Intro:
Do you feel like you were meant to have a kick-ass career as a hairstylist, 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 hairstylists, and this is the Thriving Stylist podcast.
Britt:
What is up? And welcome back to the Thriving Stylist Podcast. I’m your host, Britt Seva, and today we’re talking about how I grew an Instagram account by 800 followers in just eight months throughout this past year.
So one of the things that you may or may not know is I’m completely obsessed with social media marketing, business growth, economics, consumer behavior. I’m actually obsessed. You know that whole saying of if you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life. I literally love the work that I do. I love how I spend my days. And I had somebody DM me recently and she was like, “Britt, I want to be able to do what you do. What program can I take to learn how to do that?” And I was like, “Yeah. See, that’s the thing is I don’t know of a program that teaches all the stuff I talk about.”
Even Thrivers Society doesn’t teach all the stuff I talk about. And I could have told that person sign up for Thrivers, they still wouldn’t be able to see the world the way I see it just by doing a program like that. And what I think is that I truly have a deep love for business, for marketing, for economics, consumer behavior, all the things I just mentioned. And so studying it literally 365 days a year is the air I breathe. I can’t help it.
So in my downtime, when I’m not doing Thrivers Society, when I’m not coaching, not recording this podcast, I still do a lot of the stuff that I do in this business. For example, one of the things I did in 2024 is I hosted this totally free, I think we called it a boot camp or a workshop or an experience or something. For four weeks, I took a group of about 30 stylists totally for free, and I coached them on how to do paid marketing with Instagram or Facebook. And we did it as a giant social experiment. They each had to spend a hundred dollars on the apps. Not to me, I didn’t get any of that money, but they used that money towards investing in social media marketing. And some of them saw ridiculous levels of success, and some of them didn’t see any success at all. And I used that experience to see the patterns in what is working in marketing today. So that’s just an example of something that I literally do in my free time because I want to learn.
Another example is that, this is not the first time, but it’s the first time in the last few years, I have volunteered my time to grow a social media channel completely outside of our industry. So I am a part of a very well-knit community. I am born and raised in a community called Half Moon Bay, California. I’ve lived here pretty much my entire life. I left for about eight years. But other than that, I’ve been here the whole time. And our community is small and it’s very tight-knit and there’s a lot of volunteer opportunities. I’m deeply invested in all of that work.
Both of my children play competitive sports. My daughter played competitive softball from the time she was seven through her senior year of high school. She was a four-year varsity player. And my son is now deeply invested in travel baseball. And he is a part of a highly competitive travel baseball team. One of the things that that organization looks for is volunteering in a bunch of different ways. My husband happens to coach and I happen to take on social media. The year my son joined the organization, they said, “One of the things we really want to focus on this year is social media and marketing. Do we have anybody kind of in this network of parents of players who knows anything about social media?” So I, of course, raised my hand and I was like, “I think I could do it.”
So the account of this tournament style baseball team when I took it on was dismal at best. It was quite sad. We probably would’ve been actually in a better place if they had never done anything at all and I got to start them from scratch, but that wasn’t the case. They’d had a few established accounts for a few years and they were posting pretty rough content. It wasn’t good. They weren’t gaining traction. Even a lot of the families of players in the program weren’t following the account because it just wasn’t good content. They were struggling to get awareness about this specific baseball program out mainstream and wanted to leverage social media and marketing to make that possible. Happens to be my bag. And so I jumped in and did it.
So the story I’m going to share with you today is of an Instagram account that has nothing to do with hairstyling that I grew by 800 followers in just eight months. I actually think that’s a much more interesting case study to everybody listening to this than if I did it using a hairstylist and salon account. Do you know why? Because if I came on here and I said, “I coached a studio suite owner to take their account from a hundred followers to 900 followers in eight months,” and I shared exactly how I did it, likely a lot of you would hear my words, but as I was talking, you’d be saying, “I already do that. My content already looks like that. I’m already trying that. That’s never worked for me.” You’d almost tune out what I was sharing about how I made that happen.
And then in the end you’d say, “Well, it’s because they had Britt’s help. It’s because they were living in such and such a city. It’s because their suite is better than mine.” And it would be very easy to negate all of the strategies I’m going to share with you today.
I think that because I did this in an industry that I am by no means an expert of, using strategies that I truly think work for any person, any small business in any town throughout the world, I’m going to prove to you through this episode that if I can do this with this super small local travel baseball program, there should be no reason why you can’t apply these exact same strategies to yourself as a stylist or a hair salon and gain traction. Me trying to sell a baseball program is much harder than you trying to sell haircuts, root touch-ups, and blowouts. I promise it is.
So I’m going to share with you kind of start to finish how we did this process, what I think got us the most results, strategies that we totally didn’t even try, strategies that we tried and failed, and my process for growing an account as quickly as possible.
The other fun thing about this is it allowed me to really play in social media in a way I haven’t been able to in a long time. With my established Instagram channels, we have Thriving Stylist Instagram and Britt Seva Instagram. Britt Seva Instagram is coming up on, I think we’re at 85,000 followers or something like that. Thriving Stylist is over 40,000. Those are accounts that we can’t sandbox as much anymore because we have this established following who’s looking for a very specific thing with us.
This I had the opportunity to take an account with a very small following and play from the ground up, and that’s the place most of you are in today. I haven’t had the opportunity to do that in today’s market. And so to have a chance to do that and really know, listen, all these strategies still work because I just used them, was really powerful for me. So I hope that these are great takeaways for you as well.
Okay. So I met with the owner of this baseball program and I kind of explained what my process was going to be like. I said, “As we do this, I only want the right followers. I’m not interested in growing hundreds or thousands of followers if they’re not going to take action with us,” which I think that for him and for anybody who’s looking to grow social media, that alone can be kind of like a mind-blown moment because we’re trained to believe, okay, the point is just to get as many followers as you can. I don’t want just a bunch of followers. I want the right followers. So I said that from the start, we’re not going to buy followers, we’re not going to buy traffic, we’re not going to run ads, we’re not going to do any of that stuff. We’re going to grow this organically. It was really important.
I said, “It’s going to take me three months, 90 days to get clear on what’s working and what doesn’t.” And I consider myself to be a pretty solid social media expert. I still needed three months, 90 days grace to know what was going to hit. I think that’s important because for a lot of you… How many of you have done this? You’ve gotten on a social media grind for three weeks and you’re not gaining traction and you’re like, “F it. See, I knew it. This was too much work. It never pays off.” I knew I needed a minimum three months just to see a skosh of what was working. So make sure you give yourself a long enough runway.
I posted anywhere from four to 12 times a week on the feed for three months to get the data I needed. I was also posting in stories, but four to 12 times a week for three months to get the data I needed. So volume of content was key here. I’m going to talk about what kind of content in a minute.
We didn’t do a pay to promote at all for the account. We did not use hashtags not one time. We did not go out and like a bunch of new accounts, so we didn’t do the spam follow for follow kind of stuff. All we did as far as followers is we chose to follow the accounts of parents of players already involved in our organization, which if you’re a Thriver, you know that’s an OG strategy. I’ve been coaching to that for a really long time. So it’s not about following as many people as possible, it’s about following the right people and showing that you’re engaged with them and creating that digital community.
So a few key issues I noticed when I first took over this account. One, they weren’t using the right profile photo. And this is something I actually still struggle with quite a bit with the owner of this business is the owner of this business believes the profile photo should stand for one thing. They have their own opinion of what it is, and I want to put them on blast for it. I believe that a profile photo needs to deeply identify the business. And when you have a profile photo that’s a generic logo that doesn’t mean much to anybody, when it’s a photo of your face, when it’s something that doesn’t make any sense, it will work against the brand.
I will say openly and honestly, I have battled with the owner of this organization for months over the profile photo. We’ve literally fought about it, gone back and forth, put different photos up, pulled different photos back. We still could not come to agreement on it because this person has such a deep belief that their profile photo should be something that they feel emotionally attached to. I do not give a rip if the owner of this organization feels attached to their profile photo. All I know is using the right profile photo is going to grow the account faster. And wouldn’t you know, when we were allowed to use the photo that I liked, that I thought was appropriate, we did grow about 30% faster week over week. However, that photo’s been taken down because of personal preference.
And the reason I share that story, and the reason I’m kind of talking long-winded about this is I think that’s really important. I know for some of you, you’re trying to do things on social media because you’re like, “Well, that’s my vibe. That’s what people know me for. This is my style.” Okay, but then your style might also be not making as much money as you could next year. So just know there’s a natural repercussion to all of our actions.
The other thing I noticed that was working against the account was no captions and no context. So whomever was running this account before was posting photos and videos, but either was writing really short captions or no captions at all. We’re going to go into why that was a problem a little bit later. But I noticed off the bat that was an issue I wanted to fix pretty quickly.
And number three, when I looked at how the account was being promoted previously, it was not clear what made this program different. It just looked like yet another travel baseball program. And the reason I share that is because when I look at a lot of your Instagram accounts, I spend a lot of time looking at y’alls Instagram account, not just the people who follow me. I’ll go on the Explore page. I’ll look at stylists who work at salons that I coach. I’ll go deep into the depths to see what the average stylist and salon is posting.
So many of you are not making it clear what makes you different. So many of you are still playing the game on social media where you’re just trying to show that you do good hair. Yeah, you and everybody else. And the other thing that’s hard about that too is you and I can discern what a clean highlight looks like. We know what bleeds look like. We know what to look for when we’re looking at root touch-ups. Have you ever looked at a root touch-up and you look in the mirror and you’re like, “That looks good.” But if we look at it from above, there’s banding and it looks terrible. Sometimes the clients can’t see that kind of stuff.
The reason I share that is because a stylist can see nuances to the results of a cut or color in a way that a client never will. And so for those of you who are trying to show off on your social media channels, “I do good hair, I do good hair, I do good hair,” you’re literally fighting a losing battle. You’re not looking different at all. You’re looking exactly the same as everybody else.
Now, the other thing I noticed is the account wasn’t showing off what made this program different. There are, I don’t know, 50 travel baseball programs. I’m in the San Francisco Bay Area. There’s at least 50 out here, if not more. That’s a high volume for the interest in playing very competitive travel baseball. And when this account was posting before, I took it over whomever was running it, was posting cool photos, great videos, but it all looked the same as what every other program was sharing.
And the reason I think that’s important for you to understand is when I look at your social media channels, and I do, I go deep into the depths and I’m looking at a lot of stylists I find on my Explore page, salons that I’ve heard of by name, I’ll go and see what they’re posting, and y’all look so boring. You are posting the exact same stuff as everybody else. And I, as a client, the average client cannot figure out the nuanced differences between why your root touch-up is better than the root touch-up down the street. They can’t see it.
So even if you look at photos that the other salon is posting, you’re like, “Oh my gosh, our work is so much better,” the average client can’t even tell that. And so if you are posting hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, and even if it’s killer hair, it’s going to be very challenging for you to stand out.
So what I wanted to do was make sure this program looked different, make sure that we were working in alignment with our goals of the account, and make sure that we really establish ourselves as the number one program in the Bay Area.
So step number one was to understand the goal that the owner had for the channel. And I gave two choices, and I want you to listen to the choices I gave. I said, “Do we want to use this account to gain new players and new interest in the program or to keep existing players families entertained?” And what do you think his answer was? “Well, both. We want to do both.” I know everybody wants to do everything. I said, “Pick one, because I need to have a point of view as I’m running this channel. What do you want it to be?” And he said, “If I’m picking one, I’m choosing gain new players.” I was like, “Great. Gain new players.” So awareness of the brand overall. It’s not going to be about entertaining and satiating all of the existing families. And that’s going to be important in a minute when I come back around too.
I want you to think about that for yourself. What is the goal with your social media right now? Is it to entertain your existing clients or is it to gain more interest in working with you and your brand? Choose one point of view because it is going to change the way the content rolls.
What I see on a lot of Instagram channels is inside jokes like, “Oh my gosh, my clients will love this, or stylists who follow me will love this. Or people get it. I always eat cheese and crackers for lunch, so I have to show it on my Instagram story.” Okay, so then you’re choosing to entertain your existing clients on social. So then when you’re growing slowly, you shouldn’t be surprised because the point of view you chose was entertain my existing clients, which is totally fine. That is an absolutely fine choice, but then your business is going to grow slower. But you might retain super well, so that might make sense for you. Versus if you’re trying to gain a lot of new people interested in working with you, working with your business, it does change the kind of filter you need to run your content through.
So with that being said, because he chose gain new players as the primary focus, when I got content that was had I posted it would’ve just made one mom happy or one dad happy or showcased one player, I didn’t do it. And it did make some parents really angry. That was okay because this channel wasn’t about keeping existing players families entertained. The point was to improve brand reputation. And I think that’s important to understand as well, is that sometimes when you are making good business decisions, you will make some people upset. That’s fine. So long as you know why you’re doing what you’re doing, it doesn’t ruffle feathers as much.
Okay, number two, understanding the business. So I asked a lot of questions. Who is the target market? Who is a good fit and who is a bad fit? What is our unique promise that we serve our community with? And what is the vision and mission of this organization? You should know the answers to all four of those questions, especially what is your unique promise? Underline the word unique. What is it that you do and you offer that everybody else in your community is not hitting the mark on? Huge.
And then when I look at your social media, I should be able to pull that out of my hat in two seconds. I shouldn’t have to go to your website. I shouldn’t have to read into the depths. I shouldn’t have to come in for my first appointment to understand it. It should be very clear in the content that gets shared on your grid.
Okay, step number three, I designed a content vision. And when I presented this with the owner of the business, it was probably a 12-page PDF and it was showing sample posts and how it was going to curate content and cadence of posts. You should make that for yourself. If you’re in Wealthiest Year Yet, this is part of what we’re doing this season. If you’re in Thrivers Society, we talk about doing that as well. I share the option for the digital social media content planning system that we use. So you want to have some kind of vision for how this is all going to go.
One of the words that gets tossed around a lot when you talk about social media is content buckets. Maybe you’ve noticed, maybe you haven’t. I don’t use that term. I don’t like it. The reason being… I understand the point. The point is to almost have categories of content. And if you’re in Wealthiest Year Yet, when you go into the social content section, you see that I’m having you choose focus points for what we’re featuring based on your North star and based on all that kind of stuff.
That being said, it’s not content buckets. And the reason I don’t like the term buckets is because I think it gets misused. Because people are like, “Okay, one of my buckets is going to be sharing my family. Another bucket is going to be blondes, another bucket is going to be styling, another bucket is going to be photos of my salon space.” And I think that when we look at it like that, we oversimplify and it takes a lot of the vulnerability and authenticity and realness out of the way we manage.
So I didn’t make content buckets, but I did ask what kind of content is going to achieve our promise, share the vision and mission, and showcase what makes us desirable. And that was the kind of content I chose. So I created eight different content pieces. So eight different types of things I was going to show.
So there was one that was stories from parents. There was one that was player features. There was one that was tournament summaries. There was one that was team summaries. There was one that was showing off championships. All these different things. You would do the same.
So something might be transformation, something might be basic touch-ups, something might be client stories. Something might be one-year client journeys. And that’s why I don’t like the content bucket thing. I think you need to think a little bit wider, kind of like I just explained about what’s going to make the most sense for this account.
So for 90 days I posted a mix of all eight of these different styles of contents. Out of the eight two that hit really well. Two out of eight. So 25% were a home run, no pun intended.
One of the other styles was pretty good. So I tested eight different types of content. Three were a slam dunk. And good for me, that is how social media has done well. It’s a game of successes and failures. It’s not just everything should be perfect or this is what I’ve committed to, so I’m just going to stick with it. I stopped posting five pieces of content that didn’t work well, I just don’t do them anymore. So it’s not like, “Oh, I committed to this, I’m going to stick with it.” No, you have to be really flexible and nimble.
So I looked for patterns in the content and then based on what I could see was resonating. And how did I decide what was resonating? It was definitely likes, comments. Shares was a big one for me. I think that’s massively how we grew the account. Shares was huge. And then I’m also looking at what helped us to pick up new followers.
So I’m looking at the growth week over week and I’m looking for that natural trajectory. I’m also looking at the DMs coming in who are saying, “When are the next tryouts? How can I get involved in that program?” When I post content that gives me the kind of really positive result we’re looking for, now I know I’m onto something, right? So I’m looking for the patterns in what I post.
I focused a lot on telling stories. I told a lot of stories, and showcased that our program works better than the rest. Because when I looked at our promise, this program happens to be run very specifically. It’s not run how most travel baseball programs are run. So it’s not for everybody, but it’s for the right people. And I had to do a really good job of showing that differentiator because just like we talk about in Thrivers Society, we want to be attracting the right people and repelling the wrong people. Yeah? So I really thought about how can I showcase what makes us unique and also tell the stories of those who are involved. That was the kind of content that really hit.
I continued just posting those three types of content over and over and over, and we gained the 800 followers in eight months. One of the things that I did next was I looked for failures, and I actually tried to fail. And this is something I think a lot of people are really scared to do on social media. And I had to tell the owner of the organization, this was part of it. I was like, “Some of the posts are going to bomb. Good.” I said, “We have to know what doesn’t work so that we can deeply understand what does.”
So one of the things I noticed, and this was fascinating because I’ve always been a big captions girl. I’ve always been so big on saying, “I think captions are still critical,” and especially in the TikTokification of all of it, people have really been saying, “Oh, captions don’t matter. Nobody cares about the captions.” And I get it. I understand. I think for some things, captions don’t matter. For a brand like Madewell who’s trying to sell you a sweater, who gives a rip about the caption. It doesn’t matter.
I think that when you’re dealing with very human businesses, like you as a stylist or salon owner you’re in the service industry. I’m running this account for this youth baseball program. Some adult is putting their child’s baseball future in the hands of this program. If you’re not a sports family, what I just said sounds really bananas. If you are a sports family, you understand exactly what I’m talking about. It’s a huge decision.
And so I think that when we are in this service-based, high-touch kind of environment like we are as stylist or salon owners, captions matter. And what we noticed every single time if the caption was short, if the caption was weak, if the caption was just a quick filler caption, the post bombed. Every time. It could be a high-quality, high-production smash of a video and if I got passive on the caption, it would tank. And by tank, I mean it would get probably 100 to 150% less engagement than one that had a good caption.
So do it that what you want to do with it. But that was one of the really dominant failures that we noticed throughout.
So I picked up the 800 followers in eight months, and now as we continue forward, I’m starting to play and test a lot more. And I’ve unlocked even new levels of what’s really working. So again, kind of controversial to what I think a lot of people are coaching people to do, this was the year I introduced video content. So that’s something you should know as well.
So I took on this account at the end of 2023, ran it through 2024. For the first nine months I think all it was was photos. I didn’t post any videos. I didn’t bother. So I think there’s this high, high, high push right now about video, video, video content. Yeah, I think video content is important, but this just goes to show I did it all with photos. Mostly because I didn’t have the capacity to do video, but I just wanted to kind of see what happened too. Photos slayed. So if the idea is you have to do video to make it work, I don’t know, this social experiment didn’t prove that.
Now, what I will say is this year, because now we have kind of an established foundation, I started weaving in a lot of video. And we played with short form, long form, stories, and feed. What do you think worked best? Short form, long form, stories, and feed? What do you think worked best for us? It was long-form feed, high production. So short form didn’t work well for us. I mean, it worked okay. Little blips behind- the-scenes stuff and stories does okay. It’s the long-form storytelling style, high-production videos that did the best.
And what’s great about that for you as stylists and salon owners is all day long you could be filming stories, telling stories. It can be high quality. And by the way, every video I filmed is on my phone. I didn’t bring in an extra camera. It’s all on my phone. So I know that that works well. So that’s working now.
But the reason I share that too is all the buzz out there right now is short-form video. What do they call that? SFVs. Like, “Just worry about short-form video. Everything has to be quick and punchy. Nobody has a time span.” I don’t know. When I post this high-production, long-form feed content, it crushes and there’s saves and there’s shares and there’s engagement, it’s all of it. So I don’t know, there’s something there. That being said, play with it. Play with it, play with it, play with it, and see what your audience likes.
So when I look at how we grew this so fast in a very niche market in a very small area, what was the key? I will tell you, surplus of content is what made this possible. And I had to really fight and beg for it in the beginning. My goal is to get 40 pieces of content a week, 40 a week, 160 pieces of content a month. And I know as I say that for some of you’re like, “Holy smokes, I don’t see 40 clients in a week.” I don’t go to 40 baseball games in a week. But in a game I will take, I mean just at my son’s team, I’ll take at least 40 photos, probably 20 minutes worth of video clips. And then my aim is to get 40 pieces of content from the other teams throughout any given week.
So for you, if you see one client, you should have at least 10 pictures of every client you see and probably at least a longer short-form video of them. And that’s just a reminder of everything is content. You should be documenting as much as possible throughout your work day.
I used Later to organize and tag everything. I have promoted the social media organizer Later forever and ever and ever. I think we as a business have used it for nine years. It’s incredible. Everything is tagged, indexed. I can repost and reshare stuff super easy. So Later was critical. So when you look at 40 pieces of content a week, 160 pieces of content a month, I could not keep my head on straight if I didn’t use a tool like that.
High-quality videos and photos were critical. So like I said, because the goal of this account was to gain awareness and gain new business essentially, any photos or videos that were sent from parents that were not deemed to be high quality got skipped. And like I said, it made some people upset. And the reason I share that is sometimes you’ll have stylists… If you’re a salon owner, sometimes your stylists will share with you content and it will look bad. And you will have to tell them like, “I would love to feature this. The quality’s not there. Let me show you some examples of what I could be looking for next time because I’d love to feature this, but the quality’s not there.” It does make people upset, but it also hits the goal. So just something to keep in mind.
Storytelling was critical. I think I’ve used the word storytelling like six or eight times in this podcast episode. Storytelling was key. You are hearing stories, learning stories, experiencing stories in your salon chair every single day. So don’t tell me you can’t be a storyteller. I know you can. And we did use stories for behind-the-scenes stuff and little micro wins, but the feed really slayed it for us.
And so the reason I share those things is I think a lot of what I learned about growing this account quickly is I did a lot of the stuff that is the opposite of what a lot of influencers are saying to do today. So at least in my experience, the basics are what worked. Quality and quantity was critical. Storytelling, storytelling, storytelling.
I hope you got some great takeaways from this. I’d love to continue the conversation forward. If you like this kind of case study stuff, please leave me a rating or review on iTunes. Let me know a little bit of feedback, any questions that you have. So much love. Happy business-building. And I’ll see you on the next one.
