Finding your niche by posting your way to it

You’ve created TikTok and Instagram accounts for your medspa and have a decent following. Your posts current clients informed about the latest specials and sharing testimonials. Now it’s time to grow your audience — but where do you start?

In the debut episode of our podcast, Last Client of the Day, we spoke to Holly Tanella, founder of BOHO Alternative Med Spa, to discover how beauty businesses can leverage and expand their online footprint. A medical esthetician since 2014, Holly is also known for her soothing, sleepy-time ASMR skin care videos, which have catapulted her to over 2.4 million followers across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. Here, she provides her unique insight into how medspas can increase their social media presence through consistency and authenticity. And posting. Always posting.

Be an expert

One of the most challenging questions for any social media manager is, “What should I post?” 

This question can seem difficult to answer because the space between your medspa’s social media presence and the audience you want to reach often feels like a mysterious black box. Posts go in, the All-Knowing Algorithm looks at it, and spits out the results. Some posts connect with users and some don’t. How can you make social media work in your favor without knowing which levers to pull?

While every social media platform has its own system for pushing content into user feeds, there are two things you can add to make any piece of content better: authenticity and expertise.

People follow social media influencers, businesses, and brands to learn more about the things they’re interested in from people they feel they can trust. That’s likely why they’re following your medspa on TikTok or Instagram — they want to know more about the products and services currently available that can make their skin look healthy and vibrant. And they won’t know the best routines for their skin or which products to buy unless you tell them.

“I think it’s really cool that social media has been able to catapult different businesses like HydraFacial or [explain the benefits of chemical peels or microneedling] instead of having billboards out there,” Holly says. “Your consumers are able to have that knowledge so much faster, and so having more consumer awareness for that service is really helpful for business owners.” 

Be authentic

Whatever content you decide to post — whether it’s informational videos about various products, do’s and don’ts on the latest trends, or client testimonials — it needs to speak directly to your audience. Social media users are savvy and can spot sponsored content from a mile away — especially on TikTok, where the predominantly Gen-Z audience values authenticity more than anything else. 

For Holly, this was one of the first steps she took to expand her social media presence beyond her core set of clients.

“I’ve been doing social media for about seven years now,” Holly explains. “I knew that social media was the lowest-hanging fruit for growing my business. I had a social media manager, I had people doing content for me, but it never really stuck. I think it was because it wasn’t fully me.”

When COVID-19 hit in early 2020, everything changed for Holly — including her social media strategy.

“When my business closed down, all I had was myself, my knowledge, and my family,” says Holly. “We put all of our products online, and within a week, I started talking about skin care. When I started showing up consistently and giving out free information and helping people relate more to me and sharing my life, that’s when I really started to grow on social media.” 

You can show authenticity in any number of ways, whether performing a daily skin care routine in front of the mirror before work or having a personal one-on-one chat with one of your clients. The important thing is to work toward connecting your unique personality and expertise with your medspa’s branding.

Never stop posting and find your niche

In the early days, you will post a lot of content. A lot. Some of it will be great! Some of it, probably not. Some posts will find an audience, and some will make you question why you’re bothering to shout into the void in the first place.

Don’t worry — it’s all part of the process.

“If I could tell my younger self to post every day, I would have,” Holly says. “When you’re consistent with anything, you could produce s*** content and still grow as long as you’re producing something.”

Posting something every day is a good social media strategy for several reasons:

• It helps you develop a content creation pipeline, from brainstorming to creation to delivery. The more you post, the more efficient your pipeline becomes, and the quality and frequency of posts will improve along with it.

• It lets you try out a lot of different ideas. You may brainstorm a list of ten ideas and think only one or two are worth trying. By posting every day, you give yourself a chance to try all of them — you may surprise yourself by finding results in unlikely spaces.

• It gives you more data to work with. With enough data, you can see which posts resonate, allowing you to update your strategy by leaning into your strengths.

• It tells the algorithm that you’re serious. Again, the specifics of how each platform surfaces your content are a closely guarded trade secret. Still, maintaining a consistent posting schedule signifies to the platform that you’re active and engaged with your audience, increasing the likelihood that your content surfaces.

The more you post, the more likely you are to discover your niche — that thing that’s uniquely you that helps you stand out on social media from the millions of other accounts. 

“Find something you’re known for,” Holly says. “When people close their eyes, if they think BOHO Medspa, they think ASMR. If they think BOHO Medspa, they think skin care. Whatever content you find pops off for you, keep producing content like that, and that’s what the algorithms will know you as. That’s when you start to build a following.” 

Something to keep in mind: Holly only started making ASMR videos in 2022, which is when her first big 6-million-view viral hits broke out. But by that point, she’d already spent five years establishing a social media presence, earning a following of nearly 20,000 people simply by posting consistently with authentic, personal content that conveyed her genuine expertise. This allowed her to discover her niche — and from there, the sky was the limit.

Stay in your lane

Once you’ve found your niche, stick with it. This isn’t just to help you solidify your branding — the All-Powerful Algorithm will actively punish you if you make content that doesn’t match what it expects from your account.

“Find a niche and stay in that lane,” Holly explains. “If I produce content outside of my niche, it doesn’t perform well, and the algorithms punish me because the rest of my videos go to trash. Then I have to gain back trust. If I want to introduce anything new to my audience, it has to be in the same format.”

If you’re looking to experiment with new ideas (or simply want to try something new to avoid creative burnout), try to find ways to work them into your current social media niche. Alternatively, create a secondary account. You likely won’t see the same results from it, but it’ll allow you to speak directly to a dedicated audience with new types of content without impacting your primary account’s performance. And who knows? Maybe your secondary account will find its own niche and take off, too!

Connect content to other marketing channels

Cultivating an audience on a single social media platform can take a lot of time and effort. But you can’t forget that there are potential audiences to discover elsewhere, whether on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, or YouTube. 

Each platform has its own quirks, so you can’t simply take a TikTok video and post it on YouTube. But you can take the concept of a TikTok video and film a second version suited for YouTube (e.g., shoot widescreen video instead of vertical and take a long-form approach instead of quick edits). 

Then, make sure you mention everywhere viewers can find and follow your brand, both in your account profile and within the content (if it makes sense) to increase your opportunities for growth.

“I’m almost at two million [followers] on TikTok, and my TikTok account is what feeds a lot of my other accounts,” Holly says. “It started to help my Instagram growth, and it started to help my YouTube growth.”  

Don’t just refer followers to your other social media channels. Mention your email and SMS text messaging services, too, if you have them, and direct viewers to sign up for updates and alerts. That will give you a direct link to your followers, allowing you to deliver more personalized content that can potentially convert them into paying clients.

Stick with it for the long haul

“Social media [success] doesn’t happen overnight,” Holly says. “It didn’t happen for me.”

You may strike lightning on your first post. Chances are, though, that any social media success you find will come from showing up every day and staying consistent in your output. There will be ups and downs, successes and failures. But with every single post, you’re putting one foot forward toward delivering a viral hit that rockets your medspa into the stratosphere.

“Growth sometimes is hard,” Holly says. “Keep pursuing your dreams, and your dreams will come to you.”

Learn more about Holly Tanella, the birth of BOHO Alternative Med Spa, and how she blew up on TikTok by listening to Last Client of the Day, a beauty business podcast presented by Boulevard.