Innovation Spotlight: Dolce Salon Uses Twitter to Fill The Books

The fourth and final installment in our Twitter series! If you can't remember, first we built a twitter account, then we built a following, next we looked at using your twitter to give your salon personality, and now finally, we will look at how one salon uses twitter to solve the age old problem of filling your appointment books!

Like most things social media it's easiest to understand when we break things down to their individual parts. There are two best practice strategies to using your Twitter account to enhance your business:

1. Use your personal stylist personality to drive people to your salon

2. Use your salon's twitter account to offer exclusive deals to ensure a steady stream of digital to customers.

Dolce Salon and Spa is a perfect case study for offering deals and steals. The salon provides special offers and daily discounts via their social media platforms – and wow, do they have a dedicated following! How do I know that? Well, because when I lived in Arizona, Dolce was my salon of choice. Of course, I had my stylist I was loyal to, however, when I was in the mood for a new service, or wanted to spice up my week, I took full advantage of their amazing social media deals. Today, their following (between Facebook fans and Twitter followers) equals over 56,000 people which is no small feat to build.

So, how can you do the same at your salon? How do you fill the books utilizing twitter and other social platforms?

For instance.

Each morning take a look at your appointment book for the day. You notice that X stylist has an opening from 1pm-3pm. Simply send out a quick tweet saying

"Daily Deals-- 10% off a cut between 1pm and 3pm, 3 winners only, first call first serve.To redeem call ###-####."

Then to be sure that your customers are staying on the up and up make them print off the coupon or show you that they follow you via a smart phone! Only Twitter followers or Facebook fans can redeem the coupons and suddenly you books are filled for the day!

Capturing New Clients

Maybe your problem isn't filling your books, you are usually full with regular clients who are fiercely loyal to their favorite stylists, but you've brought in some new fresh talent and you want to build a client base for them as well. In this case send out a tweet for a 10% coupon on level # stylists for today only! This will give your new stylist a chance to win over clients who may not have come in otherwise.

Using this technique Dolce has earned over  50,000 Facebook fans  and is nearing 5,000 Twitter followers for their 13 salons all in Texas!