Day 1: "Hey everybody, I've decided to pursue my dream and start a fitness company. I'm so passionate about helping others and am really excited about this. Please do me a favor and like my new Facebook page."
Day 2: "Hey guys, I just wanted to re share my new Facebook page in case anybody missed it yesterday. Please do me a favor and like the page."
Day 10: "I'm really trying to build up the likes on my new Facebook page. I'm sharing lots of tips and will be keeping you up to date on my personal fitness journey. Please like the page at ______"
Sound familiar? This is about all that most fitness professionals do to market themselves on social media. Because of that, it's no surprise to me that so few fitness professionals have any interaction on their pages.
While the nuances of social media strategy can get rather complicated, I've broken down the 5 things that are tailored towards marketing for fitness professionals on social media. In this article, you'll learn the 20% that will get you 80% of the benefits.
1) Social media will help you become the expert
Focus on using social media platforms to position yourself as the go-to person in your niche. You will not sell much, if any, product or services straight from your Facebook page. Instead, shift the focus of your page to becoming known as an expert among your peers and friend group and allow your reputation to spread from there.
Social media is an effective tool to find groups of people interested in your specific niche and build a relationship with them. It is not haphazard. If you post it, they will not come. Instead, seek out groups already serving your target population and work to become an expert in those groups.
Then, when they come back to your professional page, they should know within 2 seconds who you are, why you're an expert, and what you can do to help them. The most effective Facebook pages aren't constantly trying to sell products. Instead, they are the ones that have positioned themselves as the center of information.
2) Post a tip of the day
I love the strategy of simply posting a single tip of the day, everyday. This tip doesn't need to be profound, in fact, it probably shouldn't be. (To the right is an example of a post by my friend, Ben Singh. Ben's a trainer from England and has adapted this technique to showcase his personality.)
I'll spare you the psychology lesson for now, but research has unequivocally shown that the majority of people share materials online as a way of selective self-representing.
In English, this means that people don't share your material because they actually think it will help others. They share it because they feel it makes them look intelligent, intellectual, attractive, interesting, attractive, or funny.
Your fitness tips will spread if you write them in such a way as to enable your reader to show off using your material. Want to take this to an extreme? Figure out a series of controversial subjects that affect your audience and make a bold statement supporting the side that the majority of your audience sits on.
For example, if you posted, "people, for once and for all, women will not get bulky lifting weights. It is a myth. Women who lift weights are strong, beautiful, and feminine."
It's been said 1,000,000 times before, but it will get shared.
At the end of your tip, write a soft call to action for people to message you anytime with any questions.
The purpose of these tips is to continually flood the feed with your words. Experts get quoted. Experts never have to search for work. And experts get to dictate their prices. People share the same information over and over again. You can look at it two different ways:
- Get annoyed and frustrated and wonder why people share every single post on why women should lift weights when they come out as opposed to taking one of the thousand quality articles already written on the topic and share those.
- Understand what the sharer is gaining from passing on the material.
There are reasons why the same types of content get shared the most even though they add nothing new to the conversation. I'm not suggesting that you simply create a page sharing memes of fitness motivation all day. But what I am suggesting is that you learn how to use that type of information as a tool to help find your audience and build your page. You have something special to offer, this will help you gather an audience to offer your unique brand of specialness to.
3) Always include a call to action
How are people supposed to know what you want them to do if you don't tell them? Always end each post asking your reader to do something. It could be as simple as asking them to write, "I'm in" if they support your post. Getting comments improves your pages EdgeRank so more people will see it. In addition, the comments act as social proof for any new readers.
Ideally, you already have an email list. A simple call to action that's effective on Facebook is to link readers to a squeeze page where they can enter their email in exchange for an ethical bribe. if you don't have an email list yet, go to Aweber and set one up immediately.
Other calls to action you can use are asking readers to like your page, check out your blog post or message you if they have any questions.
4) Post 4-6 times per day
Depending on the affinity your page has built up towards individual readers over time (an algorithm Facebook refers to as EdgeRank) your post will stay in the Facebook feed for 1-3hrs.
Post all different types of content throughout the day. Pictures are good because they take up a lot of real estate in the feed, but they are also viewed as less important than text-based updates in the EdgeRank algorithm. So if you are just posting pictures, you could be losing out.
I suggest collection a cache of quotes, memes, blog posts, tips of the day, videos or pictures of clients. On professional pages you can schedule posts to go out at specific times, so upload them all in 20 minutes the night before and schedule them to go out the next day.
Stop feeling as though you're spamming people...because you're not!
I recently published a detailed post called when is the best time to post on Facebook. This is a must read on the subject as there's some very interesting research that's been done on the question that might surprise you.
5) You must get your posts to catch on
If you can get your posts to catch on, you're audience will grow and, with a budding audience, it won't be hard to get new clients or figure out ways to develop other sources of income anymore.
According to leading researcher Jonah Berger, there are 6 things that make ideas catch on:
- Social currency
- Triggers
- Emotion
- Public
- Practical value
- Stories
What all of these 6 points boils down to is that people will share your material if they gain something from it. What they gain might be public attention, the belief that they are helping others, or social credibility.
To be blunt, nobody cares about you. Instead, they are looking for ways to feel like they are the one adding value to others lives. Shift your mindset from offering content to help your readers, to offering content that will enable your readers to help others and you've got a recipe for success
