My wife runs a beauty salon in Farnborough. It’s a business I really love and I do the website and online marketing.
When it comes to Facebook, I have never really seen the value until she recently created a group for her salon and invited her friends to join. She also managed to find a few of her clients on Facebook and invited them to join too.
It’s worth mentioning that her client-base are potential Facebook users, which helps, and she has managed to get 69 members so far. She has also created an event already and invited her members to attend.
Now Facebook may well be a fad. It may also be causing a stir in terms of privacy at the moment and face a back-lash, but from a small business point of view, creating a growing audience of members in less than two weeks (at a cost of £0.00) has value for any small retail business.
In a world where leveraging a quality client-base has more value than attracting an ongoing stream of new clients for short-term gain, Facebook does offer a real opportunity at the moment.
Group members will soon be having updates about:
- Events happening at the salon
- Monthly offers
- Discussions and links to treatments
- Links to blog posts and “How to” videos
Of course, these people are in control of the messaging, they can always leave the group. The key is two-fold:
- Don’t abuse their trust by “overselling”
- Give them a reason to have joined with personalised offers
The very way Facebook works, should also see new (relevant) people joining by association – watch this space.
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Interesting stuff. I’ve been looking into FB recently, although haven’t joined yet. I’m interested in seeing if I can build a widget for FB that will compliment Holiday Pad.
Yesterday, I had an overwhelming amount of traffic from people searching for the underwater hotel in Sweden. The interesting thing was the traffic was not coming from a direct source but from the same search term, obviously cut and paste into a variety of search engines. Over 200 people had done this!
After some digging around I managed to find out what triggered their interest. It was someone on Myspace recommending they check out the hotel – imagine if they had provided a link to my site.
Not particularly relevant to the FB discussion but proves the value of networks.
Craig, after you stumbled my site a couple of weekends ago I had 233 visitors between midnight and 7am on a Sunday! Mostly all American but for me the great thing was a lot of them checked out more than 1 page and I got some RSS subs too.
The trick is, as for any of these networks, is to keep up the momentum.
I think there is definitely value in social networking but I find it is about trying to catch the relevant traffic. Stumbleupon can create quick win traffic, which is fine if you are advertising page impressions but Facebook does it like no other I have found so far simply due to the relevance and networking factor.
I’d set up an account Garri and start searching. I guess the earlier you get in and suss out the possibilities, the better.
I intend to utilise the salon group by asking for incoming links, and offering vouchers for them.