Facebook Foot Soldiers and “Punching” Your Clients

How would you like to create tonnes of social proof, dozens of raving fans, create oodles of referral leads with very little effort?

A short time ago one of my coaching clients was doing something really cool with Facebook that I wanted to share with you. This works especially well for fitness boot camps and group personal training. (Additionally check out my update at the end that can make this work for pretty much any program you offer.)

By now you may have heard of the “human billboard” concept or offering deep discounts to people that can generate referrals for you. Today we’re going to take that a step further with Facebook. We all know just about everyone has a Facebook account, and if they are one of the rare few that don’t, it’s only a matter of time. What my coaching client is doing is having clients “tag” his studio in comments. Each time someone tags his facility in a comment it will also show on his studio fanpage, this makes it easy to hold your foot soldiers accountable.

So how does this help you? Well on average most people have 200 or more friends on Facebook, every time they make a comment that comment get’s shown multiple times on all of their friends news feeds. The more interaction with those impressions the more times it’s shown, it’s that simple. You can quickly see how you can suddenly have a third party endorsement or viral marketing span across 100s of people in a very short time because they’re all on Facebook way too often. (To further validate this the statistics of four fanpage show that with less than 1000 fans our social reach in our community is extending into the tens of thousands on a weekly basis, we are reaching an insane amount of local people on a weekly basis just with our fanpage, imagine how much further you can go if people are tagging and talking about you.)

Now you don’t have to do this for billboards, it’s easy to run challenges, ask people to tag your studio or you in comments, set a goal like the first person to comment on such a day wins a prize…you know what they say early bird get’s the worm. Or the first person to make 3 unique comments, it could be anything really.

Important things to remember:

• Posts don’t need to be (and likely shouldn’t be) sales oriented.
• The best posts are just legitimate comments, like “My workout @PersonalTrainingRedDeer was amazing today!” or even better, “My trainer @PersonalTrainingRedDeer weighed me today, I’ve lost 20lbs!”
• Facebook is about natural conversation, don’t encourage spamming people will just ignore it.

(TIP: If you don’t know how to set your page username go to www.facebook.com/username.)

A little tip that can go a long way for generating massive referrals and creating your tribe, the ideas are endless from referral contests, referral rewards, fan building and much much more. Use your imagination….in fact in the spirit of Facebook here is my latest update.

At One-to-1 we have a very defined marketing funnel. We religiously track our new leads and specifically what we’re offering to people and how many are buying. At any given time I can tell you how many people inquired, were booked, purchased and what they purchased for any month in the last couple years.

If you don’t have a similar system you will want to read this post.

I can now see the patterns of the ebb flow of our business each year. This has allowed me to design and develop promotion and awareness campaigns that allow us to keep leading our market. One of the things that I think is critically important is having a plan for ensuring you meet or exceed what you did the previous year. For instance let’s say last year in February you had 30 new people inquire about your services, and 20 signed up or bought something. But this year it’s already the 15^th of February and only 8 people have inquired, what are you going to do?

Ok I'm not actually suggesting you punch your clients.

Here’s a facebook idea to solve this problem. If you have a fanpage (and if you don’t you will have your personal profile which you should be ‘friending’ your clients) if you edit page and review the insights you will see a graph of how many people like, visit your page, etc. On the right side there is a link that allows you to ‘view likes’ or see all your fans.

Click on a fan, you end up on their personal profile, and ultimately quite often can even see their friends and ultimately navigate to a number of their local friends where you could post on their wall…

“Hey it’s Cabel from One-to-1 Fitness, a facebook friend of yours is a fan of ours, we’ve selected you for our BFF friend of a fan award. We have a special (prize/program) just for you, please contact us at ________ to claim before (5-7 day expiry/dedline.)”

The response at first may be low, but be diligent, I bet with copy and past you could do a few hundred of these in an hour, I’m guessing math wise 1-4% should ultimately respond, meaning you could calculate roughly how many people you need to contact to generate your missing inquiries. Your only cost, a couple hours or hours of your assistant.

There are numerous ways you can use or improve this, you can direct them to a private link and explain exactly what you have for them, sweeten the deal with an instant gift of content or videos (give them something of real value, expect nothing in return.) The law of reciprocity will assist you.

You could also post on your fans walls about the ‘BFF Referral Award’ and since they’re a fan any of their friends receive special treatment or a special offer for a very short period of time. (Scarcity is essential.)

This is just one of a number of simple business building ideas I’ll be sharing in express detail at the upcoming www.ProfitablePersonalTrainerLive.com workshop.

I’d love to hear what you think or your results if you use any of these strategies.