictures look good, potential customers are more likely to pick up the phone.

So how do you get your nail business noticed on Instagram? Its a slow process but here's a few pointers...

Information in the bio

So this is the bit of text at the top of your account. It is limited to 150 characters so think hard about the vital information your customers need.

Location - this is so important, don't just put the town, put the county too. Customers may not have heard of your town or village if its a little town but they might be willing to travel if they know its in the same or even the next county to them.

Telephone number or website address - Don't forget to include this so customers can easily contact you.  You want to make it as easy as possible for customers.

You can also add hashtags into your bio now. This lets potential customers see your branded hashtags. For example #thenailstudiobrighton. Get your customers to use your branded hashtags when they take nail selfies, this will also help you spread the word as their friends will see the hashtags.

Quality pictures

Ok, so it goes without saying use quality pictures. Make sure you use enough light to show off the quality of your work. Try to get a good close up. It is better to post one quality picture a day than 3 or 4 mediocre ones. Don't post something unless its great!! Mediocre pictures will only lose you followers.

Hashtags

Use your hashtags so new followers can find you. These must be relevant to your business. So if you do acrylic nails in Manchester use #nailsmanchester #manchesternails #acrylicnailsmanchester etc. If you specialise in a particular brand you could try #biosculptureliverpool.  These are the sort of hashtags that local customers will use and find you. Look at other hashtags other accounts use for more ideas.

If you are looking to gain a general following you can try general hashtags like #nailsoftheday #instanails #nailartwow. These sorts of hashtags probably won't gain you local customers but they will help you gain more credibility with a bigger following. Again have a look at other hashtags people use.  

You can use hashtags in the caption or the comments, but you can only use a maximum of 30 hashtags per post.  If you accidentally use more than 30 hashtags your post wont have a caption and you will have to start all over again, very annoying when you've spent ages thinking about the right hashtags to use.

Tag others

Tag your clients and mention them in the caption (you may want to seek permission first) then their followers will see your work too. You can also tag the companies and the products that you've used. We love to see your work and we repost some of your work to give our followers ideas of what they can do with our products. Other companies also do this. Your clients will love the fact their nails are 'famous'. Also tag a few repost accounts like @uglyducklingnails and @sarahsnailshares. 

Credit where credits due

Make sure if you copy a design from another nail artist you credit them by mentioning them in the caption. Its only right and it will give you more credit. 

Make use of your stories

Stories can increase your reach will your current followers.  This is something we don’t always make use of and we really should. 

Paid advertising

If you want instant exposure you can pay for an advert if you have a business account on Instagram. You can target your local geographical area and really tailor it to suit your needs and budget. Start with a small budget at first if you are going to have a play around with paid ads.  It may take customers a while to act on an advert. They might see your advert and bear you in mind for a special occasion in a few months. 

Business account verses personal 

Don’t be afraid of having a business account instead of a personal account. In our experience we didn’t loose any exposure when we swapped. When you swap to a business account you have access to paid adverts and insights. Insights are the statistics for each post. It tells you how many impressions, reach, likes, comments and saves that post has had. Plus you also get to see which towns and countries your followers are from, their age range, gender, what times they are active on Instagram and other useful information.

We hope you have found at least one good tip from our first blog post. If anyone else has any tips to share please do. It all helps. 

Sarah xx