While women of color have always rocked their curly, coiled, or kinky hair, now is a great time to be natural. Whether done to make a political statement or out of pure curiosity about one’s hair texture, more women have chosen to forgo the chemicals and wear their hair au natural. The number of Black women that have decided to do away with chemical straighteners jumped to 36% in 2011, according to market research firm Mintel. Â But with the transition came an honest need to re-discover how to care for their natural hair.
Enter the hundreds of natural hair bloggers across the web. This tribe of loyal content producers has provided their fellow naturalistas with innumerable posts on products, styling tips and tress-jooging tools, to name a few essentials. (Raise your hand if you’ve perfected your rod set thanks to your favorite natural blogger/vlogger? I’m including myself in the count.) The natural hair movement has expanded in part due to the digital space and the communities formed online. Those online communities have ignited meetups and hair events that have spanned the globe.
Last weekend, Brock Beauty Inc.’s Hairfinity held a natural hair care event that brought thousands of stylists, bloggers and curlistas to SIR Stage 37 in New York City. Created by Candace Kelley, the expo’s workshops, vendors and networking opportunities made the event the place to be for East Coast hair enthusiasts. Let Your Hair Down Expo participants included actress and comedienne Kim Coles, Jessica Andrews of The Glamazons Blog, Julee Wilson, style and beauty editor at The HuffingtonPost, and Black Blogger Month awardee Ty Alexander of Gorgeous in Grey.
BlackEnterprise.com caught up with LYHD expo hosts Jenell Stewart of KinkyCurlyCoilyMe! and Black Blogger Month awardee and LoveBrownSugar founder Christina Brown on standing out in the blogosphere, supporting the natural hair movement and how they’ve grown their audience.
Creating your own lane in the blogosphere: A special education teacher by day, Stewart is passionate about sharing her knowledge with an audience–and KinkyCurlyCoilyMe.com provides the Brooklyn, New York native an avenue to do so. The teacher in her has shifted her site from a how-to portal for natural hair to an online magazine where she not only shares her reviews on products, but posts the hair stories of fellow bloggers like Nikki Walton of Curly Nikki (and vice versa), as well as those of her readers.
Brown’s “real-girl approach†is what keeps the social media specialist’s readers coming back to LoveBrownSugar.com. “I have the perspective of not being an expert, but being just like my readers, experimenting and finding things out along the way,†said Brown. “I’m a regular girl like everybody else, and I’m experiencing fashion and beauty from my own perspective and just sharing that. That’s how I set myself apart.â€
Pushing the natural hair movement through social media: While both Stewart and Brown dedicate a large portion of their time to updating their site, the bloggers invest a lot of time in building their social presence. Together, the co-hosts have a social media footprint in the millions.
Stewart uses Twitter and Facebook, but enjoys using video site YouTube and boasts a following of over 60,000 subscribers. “I can use YouTube to actually showcase in a visual platform what I’m doing to my hair, what my hair looks like,†Stewart shares. “Some things I learned I could also share like information on products, information on styling techniques and I could show that in a more visual way.â€
Brown, who recently launched a website surrounding motherhood, BabyBrownSugar.com, is all about engagement. She’s scored numerous blogger-friends and loyal readers from social networking sites like Twitter, which she’s
known to answer every Twitter message sent her way. Starting with her blog, she uses social media to prove that similar to our body types, “not every ‘natural girl’ has to look a certain way.â€On growing your audience:
Stay consistent–“You have to make sure that you have articles up that people can read to keep them coming back. If I come back two weeks from now and it’s the same article that I saw two weeks ago, I’m going to maybe not want to go to your blog,†Stewart said.
Be personable–“It really makes people feel like there’s an actual person behind this brand,†said Brown. “I treat all of my followers, no matter how many I have, as my friends and I make sure that when someone comments on my site, I try and comment back.â€