Grasshopper published Four Fun Ways to Engage Your Facebook Fans, discussing ways to invite more interaction via Facebook.
- Fill in the Blanks
- Be Funny
- Photos and Captions
- Really Engaging Questions
Tag Archives: Facebook
Elements of a Good Gym Website
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Every gym needs a web presence to help grow their business, but how big does their website really need to be to be truly effective? Gym owners all over know they need to invest in something that looks attractive, exciting, and professional, but on a limited budget with limited resources this can be difficult. To help everyone out lets examine what a gym really needs to help out their business.
What Makes a Good Gym Website?
The first thing is understanding your audience. When people start designing their website they can come up with this incredible list of things it should have. “We need a news section for all the latest updates. We need a picture section so all our athletes can upload pictures their moms take a competition. We need a videos section so that every parent can see their baby perform.” While all of these ideas seem great at first, in reality you need barely any of it. People will visit a gym website for only a few things: general gym/class/team information, paying their bill, finding the links to their social media websites. Past these three things everything else you add to a website will stop getting updated and end up being a drag on resources (and money in the beginning to design it). A parent is coming to your website ‘once’ to get information on what services you offer. A child will come to your website to look for your twitter or Facebook page (although this is questionable as most kids will just search in Facebook). Lastly your most frequent visitors will come to pay their bill (possibly the best reason to have a website is online bill pay). Scaling down the website to just these three things allows you to come up with someone simple, effective, and not to heavy on the financial resources.
Keep it Simple and Professional
Creating a gym website does not have to be incredibly difficult. As we said before its mostly a medium to put out general static information A cost effective plan is to use the software, WordPress, to help develop your website. There are millions of websites using WordPress to promote their business. WordPress is a free blogging software that has been adapted, with various plugins, to meet any business need. There are also free skins and many developers willing to help you (for a lower fee than developing a website from scratch) get your site looking how you want. As well many hosting companies will host a WordPress site for as little as 5 bucks a month.
Use Social Media
Because Facebook and Twitter are so easy to use, even from a mobile device, these platforms should be heavily utilized to promote the social aspect of your gym. Took a great picture at a competition? Tweet about it. Want to announce an open gym? Post on your Facebook page. The reach of both these services is far greater than you can hope to accomplish on your business website and they are both free.
Having a realistic plan on what your website for your gym should be and what it should accomplish significantly reduces the time and cost of this project and as well increases the effectiveness of what you are trying to accomplish. If you are looking for any guidance, feel free to contact us and see what we can come up with for you.
Why It’s Bad Idea to Check a Job Applicant’s Facebook Profile
The Intuit Small Business Blog published Why It’s Bad Idea to Check a Job Applicant’s Facebook Profile. Although I think it’s a good idea to check out the information job applicant’s post online, this article brings up some good points to be aware of if you decide to check social networking sites and what to look for.
Monitoring the Private Lives of Your Employees
I read an article in the New York Times titled Monitoring the Private Lives of Your Employees which made me wonder how much monitoring is appropriate and how it should be done. Many employers have policy’s regarding the image an employee portrays on social networks, but how far should those policies go? As a gym owner should you monitor your employees’ social interactions with your gym families or ban interaction altogether? Should you allow your employees to be “friends” with athletes at the gym or should you require your staff to keep their social media lives separate. Should you take the opposite approach and require everyone that works for you to be you friend on sites like Facebook, Google+, and Twitter? These are questions you’ll have to think about and answer to make sure your business is represented in the manner you desire.
How Should My Company Use Facebook?
With over 500 million users and being the website people spend the most time on, Facebook can be a great tool to reach your existing and potential clients. The question many businesses struggle to answer is how to use Facebook. We have a few suggestions to get you started:
- Give recognition to clients. As a gym or studio you can highlight individuals that gain new skills and win awards. As an event producer you can congratulate individuals for showing exceptional skill and teams for how they place and awards they receive.
- Games and Contests. Facebook can help facilitate contests such as the Hit a Ray contest or those involving taking pictures in your gym, studio, or event producer clothing.
- Re-Distribute information posted on your website. Many of your clients check Facebook several times a day. They probably don’t check your website nearly that often so you may want to use Facebook to let them know when you’ve added something important to your website.
This is a follow up article to Should My Company Be On Facebook?
Should My Company Be On Facebook?
Over the past couple of years I’ve had several people ask if their company should be on Facebook. If your company is in the Cheerleading and Dance industry the answer is a definite YES. Why? Because your customers, existing and potential, are using Facebook.
Facebook has over 500 million users, which is a great audience to share your business with. The question should be how to use Facebook, not whether or not to use it, and we’ll help address that question at a later date.