Today's blog post is going to be along the lines of what you may have been taught in the past about marketing and why I personally believe that you may just be spinning your wheels when it comes to generating leads through adding random people on Facebook. Hear me out.
Now I've worked with a number of high profile companies. Some of these include Siemens healthcare, Panadol, Coca Cola, and I was a social media advisor for the University of Otago where I created campaigns for each of their social media managers for a whole host of pages.
So we are talking about quite a bit of social media knowledge and I did work as a social media influencer, I guess before it was properly recognized as what people might list as their career path. I got trained by Meta and Linkedin themselves officially. I've also got university modules/papers that I've completed on Social Media Marketing. So I know a thing or two when it comes to social media.
I came on here to let you know that if you're listening to someone tell you that to use your profile, your personal profile on Facebook as your business page, that you may be in for a surprise reason being:
This is against Facebook policy. So if you're using your personal profile as a business page, of which there are business pages that are specially designed for this ( you've seen the LIKE pages out there), you're gonna run into some trouble. Most of all, your page might be taken down or you might be banned from Facebook, which would be a bit of a sad time if you lose all the memories that you created on Facebook just as a result of following some bad advice.
I know because I've been there: your Facebook Profile only lets you have 5000 friends and if you're trying to reach the masses and have a big reach, you're going to be limited to 5000. And so let's not create a ceiling effect for ourselves. Especially let's not have you questioning whether you should delete all your friends from high school just in the hopes of adding everybody that's in your current area and trying to get some cold leads. I would suggest that you might be better placed to create a Facebook page and to learn how to manage that Facebook page properly.
Using your personal profile page to add lots of random people is a really weird way to start a talking relationship to people if you're in the business to customer space (B2C). If you're in a business to business space (B2B). That's a different story. But what I'm finding is there's a lot of business coaches that are in the business to business space that are telling you what they find successful for their B to B business as opposed to what will work for b2c business. So I can see that they're showing you what's correct for them, but it's not going to work for your clientele. Reason being. Most people out there aren't really that interested in exercise. They're only interested in what it can do for them. And when you're the type of person that is adding random people in your area and just sort of creating content that's about exercise and that sort of thing. It's the sort of thing that's going to alienate the current people that are your friends because they're your actual friends or you're affiliated with them through work or hobbies or other endeavors and they don't want to see you post about exercise all the time. But on top of that, people that don't really know you and don't have to put up with watching exercise pursuits, your thoughts on exercise, your thoughts on healthful eating. They're also going to be alienated at the same time. So your engagement is going to go right down. That's actually the opposite of what you want. So that is why I'm suggesting also you would want to go for that business page.
The best and most efficient way to set up your social media page is actually to have it as a social proof for people to work out that you're a real person and to work out the type of person that you are before they meet you. And so if you're using it in that way, you're gonna be very successful. And you'll notice that you probably only need to post like two, maybe three times per week, not every day. And on top of that, it'll mean that you'll have a few different topics that you can put up there and show that you're adding value to the community without pushing it into someone's face.
Other recommendations that I've seen out there are for people who are working in the b2c space to create private groups for potential clients. And I again, have seen this work really well for b2b clients, and potentially people that you have to keep reselling to. So that would be, I don't know, if you're selling supplements? or something like that. But if you're in a fitness space where someone has an ongoing recurring membership, and it's either they're a client of yours or they're a client to be, you do not need a Facebook group. On top of that, usually the people that have told you to do that are people from the "Facebook generation" that have grown up with Facebook, and you'll find that the majority of people like yourself reading this may not actually want to spend that much time on Facebook. And you might be not even trying to reach the type of people (customers) that spend their time on Facebook at the same time as well. So why bother?
So what do I suggest to do? Well, the what I would suggest to do is spend your money on SEO: get a website up and going and make sure you do some some work on your Google My Business because people are actively searching for a personal trainer or for a gym by typing into the Google search bar. And when they're doing things on Facebook, you're in their personal space and especially if you're added them as a friend and you're just like chatting to them on Messenger. Like it's just it's crazy levels of harassment that goes on in people's private messages as a result of this.
DEVILS ADVOCATE: Here's what I noticed when I tried (AS SUGGESTED BY OTHER GURUS) to use my profile as a business page.
1.The banner saying I had a coaching business was like an enticement to business coaches to message me to try and sell their wares. And my inbox became flooded with business coaches that are out there. They've been a business coach for five minutes and they want to help me get to my first 5k month (right? who wants to be at a five K month when they can be getting past that?). Great there's coaches out there for that but apparently you look like a rookie. If you are making your Facebook page a business page you're just making it easier for business coaches to find you and hound you and add you to their private groups and all of that they're sort of thing. So if that's what you're after, go ahead and do it.
2. On top of that, if you've lived through a pandemic, put your hand up. Why isn't your hand up? Well, you might have found that there was quite a difficult time, not around the COVID aspect itself, but around people's different opinions on politics, or medical opinions, or all of these kinds of things. And so for me, going to work every single day people were having arguments about their own special opinion on which premier was the best Premier and what ideas were the best and what will keep us all safe and what I was supposed to do personally, and even if the regulations were to be open to hound me with their opinion (as non business owners who hadn't had their business closed for 18 months out of 24) to "stay closed because it's safer".
So the thing is if you make your personal profile your business page, then you open yourself up to that type of debate happening all on your personal page, which may be a step too far for your own mental health and sanity. Because you are more than a person outside your business. And if you are creating it so that your personal profile page is your business page, it already says to me that your business has has gone too far and you've made your business your life. And I personally believe that you have more to offer this life than your business. You are more than your business and are more than what you are giving your clients ... you're so much more. You have family, you have friends, you've got hobbies, you've got interests, and by making your personal profile and everything you're about personally about business. They'll make it very hard for you mentally with the sharpness of the lines and it's going to blur the lines for you.
If you have any questions about what I've posted, and you'd like to know how to do these things, let me know I am creating a social media course which is going to help you with all of these things. I pretty much I'm getting just infuriated by lots of bad advice out there. And I can tell you right now that having these things and not properly thinking about what you want to do with them and blindly following the advice is going to put you in a way worse position than you are right now. Let's chat CLICK the link and select "fitpro".