As of the middle of 2018, Instagram had 1 billion monthly users. This is opposed to Facebook which, in the same period, was sitting at just over 2 billion monthly users. Although it doesn’t offer as much functionality as Facebook does, Instagram is still an incredibly powerful platform for fitness professionals. Here’s why.
The power of the visual medium
Of our five senses, the ability to see is the most powerful. Vision is not just about this ability. The power of vision lies in the human’s ability to derive meaning from what they see and to interpret it.
Instagram is a purely visual social media platform. Its focus is on the pictures that users upload and share with their followers. It doesn’t offer much room for commentary or other sophisticated features. They don’t have all of this clutter so that the user can look at the picture and interpret what they see.
Today, we’re suffering from information overload. When presented with a lot of text that we have to read we’re more likely than not to switch off and not to absorb anything. The fact that Instagram relies on imagery to transmit their message keeps the user’s attention for that much longer as they are not being faced with the prospect of doing work. However, the power of the image means that the single picture has just as much impact as reams and reams of text.
Your content will get noticed
Instagram will only deliver content to their users which they feel that the users will like and respond to. It’s not organised in a chronological fashion so that you are served the latest post made by one of your followers – no matter if you’re interested in it or not.
If fitness professionals harness this characteristic properly, the message that they want to communicate could very well reach a wide distribution and become evergreen. In other words, the content will live on beyond the time that you post it. If you’re operating as a Pilates instructor, you’ll want to follow people who produce similar content to you. This is so that they get to notice you and will engage with your content as well. Chances are also very good that content which you haven’t produced recently gets picked up down the line and engaged with by new users.
Remember the hashtag
Instagram is a great proponent of the hashtag. This is used to categorise similar content so that when a user searches for a particular hashtag they will be presented with all the content that is similar to this theme. You’ll also be shown how many posts have been made with this particular hashtag. Examples of hashtags that fitness professionals can use, and are widely used by others, are:
- #fitness
- #fitnessmotivation
- #fitnessquotes
Use social media automation tools
As a fitness professional, your time is your money. And you earn your money by training clients as opposed to doing your marketing. To help you minimise the time that you spend on making Instagram posts, but not compromising on your quality, we recommend that you use a tool such as Hootsuite which allows you to schedule up to 30 Instagram posts to go off when you would like them to. This will ensure that you are responding well to all aspects of your business.
Contact Trifocus Fitness Academy
Our specialist fitness professionals have told us that the best way that they’ve found to market their services is through social media. However, they had to spend a lot of time trying to figure out the best way of marketing themselves on these platforms. We heard this and have developed the Social Media Management for Fitness Professionals Course to help you get on top of social media in fraction of the time it would have taken you to do this on your own. Visit our website to learn more.
