In my opinion, your Facebook page has become even more important than your club’s website. It is one of the greatest ways to communicate with your members and your prospective members. I’m going to discuss ways to get more LIKES on your page; but, if you don’t have a Facebook page for your business, that’s the first thing you should do. Then you can incorporate the following suggestions.
Post Interesting Content
The only thing worse than not having a Facebook page, is to waste it by posting information your audience isn’t interested in. You should be posting videos of the “exercise of the week”, healthy recipes, featured members, fitness tips, interesting and relevant news, things you find funny, featured staff members, and anything you feel your members would find interesting. You can post promotional things from time to time, but try to keep 90 percent of your messages informative and entertaining.
Feature Your Members
You can post a member of the week on your Facebook page. You’ll post their picture, tell their success story and tag them. Put signage in your club announcing “If you want to see who wins member of the week, be sure you LIKE our Facebook page by visiting www.Facebook.com/YourClubPage”
Utilize Your Staff
Instruct your front desk to ask everyone with a smart phone to open their Facebook app and to LIKE your page. Bribe them with a free bottle of water. In addition, you can e-mail a link to your Facebook page to your e-mail list.
Integrate Facebook Social Plugins on Your Website
There are dozens of plugins and widgets that your webmaster can add to your website to get more people to LIKE your page, even when they’re not on Facebook. Watch the video accompanying this article to see me walk you through the process step by step.
Encourage Sharing
Below every post you make on your Facebook page is a “Like” button and a “Share” button. In your post, you can ask your fans to share the message with their friends. “If you liked this healthy recipe, please ‘Like’ it and ‘Share’ it with your friends by clicking the link below”
Tag Your Members
Take pictures of your members and post it on your Facebook page. Be sure to “tag” that member. When you tag someone, it shows up on their Facebook Wall for all of their friends to see. If you take a picture of a group exercise class or a bootcamp class, you can tag everyone in it, multiplying the number of people who see your picture.
Make it a Signature
Add a “Like our Page” signature to the bottom of all staff emails they send. It can have a direct link to your Facebook page on it.
Add an I-Frame Landing Page
This will be a unique landing page on your Facebook. Find someone who can create you (or you can attempt it yourself) a custom landing page when someone first visits your Facebook page. You can have a picture, a video, or anything you want on the landing page. My recommendation is to take a picture of a group of members pointing up. Edit the picture to say, “Our members want you to LIKE this page!” The picture will be placed just below the like button, so that they are all pointing up to the Like button.
You should only post things that your members would enjoy. Put yourself in their shoes and ask yourself if it is informative, entertaining, or inspiring enough to want to read. Keep your followers involved and happy to see new content on your Facebook page, and you’ll have a fan for life.
Club Solutions Magazine November 2011 Marketing Alert from Club Solutions on Vimeo.
Curtis Mock is the host of www.FitnessBusinessTelevision.com the TV show for fitness entrepreneurs. He is also the executive director of gymsuccess.com. Curtis can be reached at curtis@clubsolutionsmagazine.com.
Hello,
Great article. Could you give us some examples of facebook pages that are doing well by following your recommendations, please? Thanks.