SOCIAL MEDIA
Social addiction
Manraaj Sunner offers his advice to operators wanting to develop an effective social media campaign
S
ocial media is a true revolution: not since Vinton Cerf and Sir Tim Berners Lee invented the internet has
something had so much impact on our lives. Consider this: Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, has influence over one-sixth of planet Earth’s population. A Facebook-sponsored study featured
in the Daily Mail revealed that 89 per cent of people check at least three social apps on their smartphones within 15 minutes of waking up in the morning, and 47 per cent of respondents said they check Facebook while working out at the gym. It’s arguably more than a revolution – it’s an addiction that infl uences our decisions, our feelings and the way we live our lives. Unsurprisingly, social media has also
impacted our businesses in a very real way. The Retention People’s latest survey – which was featured in a recent Health Club Management feature (see HCM May p59) – revealed that a massive
34 per cent of the 10,000 health club/ gym customers surveyed said they valued receiving club communications via social media. So what does all this mean for gym operators?
Measurable impact One of the many ways social media demonstrates its power lies in its impact on how we market our businesses: it offers a highly cost-effective tool to complement more traditional advertising. The average cost of a full-page advert
in a regional newspaper is approximately £300. Most regional newspapers have a distribution of around 30,000, and of their distribution I might have 100 people who actually stop and read my ad as opposed to just glancing over it on the page. So for £300, I’ve engaged 100 people directly – although in fact this fi gure is probably on the generous side. Meanwhile, Facebook data suggests
that an average of 16 per cent of your audience will organically see each of
your posts. Based on this, a Facebook page with 2,000 ‘likes’ will have the same level of engagement, if not more, from just one posting; if you were to sponsor the post, this engagement can double or triple – plus it’s all statistically measurable. And all this for £0–£12. That said, this kind of engagement
doesn’t just happen, and this is very important to understand. Social media can never be the spearhead of your marketing efforts, because it requires other forms of marketing to make people aware of your existence in the fi rst place. People see you on leafl ets or in print ads, then they Google you, then they see your website, and only then do they like you on Facebook. Some companies now only direct
people to Facebook pages on their marketing, rather than directing them to their website, as it cuts out a step in the process and creates a captive audience of subscribers. But the upfront awareness advertising is still necessary.
Social media’s key role is to make companies easier to relate to, adding a personal touch to what they do
48 Read Health Club Management online at
healthclubmanagement.co.uk/digital October 2014 © Cybertrek 2014
PHOTO:
WWW.SHUTTERSTOCK.COM/NENETUS
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