A personal trainer that isn't on Facebook may as well not exist, but they will undoubtedly miss out on an ample opportunity to grow their audience and build brand engagement. Especially if you want to launch your online personal training services, you'll have to be visible online, as that's the only way your ideal clients can interact with you.
While people have been talking about Facebook's demise for years, the fact remains that it's still one of the most potent tools that personal trainers have at their disposal. According to the latest statistics, Facebook has 2.93 billion monthly users. That's a big pool when it comes to growing your audience. Nonetheless, Facebook fitness marketing will only succeed if done correctly.
In this Facebook guide, we'll look at how you can create a Facebook fitness marketing system so you don't have to worry about not being consistent with your content. We'll look at all three profiles and how you can plug them into a posting system, which works wonders for reaching new audiences.
Using Your Personal Facebook Profile
If you thought your personal Facebook account was just for holiday snaps and life updates, think again. As a personal trainer, you are your brand; your personal account is an excellent way to show the world who you are and what you can offer. So how do you do it?Be Visible By Your Followers
People use social media for many reasons, but they're looking for quality content and value. Your personal profile should become a beacon for informative, engaging, technically correct, and frequently entertaining posts.
You might want to figure out what almost all other personal trainers do on Facebook and how to stand out. For instance, many trainers will keep posting their workouts, meals, and what their followers do wrong regarding their fitness and health.
Those posts attract a specific kind of follower base, but if you're not looking for fans but potential clients, you can try a different approach. Share nuggets of information, and lessons you learnt on that day either through your journey, a scientific article you saw, even a news article or a question a client asked that day.
Grow Your Audience
If you're posting the right content, you'll get plenty of likes and comments — and every one of those people is a potential client. If they're not your friend when they comment on your post, send a friend request.
The key here is not trying to sell anything off the bat but rather show interest in them, thank them for engaging with the content and offer your support should they need it anytime.
Develop a Posting System
Your posts are the ticket to your success. But they'll only contribute to your success if people see them. How do you ensure that your personal page posts reach many people? By posting quality content consistently. And by that, we mean every day or most days. Your thoughts, experiences, insights, and fitness tips will draw the audience.
Here's your checklist:
- Post on your Facebook profile (almost) every day.
- Reach out to new audience members (almost) every day.
- Mention your Facebook Group at least once a week.
- Promote your Facebook page once a week.
Using a Facebook Group
Facebook groups have been around for years and are highly effective at building an audience. After all, everybody wants to feel part of a community, significantly if that community will help them reach their fitness goals.The stats speak for themselves. According to data from August 2022, there were over 10 million groups on Facebook, with over 1.8 billion monthly users and 70 million admins and moderators. It can take time to build an audience with a Facebook group, but the levels of engagement they can bring mean it's worth the time.
Increase Your Facebook Group Audience
Your personal training business Facebook profile will be for people you already know and their friends/family members/colleagues. Your Facebook group will be mainly for people that you don't know. You can promote this page anywhere you have a digital presence, including your website, other social media websites, and your Facebook business/personal pages.Fitness-Focused Posts
Your Facebook profile will have non-fitness content since it is your personal page. Your fitness group, on the other hand, should be exclusively focused on fitness. People will join your group as part of their health and fitness journey, not to see snaps of you on holiday!But this is good news since it allows you to dive deeper into your personal trainer business and all it can offer. You can use your Facebook group to post how-to guides, instructional videos, live gym videos, and content only available to community members.
Facebook Group Posting System:
- Post quality content every day
- Engage with the community by responding to comments and asking for content feedback.
- Encourage followers once a week to invite others in their circles who could benefit from your content.
- Mention your group in blog posts, your blog page sidebar, other Facebook pages and social media content.
Using Your Business Page
Facebook business pages aren't working as effectively as they used to on Facebook due to the platform's strategic shifts. However, they should still have a place in your Facebook fitness marketing strategy. Think of it as your online business card with links to your website, business email, direct links to your booking system, and more.Increasing Your Audience
You'll find getting likes for your business page difficult simply because people don't tend to do that anymore. It's been a fair amount of time since you randomly decided to like a business page, after all!So how do you increase your number of likes? There are two methods. First, you can post entertaining and informative content that people want to see more of. That's the best method but likely relatively slow.
The other way is to ask people to follow your page actively. In your posts, ask them to hit that like button — it's easy for people to overlook liking a page, but if prompted to, they'll be more likely to do it.
Increasing Engagement
Engagement is critical for your fitness business page. Facebook's algorithm will punt pages with low engagement (that means few likes and comments). Although post engagement is higher for business pages with less than 10k followers, it's certainly worth making a daily effort to keep your audience engaged. You can increase engagement by giving people what they want to see on social media: entertaining content.Save your detailed fitness posts for your group, and instead stick to humorous and exciting posts, memes, videos or even funny infographics, still related to fitness but presenting information or delivering entertainment in a lighthearted way.
Facebook Page Posting System:
You'll see that posting multiple times daily is more crucial for your fitness business page on Facebook because of the low reach of page posts.- Find and post memes once a day.
- Look up educational facts and turn them into posts once a day.
- Share articles from other authority sources (or your own blog) once a day.
If you have a spare budget, you can look into how Facebook Ads can help you grow your business page's audience and engagement or bring in new clients to a promotion you're running.
