The tattoo industry has always been a word of mouth venture. In the old days of the industry owners and artist in shops had to take out yellow page ads or spend huge amounts of money on billboards, flyers etc. An average advertising budget could run into the thousands monthly or quarterly. Even with that amount of money you always had to worry about your return on investment. If you are not familiar with your return on investment an example would be a shop puts out say $500 on radio commercials and the shop hopes to get at least $1000 back in customer traffic. In a large city say like Chicago a shop had to worry about the competition and what they were doing or if they were copying the deals heard on your commercials. In other words your advertising could help out the competition.
Now a days we were blessed with something called the internet. It has revolutionized the tattoo industry as we know it. Shops are now able to build a personal relationship with clients through websites like Facebook, Mypace, Twitter and a whole host more. To use this new tool shop owners as well as artist have to learn that it's relationship building that pays off. People are sick and tired of those in any industry shoving commercials down their throats. I know that I cannot stand for someone to sell me something every time I go to a site. The products I use is because I've built a relationship with the product. I get good customer service as well as quick answers to my concerns. I'm engaged on a personal level and not someone telling me to buy something.
Social Networking should be a breeze and second nature to the Tattoo industry because we engage and interact with customers on a daily basis. Sometimes were head doctors because we sit through and help people through problems while we are tattooing. Other times we give an individual comfort of just having someone to talk too when they have no one else. Besides the artwork on them customers come back to us because they feel comfortable with us and how they were treated in the shop. So as tattooist we have to take what we do in the shop and bring it into the online environment. By bringing it to the online environment we can not only gain customers, we can gain friends. We all know by gaining a friend or even an associate that helps build our business for years to come.
I would recommend any shop out there start a organized social network plan. Newspapers and print media are now going to be extinct. For a shop to get a good return on investment they must go to where the audience is. That is on the internet and sites like facebook that account for 25% of all internet traffic.