Week 6 Part A: Engaging Your Customers – Facebook Strategy

In my search of fitness and health business pages, I found that many, actually I would say most, of the public pages were labeled as “fitness and health” but only had a small handful of members (less than 50 members), which suggests that these are mostly dead, abandoned, or unmanaged pages that are now just taking up empty space on the Facebook servers. Most of the active public pages had to have at least a few thousand members to reveal any type of meaningful and current activity.  Most of the pages that seemed to have significant meaningful content and daily interactions had at least 50k or more members.

In my search of Yoga (beginner) business pages, it was somewhat different as I found that a large number were private groups.  I attempted to join several (no response yet), but I imagine that this is an industry specific trend where Yoga studios/instructors are very particular about who joins their online presence and that they are trying really hard to protect their proprietary techniques and approach.  Yoga teachers are funny that way sometimes, I think.   Anyways, I did join a couple beginner yoga pages and it seems that one of the online media presence challenge with this industry is the struggle between filter & spam control while maintaining an engaged audience who are sharing relevant information and activity.

Businesses where I was able to join and might be able to make future strategic connections:

Fitness and Health Tip Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/fitnessandhealthtipsgroup

Public group, 4.1K members, 47 new members in the last week,

What they are about: Fitness, Health and Weight Loss Tips, Articles & Blog Posts.

They offer a variety of fitness and nutritional advice.  Members can post questions and expect an answer or engagement from the group and/or moderators.  Seems fairly active with the last post 5 hours prior to me visiting the site.  The latest post was a lady asking for fitness advice, and I could definitely see where I could make a connection here by sharing my thoughts and recommendations in the comments section of her post.

Fitness Lovers:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1328003397369502

Public group, 170k members

What they do: Fitness Lovers is a platform for all fitness enthusiasts who believe that they can motivate with their videos pertaining to workout, diet and help in achieving fitness goals of the folks in the group.

This page looked like a great place to start making some relevant connections!  Posts and comments were very frequent and relevant.  Posts are a combination of people sharing their fitness success stories/journeys and quite a few fitness professionals of varying types offering their recommendations (obviously they were pitching themselves and their services). However, as a new fitness/wellness coach, this would be a very good page to start putting myself out there to increase my brand visibility and awareness.

 

Daily Workout Motivation:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/435014783220234

Public Group, 108k members, AI enabled

What they are about: Inspiring one another to be healthy and happy with their bodies.

In scope and content, this site seems somewhat similar to the above site (Fitness Lovers) in that they cater to a combination of fitness professionals (clearly advertising themselves), and those that are simply sharing their fitness struggles and journeys.  Posting, sharing, and commenting is current and active.  Many of the success stories include people losing an incredible amount of weight from extreme obesity, and its pretty amazing to see their courage as they put themselves and share their inspiring stories of success.  This would be a great place for me to share my own fitness challenges and successes as I believe many on this page would identify and sympathize with my journey.  

 

Online Personal Trainers and Fitness Instructors:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/5837232569693255

Public Group, 16.4K members.

What they are about: Support fellow fitness professionals.

This page appears to be mostly populated with other fitness professionals in a sort of networking capacity, however, there were recent and relevant posts from individuals looking for fitness coaches and advice.  Also notifications and advertisements for fitness training, certifications, and seminars.  I most likely would not get any new clients from this page, but I could certainly make some relevant connections with other fitness professionals.  Plenty of great opportunities here for connections and collaboration, especially for someone like me just starting out in the industry. 

 

At Home Workouts (Beginner Workouts):

https://www.facebook.com/groups/761097228648378

Public group, 103k members

What they are about: Best At Home Workouts Anyone Can Do To Lose Weight. We Provide Tips & Helpful Guides To Lose Weight!

I had high hopes for this page, based off the membership numbers and the name/about info of the page. However, as I scrolled through the posts and comments, I found that it was not very well regulated or moderated and there were way too many not related posts that were permitted to stay on the feed.  I think that conceptually this page would be exactly where I would want to spend some quality time, but unfortunately, this site looks to be very poorly managed.  I still liked this page in order to follow it, but I can’t imagine that I will be spending very much time at all here in the future…too bad.

 

Yoga for Beginners:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/373255056414913

Public page, 60K members.  Very active group

What they are about: This group is a gathering place for those that are ready to take action toward positive change. Are you ready to commit?? To start living the life you have always wanted to? Even if you say "YES" but you're still scared to actually DO it, this is the place to start to get the courage you need to let that soul shine! When you don't have the body you want, nor the energy or motivation to get out there and go for it, it can be a struggle to even know where to start.

Another site (at least in terms of title and about section) that at first seemed to be exactly what I was looking for, however is poorly moderated. The posts that are about the yoga lifestyle are good, however, this page is overly cluttered with spam and irrelevant content.  This is yet another example of page that probably started out great, but was either abandoned or moderators have simply stopped filtering out junk content.  This page, however, is a good reminder to myself that if I want to have a relevant and meaningful page, that I need to be filtering out the spam and junk content on a daily basis!

 

Yoga & Meditation for Beginners:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/2605146522922581

Public page, 8K members.

What they are about: Yoga & Mediation don't need to be confusing. Sharing information and simplifying the concepts and terms of Yoga & Meditation for people with no prior experience.

This page caught my eye since it had a recent post that the creator shared about his struggles with filtering out spam.  The creator, in this case, only allows public posts on his page that he personally approves of, however, he mentioned that he sometimes get 50 requests per day to post content that are not relevant to the page!  The content that is on the page is relevant to the page focus, but the posts are much less frequent (do to the strict publication control), and member activity seems to be significantly lighter that some of the other pages due to the relatively low member count. I think that in the future this connection might actually be beneficial since it is someone that has built his connections from the ground up, and is going through the growing process/struggles of spam control vs. greater activity.