An Overview of Social Media and How it Links to Your Beauty Business

Social media is defined as online content that is created by a diverse group of people, using intuitive publisher technologies. In recent times, social media is so popular because it allows users to be not just online consumers, but online publishers – an active participant in sharing information as well as the creation and molding of personal lives, as well as political and business uses. In a nutshell, social media is user or consumer generated content.

There are many website properties that fall under the social media or social networking umbrella. These sites include Facebook.com, LinkedIn.com, Twitter.com, and Squidoo.com. Another would be MySpace.com which has been consistently falling out of favor in the past year. Of course, there are many other less famous forms of social media that include web blogs, instant messaging, vlogs, podcasts, internet forums, and of course, email. As you can see, there are different categories of social media that include communication, collaboration, entertainment and multimedia.

For a small business, social media and networking can be a goldmine! These new outlets present a business owner with multiple opportunities to reach out to new markets, increase market share and attract new customers.

Creating and building customer database, and using it to reach spa and beauty clients through email, is a great form of social networking. Another prime example is a business blog – your website is not complete until you have one and is an exceptional way to educate your audience and link that education to your beauty business.

You could have a Twitter account and send out tweets to your registered followers – talk about new beauty treatments or offer special discounts to your followers. This could also include advertising a new menu, introducing a new aesthetician at your business, and sharing other interesting factoids about the comings and goings of your beauty business.

You may want to be included on the LinkedIn.com website, and build a circle of contacts, many of which may be from your college days. This is a good way to reconnect and perhaps make new customers.

Another possibility is to establish a Facebook.com website for your business, or start an interest group on Facebook and begin to amass a following. A new feature for Facebook is to import blog posts so that your Facebook account is always fresh and current.

Squidoo is also another good source for establishing your expertise in your niche area of the beauty industry. By creating a lens for each area or topic, you can build up quite a nice little knowledge base of expert information that all links back to your beauty business website.

Social media networking has levelled the playing field, allowing small and budding business owners to reach out to the masses, present information and participate in relevant exchanges of content. No longer do the large companies with endless marketing budgets have the upper hand when it comes to building client bases and increasing business revenues online. An entrepreneurial small business owner, within the beauty industry, can now be a shark instead of just a very small fish in a very large pond.