Boost YOUR engagement

Engagement is the key metric to measure if you want to learn how successful your nail business profile is on Instagram. It shows how frequently your following is interacting with your content - grid posts, stories and IGTV - making it more valuable than follower count or likes.

“Nowadays, people focus too much on how many followers they have or how many likes a grid post got, but the only way to achieve high numbers across the board is through engagement,” says Tammy Koslowski, nail tech and owner of Naf! Salon in Glasgow. She shares her top tips for getting a good engagement rate on Instagram:

1. Use Instagram Stories

“I always set my nail techs a challenge of posting five Instagram stories a day, as people tapping and/or swiping on these creates engagement for your profile,” explains Koslowski. “If you’re providing a service like nails, hair or beauty then you always have fresh content in front of you because you’re essentially creating something new every hour. Plus, the great thing about stories is that you don’t have to spend time making the content look polished either as it is meant to have a behind-the-scenes feel to it. People tapping through stories creates engagement, but adding sliders, polls or question boxes increases that even more because they’re interacting with you.”

2. Invest in Instagram Lives

“Lives are a great way to get people joining in with your channel and communicating by tuning in and asking questions. This is so important for engagement rates - and for when you’re trying to express who you are to followers,” says Koslowski. “Doing tutorials, a tour of your salon or even chatting through your products - why you love and use them - is so invaluable. If you save them to your stories at the end, these videos stick around and you can use them for 24 hours. You can also download them to use later if you want to.”

3. Don’t forget about IGTV

“My biggest advice is to always put your IGTV videos on your Instagram feed because they get so much more engagement on there. If you’re short on time, you could collate all your finished nail look photos from the past month and put them on IGTV as a collage video - that’s great content,” advises Koslowski. “Maybe use all the photos you’ve taken that haven’t made it on to your grid. Or, you could go into your archive and find all the live videos you’ve taken in the past month and collate them together as a behind-the-scenes video of what’s been going on in the salon lately. You don’t need to create a whole production; it’s about taking the time to collate your work together into a video that people will engage with.” PB

Tammy Koslowski is owner of Naf! Salon in Glasgow, which has 119,000 Instagram followers. She also runs training school Naf! School. For more social media advice, check out the Digital Skills programme at Professional Beauty London professionalbeauty.co.uk/education