The Importance of Social Media Marketing for the Fitness Industry
According to smart insights, 57.6% of the world's population uses social media platforms, and the average daily use is 2 hours and 27 minutes (October 2021). Two and a half hours seems like a lot of time scrolling, but in this digital age we now live in, people use social media for various purposes. For example, people now use social media for news updates, booking hair/ beauty appointments, and communicating with friends and family. For the fitness industry, people check social media for membership updates, sign up for fitness classes and share their fitness progress.
Social media is crucial for building brand awareness. User-generated content is an easy way of sharing your business story by letting customers do some of the hard work for you. It can help create trust with your target audience, which is why you should share your client's content. Customer posts can be viewed as a true reflection of how your gym or fitness business appears in real life.
If a customer tags you in an Instagram story, re-share it as a re-story and save it to your highlights. Then, your followers and anyone interested in learning more about your gym will be able to see the content whenever they visit your page. In addition, sharing photos and videos of your gym may encourage more people to visit and become familiar with the layout of your gym before they visit.
Sharing Facebook mentions and reviews on your profile will let the rest of the world know how your gym produces healthy and happy customers.
Monitoring your competitors is also very important for the growth of your business. Monitoring your competitors allows you to see if there's anything they're doing that you're missing out on, and if there's potential, do one better than them!
Social media can be daunting for small businesses, as mentioned in previous blogs, small businesses are usually time-poor and creating and posting content every day can be overwhelming to some. Hootsuite, a social media management platform, allows businesses to schedule posts and create social calendars. This allows any small business to be organised and plan content in advance. It's perfect for the busy business owner, and it's a free platform to use!
Social media is not to be missed for small businesses… If you're not in, you can't win!!
2.5 hours a day seems like a huge part of a person’s day to be spending on social media. It shows how important it is and how businesses need to harness that power. It really is a way to allow customers to do a lot of the work for you as well. User generated content is so powerful and builds so much trust within peer groups. People are accustomed to advertising so a peer review or experience carries so much weight in people’s opinions. You also get to hear your customers opinions in the feedback section and after all those that use your product or service always have the best ways in how to improve them. Great post on social media in the fitness industry.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Helen, 2.5 hours a day is a lot of time on socials - but won't lie, I'm guilty of it and probably even more time than that. I know I'm not alone in this, which is scary but just showing the way the world is going. With little time being a major factor, utilising a tool such as Hootsuite is a great idea, this means, you could dedicate a portion of your time to creating content, schedule it and then have an online presence for the rest of the week.
ReplyDeleteGreat post Dervela, I do agree with the above comments 2.5 hours when you say it out loud seems quite long for spending on social media but we aren't just scrolling on social media anymore it is a platform we use to research the products and services we want, communicate with colleagues, friends and family and sometimes its our means of making a living! I definitely think for small businesses scheduling through platforms such as Hootsuite can take the bulk of the work out of the way for businesses' when they are trying to stay on top of their game.
ReplyDeleteGreat post, Dervla! You made a great point on monitoring competitors social pages. You can see what they're offering, what they're not and see comments directly from their customers. While it's easy to focus on what you're going to do with your own page as a small business, it shouldn't be forgotten that your competitors are there too and you should take advantage of this. I love that you called out a potential negative for social media marketing - it can be overwhelming for small businesses. I think we can often look at cost effective marketing strategies through rose-tinted classes so this was a great point to remember.
ReplyDeleteGreat point about monitoring your competitors, it's integral to know what your competitors are doing in order to learn and grow. To bridge gaps and improve by looking around in your industry. You're so right about letting user-generated content do some of the work, especially in the fitness industry it lends itself to people wanting to talk online about what they're doing and using. Hootsuite can save a lot of headaches for time poor small businesses also.
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