TRAIT WILL WORK ON
Lessons
Resources
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Instructor
Dan Salcumbe
Dan is the founder of My Personal Trainer Website. A website design and marketing company for personal trainers.

With over 350 websites,  1,400+ marketing campaigns and multiple online businesses under his belt, he has a wealth of industry specific knowledge for PT's.

Introduction

​What You'll Learn
In this unit you will learn how social media plays an important role in the marketing of your business. It isn't just a space where people socialise, it a place to "be social" with your potential clients on a less formal level than the traditional marketing model.

Why is This Important?
Social Media Marketing is a massive topic, so for us personal trainers we’ll focus on a few key platforms: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn. And a few key strategies: developing a style and how to convert your social traffic.
Before we jump into the social media marketing guide, you’ll need to sign up for accounts with the “big 3” media platforms for personal trainers: Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. If you haven’t registered for these services yet, go ahead and do that now.

Get yourself registered as quickly as possible; the last thing you want is to find that your brand/company name is already taken by a so called “brand squatter.”
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Got your accounts all set up? Great! Now let’s move on the important stuff.

Step 1: Make Your Brand Known!

To avoid having your brand name taken by someone else, you should set up branded accounts on the important social networks as soon as possible. Visit the following sites to claim yours, and do it today:
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  • Twitter.com/youryourbrandname
  • YouTube.com/yourbrandname
  • LinkedIn/yourbrandname (as a business hub that's bigger than just you)
  • Facebookcom/yourbrandname
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Action Steps: If you haven't already

Sign up to these accounts today. They are all free. You should have a business page with Facebook, once you sign up for a standard account.

note: When setting up your brand sites, make sure the account/page is in the same name as the brand, not your personal name. So if you have a normal Twitter account, sign up for a totally new account under your brand name. With LinkedIn, set up a company page and link it to your personal profile.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/

LinkedIn:   https://www.linkedin.com/

Twitter:    https://twitter.com/?lang=en

Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com

Google +: https://www.google.com

Step 2: How To Personalise Your Twitter Account

Creating a branded background for Twitter:
Twitter has recently widened the size of the timeline, meaning you’ll have less room to design a background. 1280px is the standard screen resolution these days, so the area for your branded background design and message are going to be limited to around 108px.

​Let me introduce you to Canva. Even if you have not a design bone in your body, Canva has easy templates for social media covers and drag and drop functionality make it super simple to create a cool and professional Twitter header.

Here is some Twitter brand inspiration for you if you get stuck. http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/twitter-header-image-examples#sm.000h1mdyu1034ex910i9fmqg5564r
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Writing your profile description: 
This is where you’ll describe your core values and provide a link to your website. Space here is limited, so think of a few words that best describe you and what you do. This will help people find you when searching popular terms via Twitter. 
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Should you use a photo or a logo in your avatar?
This really depends on how many people will be posting on your twitter account. If you’ll be the only one publishing content on your timeline, then a headshot will work great. If there are multiple people posting under their own names, then use your branded logo as the Avatar.
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Whatever you decide to post as your profile image, make sure to get rid of the “Twitter egg” immediately. Every account comes standard with the Twitter egg, and it’s a guaranteed way to get ignored by readers. ​

Step 3: Define Your Twitter Style

The best content to post on your Twitter timeline is articles from your personal blog. However, there are a few different approaches you can take when posting on Twitter.
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  • Creators: these are the people who share the content they themselves have written. The main benefit of this style is that it’ll help establish you as a thought leader in your field. It takes time and research to come up with original content, but the marketing value makes it well worth it.
  • Curators: Content curators search out other people’s writing and pass the information on to their followers. While you won’t have to do much writing and researching yourself, being a good curator means you’ll have to follow the writings of other experts, and share the most valuable content. If you like, you can even add a little commentary of your own.
  • Windbags: these people don’t provide much value to their followers outside of engaging them in conversation. While this style of posting may be the easiest, it’s not recommended for marketing purposes.

​Make sure to leave about 20 characters at the end of your tweets. This will allow people to retweet your posts without having to edit anything out in order to stay within the 140-character limit. 

Step 4: Build Your Twitter Following

Follow these steps to build a large Twitter following:

  • Follow other people’s feeds. Often, they will follow you in return.
  • Tweet out useful or interesting content (it’s all about getting those precious retweets!)
  • Tweet content that people will find via search.

Directories like twellow.com are a great tool you can use to find people worth following. Listorious.com provides user-generated “Twitter lists” full of awesome tweeters.

You can also use the Twitter search function to find interesting conversations relevant to your business. This is a great way to engage with a wider audience and build relationships with others in your industry.

With Twitter, it helps to know what time of day your target audience is most active. See what time of day you get the most likes and retweets on your posts, then use a service like Hootsuite or Timely which will automatically post your tweets at the ideal time.

Remember, Twitter is a SOCIAL network. Only post your content when you are going to be able to engage with your followers and spend some time chatting. If you want to build a community around your brand, you should be participating in the conversations.

I’ve personally found success tweeting at around 9am PST. Here’s my pet theory as to why:

  1. It’s when people on America’s west coast are starting their work day, a time where they browse their social media accounts while sipping coffee.
  2. It’s lunch time on the east coast.
  3. It’s when folks in the UK are ending their workday.

​Obviously, if your marketing at people in Australia or New Zealand you should adjust your tweeting times accordingly!

Step 5: Personalise your Facebook Account

​When you are setting up your Facebook fan page, the number one goal is going to be getting “likes.” When potential fans arrive on your page, they should see that you provide valuable information and are worth “liking” (following). After they like your page, they will see your posts on their news feed.
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Designing a header image for Facebook
Use Canva.com to craft a header that shows your logo and company name.
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Vanity URLs
One way to optimize your fan page is to acquire a branded, or vanity, URL (for example: Facebook.com/myptwebsite). Before you can set up a vanity URL, you’ll need at least 25 fans. Don’t worry, we’ll go over some tips on how to do this later.
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Once you have 25 fans, simply head to http://www.facebook.com/username/ and pick your new URL.

Step 6: Connect Your Blog to Facebook

You should post several Facebook posts in order promote each blog entry effectively. The best way to do this is through using apps like Hootesuite, Meet Edgar, or Buffer. 

​These apps let you schedule in advance when posts get published, allowing you to send out a month’s worth of posts with one click. It’s like social media on autopilot!

Step 7: Get Facebook Fans

Having a lot of Facebook fans is helpful for a number of reasons, including:
  • Earning Social Proof (who takes advice from someone that only has 5 other people paying attention?)
  • It allows you to get a vanity URL once you reach 25 friends.

​Finding fans is pretty easy at the start, just invite everyone you know to like your page; friends, family, enemies, really anyone. Contact enough people and you’ll have those 25 friends in no time!

Step 8: Optimise Your YouTube Videos

I’m sure that by now you already know just how powerful a tool YouTube is for personal trainers.
People trying to get in shape are constantly on the lookout for cool new exercises, as well as experts who can guide them.
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SEO for YouTube is so important that it deserves its own article, so that’s exactly what we’ve done.

Frequently Asked Questions

WHAT ARE THE BEST PLATFORMS TO FOCUS ON?
The Personal Training world is a male dominated one, fact! so below are the platforms you should concentrate on for a mostly a male audience. Pinterest and even Instagram maybe wouldn't be as popular with your audience demographic as tendency to be a female dominated arena.
  • LinkenIn - For Business
  • Twitter - For quick chat, connections and business updates (It also is a very male dominated platform)
  • Facebook - Your tribe will socialise more on Facebook. You can also deploy carefully crafted adverts on FACEBOOK, which can increase your brand awareness and promoter offers and services, which then lad back to your valuable website, where of course you have designed a content crafted Landing Page (More about that later.
  • YouTube- Video content is big for PT business as you can offer  programmes, coaching and content videos to support their business and  your audience can get a real feel of who you are, as a huge part of working with people is authenticity, connection and personality match. Google. Facebook and Twitter's algorithm favors audience who watch a video and it rewards you by making your posts more visible.

HOW DO I MAKE BRAND HEADERS?
Use Canva design for all your social media header covers. It is free, simple to use and will make a professional look for your business online.

WHAT TIPS DO YOU HAVE FOR A SOCIAL MEDIA NOVICE?
Don't panic. That is the first step to stress. It really isn't that hard to set up a simple account online and Youtube has some great Vlogs with instructions of how to do this if you get stuck. Post interesting engaging content regularly.

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