How to Use Facebook as a Yoga Business

Last week, I covered why it’s critical for you to use social media for your yoga business (if you missed that blog, check it out here). This week, I’m sharing exactly how to use Facebook as a yoga business.

Why Facebook?

Having an active Facebook profile helps with brand awareness, SEO, and more than likely your target audience is on Facebook. Plus, if you ever want to run any ads on Facebook or Instagram, you’ll need a page!

There are 3 different ways to use Facebook: profile, page, or group.

Your profile is something you likely already have— a personal profile where you are friends with the people you care about in real life.

A page is something you’ll want to create as a yoga teacher, studio, or any other type of yoga business. Pages represent brands and public figures, and having a page allows people to “like” you in order to see your content in their feed.

A group is something you may want to create, but I always recommend starting with a page. Groups are usually created to discuss topics of mutual interest (like yoga) with other like-minded people. They can be a great way to create community and engagement with your students and potential students, but shouldn’t take the place of your Facebook page.

So once you create your page (click here to create it), how do you use Facebook effectively?

Define your goals. What are your goals for Facebook? They could be any of these goals, or maybe something completely different:

- Grow your email list
- Increase class or workshop attendance
- Increase studio or website memberships
- Build awareness for your brand
- Attract new customers to purchase physical products like mala beads and yoga mats
- Grow brand loyalty to turn clients and students into raving fans
- Attract new students to attend your classes
- Drive traffic to your blog posts on your website

Whatever your goals are (and you don’t have to pick just one), your strategy should be created with those goals in mind.

Create a strategy. Once you have your goals, ask yourself how you will use Facebook to achieve them.

For example, a strategy for growing your email list could include creating a free yoga video or other resource and creating a mix of organic and paid content to drive traffic to a landing page where people will enter their email address to receive your free resource.

Content. The content you share should depend on your strategy, but it will likely include some combination of blog posts, videos, and images designed to educate, inspire, entertain, and engage.

Educate and inspire. For a yoga business, the opportunities to educate and inspire are endless. Think informational videos explaining different aspects of yoga such as the 8 limbs, infographics and blogs of different yoga poses for specific purposes such as stress or knee pain, inspiring quote photos, and images or videos showing how to get into certain poses.
Entertain. What does your audience find funny? Sharing viral yoga- related content (who doesn’t love a good goat yoga video?) with your own take, memes, and funny personal situations make you and your brand relatable and fun.
Engage. When you post relevant content that entertains, educates, or inspires, your audience will want to engage! Focus on making your audience feel emotion— joy, nostalgia, excitement, hope— and they will like, comment, and share your posts to help you grow a following and widen the spread of your unique message. Get creative with it, and make sure each post has your voice in it.

Build relationships. Social media should never be a one-way street, and Facebook is no exception. It’s meant to be a conversation between you and your audience.

When they comment on your posts, respond thoughtfully. Ask them questions regularly about what matters to them most, what they struggle with, and what excites them. As you continue to have a conversation with them, you can get to know each other— and that is when your audience starts to want to attend your classes and buy your products.

Run ads. You may have heard that “organic reach is dead” on Facebook. That’s certainly not true— and when you follow the outline above, you’ll see that for yourself! But organic reach has fallen in the past few years, so you may find that once you start to work on your Facebook page you’d like to run some ads.

Running Facebook ads could be a whole blog series in itself (comment below if you’d be interested in learning more, and maybe I’ll write some blogs specifically about ads!), but here are a few key things to keep in mind:

Run ads with a goal in mind. Facebook makes this easy for you by offering you options when you create an ad: traffic, conversions, engagement, awareness, leads, and more. Think how ads fit into your strategy and what goals you have for each campaign.
Use the ads manager instead of “boosting” a post right on your page. I know, annoying. Boosting is quicker and easier, but it doesn’t give you the ability to do as much detailed targeting as the ads manager does.
If there is a local aspect to your business, use detailed location targeting. If your yoga business has an online shop that you want to promote, you can target the entire US! But if you want to promote yourself as a yoga teacher teaching local classes and workshops, narrow down your location targeting to your city and the surrounding areas.
Pixel your website. This is the most important thing you should be doing on Facebook, even if you’re not running any ads yet. Pixeling your website is as simple as going into the Ads Manager, clicking “Pixels” and following the quick steps to insert the pixel code into your website. This will allow you to create detailed custom targeting audiences, remarket to website visitors, and create “lookalike” audiences of people who are like your website visitors.

What other questions about Facebook marketing for your yoga business do you have? Comment below and ask away!

Why You Need to Use Social Media for Your Yoga Business

I know “promoting” yourself can feel a little icky. Yoga is supposed to be about love and light and union, not gimmicky marketing.

This is a mindset I see in my clients All. The. Time. And as a yoga teacher myself, I’ve definitely been there!

But in 2017, social media is non-negotiable for your yoga business. It’s not a good-to-have, it’s a must-have if you want to get yourself in front of more people, fill your classes, and sell out your workshops and retreats.

This photo of me was taken courtesy of Studio B Yoga & More by the amazing Sharalee Prang!

Think of it this way: you have a unique message that the world needs to hear. It’s not gross, or gimmicky, or “salesy” to want to share that message with as many people as possible, for the greater healing good of the world. In fact, it’s critical that you share that message with every single person who needs to hear it.

That is what social media can help you do.

Below are 3 key purposes of using social media for your yoga business. Next week, we’ll delve into exactly how to use different social media platforms, starting with Facebook.

1. Personal branding. There are so many yoga teachers, yoga businesses, and styles of yoga. Why would som

eone choose your class, video, workshop, retreat, or product over someone else’s?

The answer? Personal branding! Personal branding is how you differentiate yourself from everyone else. You are never going to be the only person doing what you do. But there are going to be people out there who love your unique style and your approach, and they will want to consume your content, take your classes, and buy your programs.

But they will never know how much your style resonates with them unless you share your style with them!

You can do personal branding in so many different ways on social media. A few great ways to do this are live video meditations and short yoga classes on YouTube and Facebook, snapshots of your life on Instagram, and blogging and sharing those blogs on social media.

2. Education and inspiration. You know that yoga doesn’t stop when you get off your mat…but not all of your students do. Similarly, teaching yoga doesn’t stop when you step out of the studio.

With social media, you can teach as often as you like and you can meet your students where they already are: online.

I don’t just mean teach asana, either! You can teach them meditations and Ayurvedic tips. You can teach them about the limbs of yoga and you can inspire them to live the yamas by the way you live. You can teach them what mala beads are and why they’re powerful tools for meditation.

The opportunities to spread your message far and wide are infinite.

3. Community. Sharing your message on social media can create a global community you may have never thought possible. Your message will attract the people who need to hear it, and those people will continue to follow you, interact with you, and likely engage with others who feel the same.

You can create communities in a more traditional sense of the word in many ways online: free Facebook groups, paid memberships, and paid Facebook groups. But you can do this on your regular pages, too, because you know the saying: your vibe attracts your tribe.

Community is everywhere online, and social media can help you create yours.

If you’re reading this and thinking “That’s great, but I have no time to do any of that,” then outsourcing might be the answer you need. I highly recommend checking out Edgepoint Social for your social media needs!

Have more questions about social media? Drop them below, and keep checking back each week for more in-depth blogs about social media, mindset, and all things yoga!