Have you ever been scrolling on social media and seen ‘fitness gurus’ with airbrush bodies and toned stomachs? Yeah, us too. Compare the feeling you get from viewing that type of content to when you see a post that makes you smile or inspires you. Completely different feeling, right? At Balance, we encourage our instructors to promote their teachings by making others feel inspired or bringing a smile to their face. While we fully support posting what makes you feel confident and happy, we are here to remind you that showing your body is not the only road to success in the fitness industry.
Building success on social media is just like your practice, you need to be consistent in order for it to pay off. In this post, we outline 8 simple steps to promote yourself and your practice on social media, without exploiting your body.
Step One: Be Yourself
By sharing real and genuine content, your audience is more likely to connect to you. Here’s the best part: being authentic requires literally no effort at all because you are simply just being yourself! Authentic content will strengthen the relationship your followers have with you, build trust and community.
Step Two: Ignore ‘Inspiration Culture’
Part of being yourself and being authentic online means straying away from the all-in-your-face self-promotion on your feed. Being flashy and phony won’t lead to people relating to you, but honesty will.
Step Three: Tell Your Story
We have seen far too many instructors letting their business pitches overshadow their social media profiles. To tell your followers your story, think about this question: what makes you unique? We want you to stand out, and to tell your story about why you started your practice or why you became an instructor is an easy way to achieve this.
Step Four: Find Out What Works and Stick To It!
We know that when it comes to your practice, consistency is key. The same thing goes with Instagram; the algorithm loves consistency! If your followers respond well to the type of content you are pushing out, stick with it!
Also, a small note, recycling content is not cheating, it’s smart! Especially if you are showing something visual that is a sneak peek of your classes on Balance.
Step Five: Apply the Three “E’s”
The three “E’s” stand for educate, empower, and excite.
- Educate: Are you teaching something valuable, and is the information clear and digestible?
- Empower: Is what you are pushing out on your social media going to make your followers feel confident? Is your post going to make them feel good about their practice?
- Excite: Does your post convey the excitement of seeing a new pose or a different flow for your followers to use?
If you can hit at least two of these three, your post will likely perform well. Here is an example of a caption for a post that performed well.
Step Six: Focus on The Right Things
One of your main focuses when creating social media content should be shares and saves. If your followers share and save your content, it means there is a clear interest in what you are posting! Even better, they enjoyed it enough to share with their followers.
Having a business account on Instagram allows you to track your efforts and gain a deeper insight into your posts’ performance and the reach you are getting.
We also recommend curating a list of hashtags to add to your posts that are relevant to what you do and the practice that you teach. We recommend that your list has a wide variety of hashtags with different popularities. The best way to learn the popularity is to search it on Instagram and see how many times it has been used.
Step Seven: Share From the Best
One of the main rules of social media-always give credit where credit is due. By crediting others, you might lead them to share their posts, in turn leading viewers back to you (so if you share content, tag the original owner!).
Follow people that are in the same industry as you and that you respect. This will help you learn along with hopefully engaging back with you! Social media is a two-way street, engage and share the good stuff, and they will most likely return the favor.
Step Eight: Plan Smart
Take the time to plan and layout your social media. Planning out your social media in advance will help you maintain quality of content, help with consistency, and give you peace of mind.
We also recommend that you batch create some content to build up your archives.
These 8 steps are designed to build your following on social media while staying true to yourself and your brand. The biggest takeaway is to be yourself, because we believe that who you are is awesome! This blog was inspired by Meghan Callaway.
To learn more about the benefits of joining Balance as an instructor, please visit https://www.balance-withus.com/ and sign up for your FREE Forever account today.