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 I’m really, really excited to dig in today’s episode on your three-hours-a-week social strategy plan. This is going to be such a fun, strategic, tactical episode where we dive into why the heck is social media so exhausting? Why do we feel like it’s such a time suck? And what can we do to be more efficient with it?
I want to go back and share with you the inspiration for this one, and then we’re going to dig in.
Some months ago, I saw a post somewhere on social—to be candid, I can’t exactly remember where, but it lit my heart ablaze. I knew it had to be an episode, but it said something like, “People who say you can pull off social media in three hours a week are liars, and here’s why.” It was something along those lines. I’m totally paraphrasing and it was something probably much more eloquent than that, but it was basically, “Unpopular opinion: You can’t pull off social media strategy in three hours a week.”
Says who? Sure, you can spend 10, 15, 30 hours a week on social media. Absolutely. You know what? You can spend a hundred hours a week on social media if you want to, but the idea that you can’t pull it off in three hours a week… It took me three days. I kept going back to that post and back to that post and I was like, why? Literally what is wrong with the system in place where you can’t pull it off in three hours a week? 12 hours a month on social media for the average small business is pretty damn good.
Now can you do more? Always. There’s the option to scale, but do I believe a stylist, a salon, multiple salon locations could build a really powerful brand and reputation on three hours a week? I do.
Let’s look at that, what that would look like, and then let’s take a look at why I think that people are struggling with that.
Let’s first take a step back and look at what makes social media feel long. What makes social media feel heavy? Whenever I do a live speaking engagement, one of the things I always ask is how is everybody feeling about social media? And almost always it’s like a collective eye roll. It’s I dropped an F-bomb in the middle of the class. People are collectively so upset that I’ve even asked the question because we say social media, like it’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to us.
Part of me gets it because social media is this moving target, right? Social media is this thing that is ever changing. The rules that are in place right now are different than what was working six months ago, which is different than what was working six months before that. And it’s all different than what’s going to work six months from now.
And so what I think is the reason why we get exhausted by it is it feels like it’s ever changing, but you want to know a secret? I’ve been using the same strategies for a couple of years now and I’m still doing great. To that point, I think often we see the trends and we get so hyper-focused on the trends that we lose sight of what the objective actually is.
The objective is never to go viral. I want to be very clear on that at the top of the episode. Going back to 2020, 2021 when reels had their heyday, which I am really having my heyday right now because I said from the jump that reels was being artificially inflated. I didn’t think it was going to be a lasting strategy and it’s not.
What happened was people were doing all these dancing, dancing funny reels and they would go viral. In our industry, there were so many stylists and salons that went viral using these trending reels and they were like, “Oh my gosh, my reel got a hundred thousand views,” or whatever. Then they would look at the views and the views would be international viewers, which is fine except for that in an industry like ours, we’re relying on local small business.
Going viral in a foreign country for a stylist who’s doing hair in Nashville, Tennessee is not great. What is that going to do for them? As it turns out, it did nothing. A whole lot of nothing. Going viral is cool if you’re like a comedian, like a Matt Rife who’s gone viral in the last year, great for him. He’s got an international audience. That plays for him. If you have an Etsy shop and you go viral, that’s great. You’re selling a physical product and you could ship around the world.
Going viral is great for a local small business like ours. It “What have you done for me lately?” Going viral, not that much. It’s challenging. Following the trends is exhausting and also generally doesn’t lead to a big payoff.
That’s one of the things that causes the overwhelm.
Two, lack of vision. Often we’re like, “Social media is the thing I’m supposed to do. How do I do it?” Then you sit down and it almost feels like when your parents told you growing up, “You have to eat your green beans.” Social media is the soggy green vegetables that came out of a can that your mom or your grandma or your grandpa, whoever, didn’t really know how to cook properly.
For a lot of us, that’s the relationship we have with social media where we like we know we’re supposed to do it, we need the vitamins and minerals, it’s good for us, but it doesn’t taste good going down. We’re trying to figure out what dipping sauce to smother it in so that we can tolerate it and we don’t want to make time for it.
We’re trying to figure out how we can put social media in our napkin on our lap under the dinner table so we can throw it away later and no one will notice. I think that’s the relationship that a lot of us have with social media. When you have a vision for what you’re doing on social, A, it’s not hard, B, it’s not time-consuming, and C, it’s really freaking fun.
I think what happens is it feels like this laborious chore and anything that has that feeling of, “Ugh, this is that thing I’ve got to do,” is not going to feel good. It’s like when it’s Sunday and it’s time to scrub the toilets. I don’t like that feeling either. That’s I think what social media feels like to a lot of us.
Here’s the rub in that and something I want to share: a day will come where social media won’t exist anymore. We’re already seeing pretty massive trends in that. There’s a lot of social media burnout right now. There will come a time where you wish it was as easy as it is right now. I want you to be very mindful of that and I want you to use the tools we’ve got while we have them because we always think like, “Well, I long for the olden days,” or “I’ll do this when I get around to it.” When you get around to learning this, it will already be something else you’re supposed to be doing. It is so much easier to hop on what’s working now than thinking in two years it’s going to get easier or that you’re going to have more time ’cause you won’t.
I think the lack of vision is one of the key components and not just vision around social media but vision around your business. That’s why in Wealthiest Year Yet, which is my annual planning system and program, we talk about what it looks like to create your North Star. When we create that North Star, it’s based on our dreams and our reflection, right?
Wealthiest Year Yet is broken down into six sections. So we have the North Star, we have social content, we have dream, we have reflect, we have strategizing, we have execute. You have to do all of those things to see progress.
In Wealthiest Year Yet, we start with reflect and dream and then we go to North Star. Once we have our dreams that have created our North Star, then we create the social content plan. It’s very difficult to create a strong social strategy if you don’t know the reflection, the dreams and the vision, a.k.a, the North Star. How will you know that?
For a lot of you, your vision for social media is simply to do it or your vision for social media is to post the work you do. That’s not a vision. That is a very tactical, obligatory, “I’m supposed to do this thing, I’m going to take a picture of my guest, I’m going to do the best I can with a caption, I’m going to post it and whatever. Britt says I’m supposed to get reviews, I’m going to ask when I can and then when I do, it’s whatever.”
None of that work is done with vision.
Have you ever looked at a social media account and been like, this is so dreamy. Like an account that’s goals for you. I guarantee the owner of that account has vision and the vision is not to make a pretty Instagram and the vision is not to get 2000 Google reviews. The vision is something deeper and more strategic than that.
Putting that vision into place is one of the best ways to save time on social media and one of the key reasons why social media takes too long for some people.
The next reason why social media takes too long is lack of marketing message. If you don’t know the vision, you will not have a marketing message. Your marketing message will be, “Hi, I’m Britt, I do hair, come to see me.” That’s not a marketing message. That is a very flat way of showcasing online who you are and what you do. A marketing message is different. Consumers today are inclined to trust businesses that solve problems and it’s very difficult to have a strong marketing message, which P.S., your marketing message should be aligned around the problems you solve, the values that you have, and the guests that you serve, the market that you serve.
Notice that I didn’t say, “…and the services that you do.” The marketing message is generally not around the services that you do, although you know that will be a part of what happens. The marketing message is different than that.
If I were to poll our industry and say, “What services do you do?”, we would find so much crossover, it’s actually ridiculous. A good marketing message is more based around what problems you solve, the value that you offer, and who it is you serve.
All of those things lead back to that vision. When you have those pieces in place, social media is not long, taxing, time-consuming. It becomes very clear what you should be posting.
The fourth thing that I think makes social media take too long is the lack of determination and focus.
Let me take one step back. Social media is the Interest level of the marketing funnel that I coach to. So I’ve been coaching to the marketing funnel for over a decade. It’s the methodology that I coach to in all of my programs. If you search on Google Thriving Stylist Marketing Funnel, you will find a ton of podcasts, trainings, YouTube videos, blogs, a ton of stuff.
On the marketing funnel, we have the interest level. Living on the interest level is all things social media. Social media is anywhere any person can have an online conversation about a person, place, or business.
When you look at where that exists in our industry, social media would be Instagram, TikTok, right? The obvious things. Facebook, Yelp, Google Business, the Nextdoor app, right? Pinterest. Anywhere that online conversations can be had about a business is social media.
Generally it’s social because it’s a two-way conversation. You can say something about your business and somebody else can say something about your business too. Based on every single channel that I just rattled off, you’ll notice it’s a two-way conversation versus something like a website is a one-way conversation. That’s you putting information out into the world, right? Social media’s going to be a two-way conversation. That’s why we call it social.
When we say lack of determination and focus on social media, you find it overwhelming choosing what platforms to be on. You find it overwhelming to stick with the content plan that you put into place. Maybe you’ve bit off more than you can chew. Maybe you don’t have the vision or the marketing message so the determination simply isn’t there.
Then the focus. I see the number one issue on social media is scattered focus. I follow so many stylists, salon owners, industry educators where I’m like, “What are you talking about?” You talked about one thing today, something different last week, something totally different a month ago. I can see you’re definitely putting information out into the world, but your point of view is nothing. It’s so scattered.
If you have no point of view, if you have no focus, if you have no marketing message and no vision, it is not a wonder why social media is feeling exhausting, overwhelming, and way too time-consuming. Anybody having a breakthrough right now?
For some of you, I just described exactly your relationship with social media and this is why it takes more than three hours a week. If you’re struggling with all of these things and you need help with marketing, vision, message, determination, or focus, something to consider checking out is our Wealthiest Year Yet system.
Wealthiest Year Yet at the time of this recording is on pre-order wait list. We actually completely sold through our initial stock of going to 2024 planners. We have new ones on order. If you head to thrivingstylist.com/WealthiestYearYet, you can learn more.
The other place you can check it out is if you’re listening to this in real time, you can head to thrivingstylist.com/goalsetting and sign up for the Goal Setting Workshop that’s happening early October 2023. I will be sharing some of this strategy around social content planning and mastery and how to create that vision in that mission. We will talk about that a little bit in the free Goal Setting Workshop, so sign up for that as well.
If you’re listening to this at a later date, of course those things have expired. However, check out Wealthiest Year Yet we may still have planners in stock, and my Goal Setting Workshop does come back annually, so keep an eye out for it.
Let’s get back into the strategy.
I want to start with the pre-work. Remember, my promise is you can be stellar at social media in just three hours a week. The key to that is going to be the pre-work. The pre-work happens every single quarter, every 90 days. My team and I do this plan as well. It’s two to three hours a quarter. We’ve actually scaled it back to more like 90 minutes. But full transparency, I do have a team that helps me now so I say two to three hours if you’re doing this yourself. If you have a team, it may take longer because there’s more collaboration and things like that.
When we sit down to do the quarterly pre-work, we look at what are we trying to accomplish? What are the goals? What is it that we’re focusing on for the next 90 days?
Then what is it that makes us special? Who are we going back to that brand message, right? What are our values? Who is it that we’re trying to serve? What are the problems that we solve?
Then we look at what kind of content best resonates with our audience. This is where we do the review and we’ll go back and say, “Okay, great. Over the last 30 or 60 days—” and we look pretty recent because social media’s changing all the time. “Over the past 30 or 60 days, what have people been into? Has it been more video? What are the topics they’ve liked? Has it been carousels? Has it been quote cards, has it been pictures of my face? Has it been videos of me talking? Has it been showcases? Has it been overly-produced videos? Has it been more face-to-camera stuff, raw stuff? How are our stories performing?
We take a minute and look at what content and specifically what problems we’ve been tackling have gotten the most positive result. For me, the result I’m looking for is shares and DMs. Likes and comments are whatever. I want shares and DMs. I’m looking for shares and DMs predominantly when I’m looking at content resonation. You might also look at clicks through to your booking page, clicks through to your website, those kind of things.
Then we choose our content categories. Remember, we’ve decided what problems we’re going to tackle solving over the next 90 days, what problems people have been into for the past 30 or 60 days, and what our values are, who it is we’re trying to serve, and who we’re trying to help. Going back to that marketing message.
Once we know those things, we choose our content categories for the next quarter.
In this season, at the time of this recording, I’m heading into the tail end of 2023, so all of our content is going to be around wrapping up your year, holiday season success stuff, annual planning stuff, reviewing the year that you just had, motivational. We keep it light because around the holidays, people are often grinding it out in the salon.
We think about what is my market going through? How can we support them? How can we uplift them energy-wise? What content that can I share that’s going to meet them where they’re at?
Maybe for you, if you are somebody who specializes in curly hair clients and it’s summertime, are they suffering with seasonal dryness? Are they suffering with flaking scalp or is that maybe not a seasonal thing for most of your clientele? Do they need to change their product regimen? Do they need to change their shampoo technique? What are the things that they need to keep in mind over the season you’re planning for? That becomes the content focus for the quarter ahead.
You use that to create content categories. We do this in our Wealthiest Year Yet planner, so if you need a tool to help you, that’s there and available as well, or you could certainly do it in a notebook or a sheet of paper, something like that.
Okay, that’s quarterly.
Now let me get into how you’re going to do this on the week-by-week in three hours or less.
The weekly work you’re going to accomplish is every single week you’re going to commit to writing five captions based on your content categories.
When you look at what those captions should be, it could be a myriad of things. The things I find that work well are stories. I love to tell stories in my captions. Solving problems. “Hey, I know something that a lot of you are struggling with is split ends this season. Here are the things that I like to do to combat those split ends.”
Yeah, I made that up on the fly, but solving problems, showcasing why you’re different. Those are the three types of captions I’m really digging right now. But think about what makes sense for you. If you have a salon team, probably doing intros or “Hey, this is what our stylist Candace is up to this summer.” Things that you can share to connect with the audience are always going to be good things as well.
Once you have written your captions, then I match them with photos. A lot of people will sit down and they’ll look at the photo and be like, “What do I write? What do I write? What do I say? What’s funny? What’s interesting?” I don’t know about you, that gives me the biggest writer’s block of all time. It’s putting way too much pressure on myself versus if I write the captions first, I can go back into my content catalog and find a picture to share.
Now for those of you who don’t have a content catalog, this is something we coach to big time in Thriving Stylist Method. I would definitely look into that if you haven’t already. But thinking about batching content so that it’s not on the fly.
Another thing that makes social content take too long is trying to post on the fly. If you’re like, “Oh my goodness, I have to get a great photo of a client today ’cause I need to do a post tonight ’cause I haven’t done one in three days,” it’s no wonder why social content is feeling so heavy, so overwhelming, so high pressure because you are putting this in inappropriate and inadequate amount of pressure on yourself to get the perfect photo today because you’re under a tight deadline. Most people don’t work super well like that and usually your creativity is not at its finest when you’re like, “It’s do or die, babe.” That’s generally not when we work our best. Versus if you’re constantly getting great content and then every single week you sit down and you’re like, “Okay cool, I got to do my five captions, I’ll pair ’em with five photos,” You’ll do well.
Here’s the key: set a timer and give yourself just 12 to 15 minutes per caption to write it out. I’m at the point now where I can write a 2000-word caption in five to seven minutes, no problem, and it is so good. I can write a 400-word caption in like record time. That’s because of practice.
If you don’t allow yourself hours and hours and days and days to do this work, you’ll learn to do it faster. Set a timer, 12 to 15 minutes per caption.
That should take you maybe an hour to write five, okay? Then you’ll spend 20 minutes on your office hours day scheduling those posts out. 20 minutes should be enough time to schedule out five social media posts. You’ve already written the captions. We allocated over an hour of time to write those five captions. It should not take you more than four minutes per post to schedule the post. You’ve already written the caption. You should have the content bank brewing. That should take about four minutes a piece, okay? I’ll even give you 25 minutes if you want to per week on your office hours day to schedule those posts.
Now we’re at still under two hours to get five posts up, captions written, everything’s scheduled, golden. Then we’re going to choose our engagement hours each week. What I would suggest is five minutes a day responding to comments.
For most of you, that’s plenty of time. 10 minutes a day being in the DMs, right? Responding to comments often is a shorter response. Not always, but often 10 minutes a day in the DMs, you know, that’s 50 minutes, that’s an hour a week in the DMs, it’s quite a bit of time.
Then 15 minutes a day working on awareness strategies. There’s lots of other things that we can be doing to grow our social channels all the time. We talk about those things in Thriving Stylist Method. If you’re not sure what those things look like, let me tell you what they do not look like. Hashtags, sharing your posts on stuff like that, like the silly stuff that we do as hope-and-pray marketing. We don’t do things like that, but working on your awareness strategy 15 minutes a day.
So we had five minutes a day responding to comments, 10 minutes a day in the DMs, and 15 minutes a day working on awareness strategy. That’s 30 minutes a day. You get to be very active on your social and sometimes that’ll be a mix of Google Business and Instagram. We all know that social media has ebb and flows. Sometimes you’ll have a really busy day on one platform and a low day on another. Think about those things, but that’s quite a bit of time. 30 minutes a day for maximum impact.
When you look at the way that I broke it down, that breaks down to an hour, an hour and 15 minutes for the caption writing, depending on if you’re writing your captions in 12 minutes or 15. Then two to two and a half hours for engagement, depending on how many days a week you’re working, right? If you’re only working five days a week, 30 minutes a day, it’s going to be two hours. If you’re working four days a week, 30 minutes a day doing the interaction, that’s two hours a week engaging on social. If you are working five days a week and we’re doing the 30 minutes a day of engagement, that’s two and a half hours a week on social, right?
But no matter how you slice it, we’re between three, maybe three hours and 45 minutes a week for a full social content strategy, posting five times a week with brilliant captions, posting on multiple platforms, time for engagement. We are at less than four hours a week, not just posting, which was the post that I started this whole thing with, but engaging as well in under four hours a week.
Here’s where I think that people are actually getting overwhelmed. This is a statistic. You can Google it and look it up. The average user spends two and a half hours a day, or 17 and a half hours a week scrolling social media
Busted.
How many of you spend 20, 30 minutes a day watching TikToks? How many of you spend an hour and a half a day watching TikToks? How many of you spend 15, 20, 30 minutes a day scrolling Instagram? How many of you spend 30 minutes a day watching YouTube videos?
Often where I think the overwhelm comes in is that it’s much more comfy, cozy to consume content than to create it. My advice: stop making the excuse of “I don’t have time to create social content. I don’t have the time to have a full social strategy plan.”
Make the plan, make the time. If you were to carve out three to four hours a week, you would have a full social content plan that would actually be working to fill your chair. If you are struggling to figure out what you should be doing on social, make sure that you sign up for the Goal Setting Workshop. You can head to thrivingstylist.com/goalsetting.
I would love it if you liked this podcast episode to leave me a rating or review. Let me know what stuck out for you and I would really love it the most if you actually tried to implement the social content strategy plan. Give yourself 30 days. Make the commitment. Choose to carve out just three to four hours a week and see how much more productive you are once you have that vision, that message, and that strategic plan to pull it all off.
Y’all, so much love, happy business building, and I’ll see you on the next one.
