Is your work/life balance too affected by social media?
By Katie Barnes | 02 February 2021 | Feature, Tech Talk
We are able to create relationships with customers before, during and after they have booked a visit to our nail business with the power of social media. This allows customers to trust us and become instantly loyal, even before they may have visited. But, there is a downside to social media – it is 24/7.
What are the benefits of social media?
Social media is an imperative part of the marketing strategy for nail and beauty businesses and most thrive on it, whether they use it for networking, keeping in touch with current customers or gaining new ones. Social media is an instant timeline of events.
Social media can often save on marketing costs and has a much larger and instant audience than traditional methods of advertising.
On social media, customers are able to see so much more than these traditional methods such as reviews, working environment and customer work to assess much more information about the business in one place at the click of a button. Client retention can often increase due to instant communication methods and interactions and the rapport that is then created.
What are the disadvantages of social media?
In this day and age, most people have access to portable devices such as smart phones and tablets, making social media more easily accessible than ever. Many users become dependent upon it and expect an immediate response whatever the time. This can prove difficult to manage when your customer base lives in different time zones.
Whether you are using a business or personal profile, you must keep content professional, appropriate and avoid swearing, being aggressive and personal rants. Just one negative post could affect your reputation and business.
Maintaining a work life/personal life balance online
With how easily accessible social media is, maintaining a healthy work and personal life balance is one of the hardest things to manage as a business owner. Try to manage the time spent online efficiently by allocating set time to schedule posts to various channels. This helps with how much time is needed online, and additional time is only required to be spent responding to content interactions. Scheduling and planning your posts also helps with the quality and consistency of content.
If you anticipate a post to have a lot of interaction, it can be good practice to schedule this for a time where you can assign some time to be on hand for any questions.
The beauty of an employed job is that once you have finished work you can switch off and are not expected to be communicating out of work hours. There is a misconception that as a business owner, you must be available at all hours. Many choose to work for themselves to get a better work/ life balance so it is important not to fall into this expectation.
How to achieve this
Social media and email platforms allow you to set up an automated reply which goes out to anyone that private messages you outside of your set work hours.
Keep your personal page for private use. You are unable to set up automatic responses on these. While you may not mind in the beginning, you will regret it in the future as boundaries are too easily crossed when customers have your personal contacts.
Set your working hours and stick to them. This takes discipline. Maintain consistency when responding and customers will begin to recognise when you respond and become accustom to this.
However tempting, it is important not to respond out of hours so that you don’t set up false expectations.
Maintain great customer service while you are out of hours by using auto-responses.
- You can create an away message that automatically sends out of your set hours on Facebook and Instagram.
- Include details about hours and when clients at your social media agency can expect to hear back from you on your website.
- Add business hours to your email signature.
When you are in a rush, it is easy to make a typo. Saved replies mean there is no rush. You can think through your common responses and have them ready to go with just a couple of clicks. This is possible by scheduling these into Facebook and Instagram or manually by creating a document that you can copy and paste from.
Whatever career you are in, whether it be employed or self-employed it is important to have time to switch off and relax to make you more productive on a day to day basis.
Love Katie B x