Intro: Do you feel like you were meant to have a kick-ass career as a hair stylist? Like you got into this industry to make big things happen?
Maybe you’re struggling to build a solid base and want some stability. Maybe you know social media is important, but it feels like a waste of time because you aren’t seeing any results. Maybe you’ve already had some amazing success but are craving more. Maybe you’re ready to truly enjoy the freedom and flexibility this industry has to offer.
Cutting and coloring skills will only get you so far, but to build a lifelong career as a wealthy stylist, it takes business skills and a serious marketing strategy. When you’re ready to quit just working in your business and start working on it, join us here where we share real success stories from real stylists.
I’m Britt Seva, social media and marketing strategist just for hair stylists, and this is the Thriving Stylist Podcast.
Britt Seva: What is up and welcome back to the Thriving Stylist Podcast. I’m your host, Britt Seva and we are going to continue the conversation we had last week.
Last week, we talked all about Instagram, the new verification program, what it means for the platform. This week, we are going to talk about the fall of social media. And I do not mean the beautiful season of autumn in which I was born. I’m a fall baby and love it all the way. I’m talking about the reality that I don’t know why nobody’s talking about, that social media is crashing hard and fast, and I want to share with you my reasons for saying that. I’m going to throw a lot of stats and data your way. I want to share with you what I am planning to do because of this crash and where I think marketing is heading over the next five years.
If you’re a Thriver Society member, you’ll remember that in 2021, I put a five-year lifespan on Instagram. When I said it, a lot of people were like, “Oh, there she goes, talking her crazy theories again.” You know, 18 months, two years later, turns out I was pretty dead on and I basically projected that by 2026, Instagram would be pretty much irrelevant in our industry. I’m standing by that.
I think we are really heading down that track and path, and I realize that for a lot of people as I say that, you’re like, “What is she talking about? That sounds shocking.” You have to remember the lens in which I view our industry.
I always say very openly, I’m really geeky and I spend my time reading economic reports and studying marketing and talking to peers and talking to those who know what’s up, and it’s not looking great for social media as a whole.
I want to share with you some stats and some data to bolster that statement so that you don’t think that I’m just fear mongering. You understand that my position today, in the past, for the future has always been to best prepare you for navigating the beauty industry. That’s what it’s all about for me. I think I would be reckless as a coach if I didn’t share with you what I think is coming. This is why I’ve been telling Thrivers about this for two years. Now I’m sharing it openly with the public, but what I want you to understand is the best way to be successful in business is always to be proactive. Reactive business decisions keep people broke. So if you are struggling financially, if you’re struggling to gain clientele, you’re likely being a bit reactive.
My goal with this episode is to encourage you to be proactive.
So while I’m going to share some insights and some concepts that are going to feel a little bit scary and that are going to leave you with some questions, I hope it’s a push to really take smart action and that’s where this episode is going to end up.
I first want to talk about Instagram and Facebook and then we’re going to get into TikTok.
When we think about the platform Instagram, which P.S., Instagram is the only platform that only that over 90% of our industry is on. Why is it we like Instagram so much? Do you know why? Because most of our peers are hanging out there, right? It’s like when I was in high school, everybody went to the same handful of places. We had an open campus, everybody went to the same couple of places for lunch and that’s where I wanted to go ‘cause that’s where everybody was. Instagram is kind of the same way. All your peers are there, we’ve been told you’ve got to be on there, so it’s almost the peer pressure told you to do it.
Instagram as a platform peaked in 2014. That’s when the Instagram craze was for real. That’s when it really became a platform that had evolved beyond just sharing vacation photos for your family to see, like next generation Facebook, which is essentially what Facebook is still is. But Instagram morphed and it’s when it made this leap from like, “Oh wait, this is not Facebook 2.0, this is something really different.”
When you look at the person I always bring up because I just think it’s such an iconic, easy-to-relate-to example. When you think of somebody like Guy Tang. Guy Tang blew the heck up on Instagram. He was one of our industry’s first influencers. He understood how to capitalize on the platform when it was in prime time growing position, okay? Honestly, growth potential has been on the decline ever since. That’s why very few of you are getting to a million followers as a hair stylist. The platform has just changed.
That’s okay, change happens. But the peak to jump on and master the platform was almost 10 years ago. Now isn’t that interesting? That was the year that the app hit 300 million active users, surpassing Twitter for the very first time. And when that happened, that’s really when Instagram made its mark and it made marketers everywhere, big businesses say, “Oh shoot, people are flocking to Instagram. This is where attention is and this is where I want to be.”
As I say that you have to realize the currency that we are playing with when we’re marketing small business is attention, period. The way to build and grow your business as a stylist or a salon owner is to capture the most attention, end of story. And so when Instagram was captivating the world and was the platform that had the most attention, it was winning.
What you’ll remember if you were on the platforms around that time is there was almost this second surge of Instagram fever in 2016. This is when Instagram stories were born and it gave this secondary boost to the ‘Gram.
Instagram stories were a direct rip off of what platform? Snapchat, whether you know it or not. Now for some of you, I remember getting Snapchat in 2016 and trying to use it and I got into it a little bit, but it didn’t really catch my attention the way Instagram did back then. And then when Instagram stories came around, I really got into Instagram stories.
For those of you, if you have a teenager like I do, you probably know Snapchat is still very alive and well. My daughter doesn’t—she probably sends like, I don’t know, 200 texts a month and 196 of them are to me because the younger generations often communicate strictly through Snapchat. They’re not communicating on text messaging. So the app is still very alive and well the way that it is used never really peaked the way that Instagram or Facebook or TikTok did as far as the business or marketing potential simply because of the way that it was set up. It’s not really set up for that anyway, so it’s no harm no foul.
The reason I bring that up is because 2016 was the first year that Instagram realized, “Oh, we can potentially create a monopoly.” I believe when they overtook Snapchat usership, which is what happened, people jumped off of Snapchat and into Instagram stories, Meta, which at the time was Facebook—first of all, does everybody understand that Facebook owns Instagram? Mark Zuckerberg owns both Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. He put in bids to buy out TikTok, like he has been on a mission to dominate social media for a really long time. That’s not new. That’s been going on forever. What happened is that once there was this taste of oh wait a second, we can really capture attention, all we have to do is continue to mimic the features that people are into.
Who here remembers IGTV? Instagram TV had a blip in time. IGTV was almost the next ripoff if you will. It launched June of 2018 and by March of 2022, it was completely shut down. So that had not quite a four year run. What was the point of IGTV? They were trying to be what? YouTube.
You have to understand the mission for a long time has been monopoly or world domination, so these triggers have been pulled to get there. So what was the next iteration of that? The next iteration was reels which launched in 2020 in the middle of the pandemic when everybody was stuck at home and really bored and looking for new ways to connect.
What was the point of Instagram reels? It was to create an experience for users as similar to TikTok as possible. That was the whole point and vision for reels. I said from the jump with reels, this feature is being artificially inflated. I’m not buying into the hype. Instagram is pumping out blogs like crazy, oh my gosh, everybody loves reels. Viewership is up, everybody should do reels.” Y’all, they were manipulating the user’s mind and what they were doing is they were creating false engagement around reels to encourage people to get in the habit of creating them. Because what had happened is if you posted a photo on Instagram, it would hit the algorithm and it would maybe get out in front of let’s say a hundred people, okay? You post a reel same time of day, same day of the week, same conditions. You post a reel, it’s going to get out in front of a thousand people so you’re going to get 10 times the likes. And I’m making up that scale, like I don’t know that it was 10 times as much, but Instagram was strategically forcing engagement on reels.
Now did they ever make that public statement? No, but I could tell. It was just the writing was on the wall for me from the start. And so what was happening is they were trying to condition users to like reels. Y’all, it was never true. Instagram users were never craving reels. What was happening is creators were being conditioned and almost brainwashed to think everybody’s into reels, start posting them. So they did and for a couple years, that became the big deal.
Well, fall 2022, that artificial engagement was pulled back ’cause it wasn’t sustainable. It couldn’t happen forever. As soon as that was pulled, reels really started to die out.
When you look at what Instagram specifically has been up to, they really strayed from what the platform was intended for and what people loved about it at its peak in 2014. In 2014, it was strictly a photo sharing app. It was about authenticity and it wasn’t necessarily about curated grids. Video wasn’t even an option on there, right? It really was just storytelling through caption, visual storytelling through photo. These are like tale-as-old-as-time marketing concepts and I tend to think that somewhere, somebody at Instagram was like, “Man, if we could go back in time, it’s just get back to the basics of great storytelling, we might be able to save this thing,” but I think it might be a little too late for that and we’re going to get into why.
But what happened was Instagram, instead of staying true to what they were really good at, got caught up in the Monopoly game, got caught up in the bigger and better game, and decided they wanted to be the next Snapchat. They wanted to be the next YouTube, they wanted to be the next TikTok. Fail. Fail. It’s not working.
We have to flash forward a little bit and profit was down for the parent company Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram. Profit was down 36% year over year as 2022 closed out. That’s massive. Let’s assume, I don’t know what Meta’s profit margin was, I have no idea. But let’s assume that they were operating to lose 36% margin, like their margin was obviously bigger than that. Let’s say they were operating at a 50% profit margin, which is a really juicy profit margin for a business. They have physical locations, they’ve got thousands of employees. If they had a 50% margin and they lost 36%, they’re down to a 14% margin. Y’all, that’s dismal for a publicly traded company. That’s not great. So profits down 36%, Meta stock dropped by 60% year over year by fall of 2022.
Meta publicly said that their advertising revenue represented 97% of total revenue when times were good, so most of their money comes from ad spend.
Now think about yourself as the consumer. What have you complained about on Facebook and Instagram for the last five-ish years or so? How many of you said ads? You’re sick of seeing them. They annoyed you, you tried to turn them off on your feed, you didn’t want anything to do with them. So what happened? Apple introduced the iOS 14 update which blocked advertisers from targeting you in the same way and there was this like global hallelujah, this is going to be amazing. Well, you’re now seeing the repercussion of that decision.
What happened is advertisers pulled their money out of Facebook and Instagram ads because they stopped working. If the targeting doesn’t work, the advertising doesn’t work. Y’all, social media’s an economy. Are you seeing it yet? It is a global economy based on attention. This should be starting to click in for you a little bit.
When the advertisers pulled out because attention wasn’t there anymore, there was no money coming into the platforms.
The other thing was that Instagram was doing these funny, funny things with artificial inflation of certain types of content, certain types of features, and interest in the platform has waned significantly in the last few years. Hootsuite said according to the latest Instagram engagement stats, the average engagement rate for all types of Instagram posts by business accounts specifically is 0.65%. That’s 60% of 1%, so less than 1% engagement, meaning 99% of your followers are not engaging in your content. Does that sound like a good marketing strategy to you?
When we go back to 2017—it’s never been like a hundred percent. It’s not that we’re ever looking for that, but back in 2017, we were shooting for three to 5% as business owners. When you look at, wow, engagement has waned by 500% or 300%, however you want to look at it, that’s a problem because we’re not working any less hard to make the platform work for us. It’s just not working.
Why is it not working? Because users are not enjoying the experience.
How many of you have felt social media burnout? Guess what? Your clients felt it too. The question is how did we get here and can we go back?
You have to remember the initial idea behind social media was to connect with family and friends. Facebook, for all intensive purposes, was the first advanced form of social media. We can look at platforms like MySpace, but think about it. MySpace was much more private. It was almost like a hangout private page for you and your friends. It was a little bit different. Facebook was about social sharing.
When we talk about Web 2.0—I’ve done podcasts on that in the past—it’s this new form of UGC, user generated content. This was really the first iteration of that. Then Facebook’s little sister Instagram was born and she was all about visuals and UGC and storytelling. The original purpose was connection.
When the influencer culture was born, which was when Instagram peaked 2014, 2015, 2016, that was—the pinnacle of Instagram culture was 2019 and it’s been on a downward spiral ever since. But a huge part of the reason why these platforms are declining is this era of performance media evolved and it stopped being about connection. It stopped being about authenticity, it stopped being about service, and it started being about performing, for lack of a better word. Like if I get enough followers, then I’ll get brand deals.
Can we really call that authentic effort? It’s not. It’s contrived.
First of all, I don’t chase brand deals. I don’t have any so I’m not chasing them. But if somebody were to say, “I’m going to do this post in hopes that I get a sponsorship,” whatever content they’re posting isn’t in your best interest as the follower, right? It’s in their own best interest ’cause they want to get XYZ product for free or they’re hoping to get cut a check or whatever it is.
You and me as users now see through that. For a while that worked. Now it doesn’t and followers, users on the platform are a little bit jaded and a little bit gun shy and they don’t trust Instagram as much when it comes to choosing a place to find services, businesses, make purchases.
I found this really interesting quote from somebody named Lee Tillman who considers herself to be a former full-time Instagram influencer. She says, “My close friends who aren’t influencers haven’t posted in like two years.” She as an influencer is keeping up on her posting. But what she noticed is friends and family aren’t posting on Instagram nearly as much at all.
Have you thought about that? Have you stopped to think about that? How a few years ago people were posting pictures of their kids and their families and whatever several times a week. That has really waned. When you see that users, like average users not businesses, are not using the platform as much, that should be a huge red flag to you that interest in the platform is waning.
Tillman also said she’s been an influencer since 2015 and has seen her rate offered by brands go down 80% in the last five years. Let’s say that a brand deal used to be a thousand dollars for her. Now the brand deal would be $200, right? Because 80% of the value is now gone and she’s left with the remaining 20%. It’s because the market’s oversaturated and influencer culture has started to shift. If you don’t think that when you showed up on Instagram to promote your business, you were creating influences, that’s naive. When we show up as business owners on any platform, the idea is to create influence. You are in fact an influencer. That’s your whole point of promoting your business on Instagram and unfortunately interest in that is really waning.
Let’s get to Instagram because then people start to think, “Oh, it’s because everybody’s on Instagram.” First of all, not everybody, but a lot of people are there. One third of Americans currently have the app. Instagram is very popular. What we haven’t seen, and if you came to Thrivers Live 2021, Gary Vaynerchuk was one of our speakers and I did a Q&A with him and I asked him, I said, “Listen, do you see TikTok being viable for stylists and salon owners?” And he openly said, “Not yet.” He said, “What I think the platform is missing and what they’ll need to adapt to if they do intend to stick around is they need to find a way to optimize for local small business.” Because right now, right now it really is for entertainment purposes only.
Now I have bought plenty of stuff from TikTok, but it’s mostly like Amazon Finds clothes. Finding a local service provider on TikTok is a little tricky. It’s not that it doesn’t happen, it’s just not predictable and scalable in the way it would need to be to be a truly critical tool for a small business. Just something to think of.
But all that set aside, have you been keeping an eye on what’s going on in the news with TikTok? I literally thought everybody had, but I spoke on a stage in January and they spoke on a stage in February and I asked to both of those crowds, “Hey, how many of you know what’s going on legally with TikTok?” And it was like one or two people amongst hundreds who would’ve any idea what I was talking about. I thought this was mainstream media news, but again, this shows the filter that I’m living through.
There is a bipartisan bill that is pushing its way through the government that would completely ban foreign technology such as TikTok. TikTok is included in this. It’s not the only targeted app, but it is one of them. If this bill is to go through, TikTok will no longer be available in the United States. That is a very real threat.
Now this is not just talk talk because this came around in 2020 as well. The problem was in 2020, it didn’t have bipartisan support, meaning the Democrats and Republicans didn’t both agree it was a good idea. This time it does and that’s why this is a very real threat. This iteration of the bill passed the Republican-controlled committee 24 to 16 along party lines with unanimous GOP support, so this is for real.
Now it’s not set in stone yet. It’s still got to make it through the House and through the Senate. It could be adjusted in time. The president will have to decide if it’s a final decision. You can Google this. Every major news channel is reporting on this because it is an actual threat right now. TikTok has already been banned on government devices, I think, I don’t believe in all states. I believe in many states, like at the time of this recording, which I usually record podcasts a couple months before they air so please keep that in mind.
But the reason I share this, the reason I talk about Instagram, the reason I talk about TikTok is not to be a Debbie Downer, although I realize that I’m deep in those waters at this point. The fragility of social media is so real. And in all of my coaching, I’ve always said don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Don’t even put all your eggs in the social media basket because for as much as we complain about having to do social media, how sad are you going to be when it’s gone? Because this should be the wake up call that none of these apps are going to be here forever and we take for granted the tools that are available to us because we say things like, “It’s too hard, it’s too much, too much work, it’s too time consuming.”
And some of you as I say this might say, “Good, things will be so much easier when Instagram’s gone.” Oh really? How are you going to market yourself? Literally, what is your plan? What are you going to do? Word of mouth? You think we’re going to go back to the nineties? We can’t go back to the nineties because people have smartphones now.
Now will another form of social media be born without a doubt? What will that look like? Will it be useful to local small business? These are things we don’t know.
My closing message in saying this is going back to what I’ve always taught in business coaching. Don’t chase the trends. Chase consumer attention, right? Attention is the currency. Make really smart business decisions. If doing funny, joking videos on TikTok or Instagram is working for you and it is driving new clients to your chair month after month, by all means keep on doing it. But if it’s not, really ask yourself what is it that I should be posting to drive business? ‘Cause my friends, what if you only have two years left on these platforms? You need to get down and dirty.
When I said at the beginning what I was going to share was my action steps is for me and my company, we’re not abandoning social platforms. We are like “Now is crunch time.” The train left the station many, many years ago, but now it’s like how do we make the most of the time we have?
I think that this is just that reminder of these things aren’t going to be here forever. We can complain about how much work they are, but my gosh is going to be so much harder and the next iteration of whatever it is, right?
What I encourage you to do, if you’ve not harnessed the power of social media yet, do it while you can ‘cause I can’t tell you what’s going to evolve next, but I do believe it will be harder than what we’ve got now, so let’s get back to basics.
The exciting thing about Instagram in particular is now that all of the artificial inflation has been turned off, for counts under a hundred thousand followers, carousel posts are doing the best, followed by photo posts, videos trailing behind, so focus on what generally is in more of our comfort zone: photos before and afters, things like that. Get back to basics on the ‘Gram. That would be my advice for you.
If you’re still feeling a little lost on what you should be posting, how you should be posting, doors to Thriving Stylist Method are open and available to you. It’s the lowest-cost business education you’ll find in the industry and the most robust training program based on a totally proven methodology.
If you’re still feeling lost on marketing, you want to make sure you capture this moment, www.thrivingstylist.com, always available for you.
If you have more questions about this, if you want to keep this conversation going, leave me a rating or a review on iTunes and in that rating or review, leave me in the comments whatever your questions are. I read them every single week and I come here ready to serve up as much as I can.
Y’all, so much love, happy business building and I’ll see you on the next one.
