By Karen McRae, Special AFS Contributor
Having a presence on social media platforms for your gym or fitness studio is a great way to connect with clients and find new business. But even with all the resources available online to help give your business a social media boost, it’s hard to know what will – or won’t – work.
If you’re feeling stuck or like your social media marketing efforts aren’t paying off, try these five tips to boost your productivity and bolster your presence online.
Get Your Employees Involved
You’ve got some brand ambassadors sitting right in your office, working in your space, training your clients. And they’re already on your payroll!
Encourage and incentivize your staff to advocate on your behalf on their own social accounts. Now, we don’t mean asking them to blast out sales messages to their friends and family. But come up with a program that will allow them to share information about your business without sounding like they’re selling anything.
Keep a shared calendar of monthly or weekly topics and upcoming events; use hashtags, encourage brand @mentions, and share content or upcoming class info; create a guide for posting specifications and keep it in a shared place where all employees can access it at any time.
Now You See It, Now You Don’t – Disappearing Content
Snapchat really brought disappearing content into the foreground and made it part of the nation’s lexicon. This kind of content is a new way to give your potential clients a more intimate, authentic, human look at your business. Hubspot has some great ideas for ephemeral content:
- How-to videos
- Behind-the-scenes looks
- Contests and giveaways
- Recipes
- Interviews
- “Takeovers” (when a different user wants to share content)
- Live events
- Daily/weekly video series
- Announcements or product reveals
It’s this off-the-mainstream content that could really give your business a social media boost and make you stand out from your competition.
Off the Platform, Into the Messenger
Do you have Facebook Messenger installed on your phone? Or WhatsApp? Well, over 4 billion users worldwide actively use these messaging apps and that number is only going to increase as time goes by!
You might think, ‘I don’t have time to message people through one of these apps! I have enough to do already!’
We totally get it. But what if you could connect and communicate with lots of potential clients without taking up lots of time?
One of the ways that businesses are doing this by building their own Chatbots. Chatbots are a “service powered by rules and sometimes artificial intelligence, that you interact with via a chat interface.” They provide a cost-effective and scalable way for businesses to offer a better customer experience. You, or an employee, don’t need to man the messengers; set up a chatbot and let the interactions roll in!
Chatbots can answer questions, tell you about the weather, help you find products you’re looking for, make hotel reservations… the possibilities are endless! It’s simply a matter of what’s best for your clients.
Learn more about Chatbots here and how to build your own Facebook Messenger bot here.
Are You Using These Facebook Features? You Should.
Lastly, since there’s a good chance that you’re using Facebook as the main hub of your social media marketing, here are a couple ideas for how to stand out to your audience.
Create a Saved Audience
From within Facebook’s Business Manager, you can set up and save an audience based on certain parameters. Why do this? You can then advertise to specific, predetermined groups of people making sure your targeted content gets in front of the right eyes. This is free to set up, so why not give it a try?
Video Captioning
A majority of users on Facebook watch videos without sound. If you’re uploading videos to Facebook (which you should be doing), not having captions means you’re losing people. You can either use the Facebook captioning tool, type the captions yourself (in Facebook) or check out this video for a quick and easy way to get captions from YouTube.
There you have it!
Five tips to help give your social media marketing a boost! Give these a try and let us know how they work for you!
Karen McRae is the Content Strategist for Superpowered Web, a fitness web design agency specializing in design, branding, SEO, and content marketing for independent fitness studios. Check us out here!
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