Facebook is the most-used social platform with nearly 2.45 billion monthly active users in 2020. It continues to grow in both number of users and time spent engaging. Plus, Facebook’s audience tends to be a bit older than other platforms like TikTok and Instagram, which means there’s a bigger market of potential customers for your fitness business who have disposable income and are ready to spend it getting healthy and fit. In fact, 74% of high-income earners are Facebook users, surpassing LinkedIn, which reaches just 49% of users making more than $75,000.
Here’s how you can tap into the power of Facebook to fill up your group fitness classes and training programs.
How to Grow Your Fitness Business’s Audience on Facebook
There are two ways to get more page likes and followers on Facebook: organically and through paid advertising. Ideally, you’ll use both. But if you’re not ready to spend money on ads, you can still grow your audience with an investment of time and energy in content and engagement.
Whether you’re launching paid ads or posting organically the rule for optimizing engagement is the same. You’ll get the best results from content that:
- Quickly tells an inspirational story that new and existing customers can relate to
- Clearly illustrates how your fitness business can get people the results they’re looking for
- Is welcoming, conversational, fun and inviting
- Features real people: you, your instructors and your community members
- Gives users a way to interact with you through comments, hashtags, and your website
The best way to build fans on Facebook organically is to tag and mention regulars and VIP’s in your posts with inspirational messaging and invite those loyal students – either publicly in the announcements you make before or after group classes and training sessions, or privately in one-on-one conversations – to like and follow your page. Be sure to mention that by doing so they’ll get “bonus” content from you and be able to personally interact with you and your staff. This is a huge attracter for those students who think the world of you.
You can also create a best practice for yourself and your staff to send friend requests from your Facebook business page to class attendees after every single class or workout session. Fitness studio management software like Punchpass makes it easy to track and access class attendance lists.
If you want to pay to grow your audience, Facebook allows you to create a “Custom Audience” for paid ads, including paid “like campaigns” by importing a contact list – like the one you can download from your Punchpass software, or an email service like MailChimp, Constant Contact. You can then target those contacts with a post that asks them to click to like or follow your page.
Beyond like campaigns, you can utilize paid ads on Facebook to find and engage with very specific target audiences. If you want to get super fancy, you can use Facebook tracking pixels that share user behavior from your website to run ads targeting people who, for example, went to a specific page and watched a certain video for a certain percentage of time. You can also geo-target potential new customers by running an ad that displays only to people within a five-mile radius of your studio/class location.
Work the Facebook Algorithm to Your Fitness Business’s Advantage
In the last several years, Facebook has been optimizing posts based on the amount of time users engage with a post – think watching a video, commenting and sharing – as well as emotional response rate (prioritizing hearts, sad and angry faces and virtual hugs over likes).
The way to cut through the noise as a fitness business owner is clear: post content that shows real people doing inspirational things, talking about the day-to-day health and fitness challenges they are overcoming through working with you, and use visually compelling photos and videos to illustrate this.
For more specific ideas on types of content to post as a fitness business, check out our recent post, “3 Best Tips To Keep Your Business’s Social Media Feed Awesome.”
Go Live on Facebook to Engage with Users in Real Time
You’ll get an extra boost by being brave enough to go “live” with a video feed featuring you and your team. There’s a tremendous opportunity to engage the customers you haven’t been able to see in person through these live, interactive sessions where you can do Q&A and support each other during the challenges of the pandemic.
Many fitness professionals are using the live video feature to broadcast workouts and classes. We recommend using Punchpass’s Zoom integration to allow customers to pay and register in advance for live classes. But you can use Facebook’s live feature as a way to give a free “preview” of your classes, or share tips on a move of the day or workout of the week. Drive participants to your website to download the full instructions or tip sheet from your Punchpass content library and be sure to tell participants watching live how to buy your intro offer or get a pass to your next regularly scheduled class.
You can post a recording of your live event to your business page’s feed afterwards so that anyone who wasn’t able to hop on in real time can still enjoy your video. Here are Facebook’s official instructions on how to go live from your page.
Post Your Class Schedule & Get Bookings On Your Facebook Page
You can pin your Punchpass class schedule to the top of your Facebook to drive sign-ups. Make it even easier for customers to learn about your fitness business and buy passes before they enroll in a class by putting a link to your online calendar in Facebook’s “Book Now” feature at the top of your page.
You can also link directly to your pass purchase page – where your customers purchase passes and memberships through Punchpass – in your Book Now button.
