Many Martial Arts Gym owners use a personal Facebook profile for their marketing. But what are the consequences of doing this?

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IN THIS EPISODE, YOU WILL LEARN:

• Costly consequences of having a profile for your martial arts business
• The awkward Facebook friend request
• What is Edgerank and how it controls who sees your post
• Why people don't see your Facebook status updates
• Why you can't scale a Facebook profile
• How to segment your friend lists for different posts
• And more

*Need help growing your martial arts school? Learn More Here.

TRANSCRIPTION

GEORGE: Hi, this is George Fourie from martialartsmedia.com. In this video, I'm going to be talking about should you have a Facebook profile for your martial arts business, or should you have a Business Page and what's the difference: should you have both, what should you be doing in this scenario?

Ok, so should you have a Facebook Profile for your martial arts business, or should you have a Facebook Business Page for your business? I think that kind of answers it: of course you should have a Facebook Business Page, but let's explore the options why.

Now, first and foremost, if you have your business set up in the Facebook Profile section, which is actually just for a normal person, then that is actually against the terms of service for Facebook (see section 4), and they can actually shut your account down. If you're building authority on this account and you engage with people and your members most importantly, the last thing you want is your Facebook account shut down, so you do need a Business Page, instead of the Facebook Profile. Let's also look at the obstacles this is going to cause.

If you look at a Facebook Profile, it's a lot more personal. So for me to be able to connect with you, I need to add you as a friend. And it's a bit hard to be a friend with a business as such. You can be a friend with a person, but to be a friend with a business – it’s a bit awkward.

So what you've got to look at from that point: if I'm a prospect and I'm trying to find out more about your business, now I've got to engage with you on a personal level, which I don't want to do yet – I just want more information about your business. That is why a “like” is so much easier, because I can just like your business and I can follow your updates and find out more information about you, whereas, if I had to add you as a friend – which we are not friends, I'm just searching for information about you, it’s so much more personal. There's just a bit of an awkwardness of actually adding someone as a friend who's not your friend and you just want to find out if this is a business that you actually want to engage with and if you want to take up training.

So you definitely want the Business Page. Now, the Business Page has advantages and initially, it has some disadvantages because Facebook would prioritize your posts from a profile versus a Business Page. Now this gets a bit technical, but there's a thing called EdgeRank. And EdgeRank is basically Facebook's ranking mechanism, how they decide which posts show up in your news feed. So yes, it doesn't mean that if you post something on Facebook that it’s actually going to show up: it means that Facebook still has a look and prioritizes and sees, OK, well – what should be showing up in your custom news feed?

And of course, if you had a sister that just  had a baby, or there's a wedding anniversary or your friend has a birthday or something, these are things that are going to show up in your news feed, rather than a business promo special. And this is why it’s so important to have engaging content and be telling people stories. And this is where blogging and things like that come into play. So it’s not just about putting offers up and doing specials and so forth.

But that's going a bit off topic. So essentially, yes: you want to get onto the Business Page. Now, the Business Page is going to allow you to scale, which is something you're not going to be able to do with a Facebook Profile anyway because it maxes out at 5000 friends. As a martial arts business and if you're targeting your local area, you might never need that limit or reach that limit, but nevertheless – do you want a limit on your profile and your reach and do you want to have the risk of having your account shut down as such?

So you've got to get the Business Page setup. If you already have your whole business set up on the profile, you can convert that to a page, OK? That can be done. You are going to see a drop in your reach in the beginning, but hey – you're a business, so you should be extending that reach with paid ads, and that is something that you can do with a Facebook Page, which is something that you can't do with a Facebook Profile.

So that would be the first step for you to do, is to convert it, get it over to a Business Page and start providing value to your audience from that. If you're not getting reach and you've got a promotion, if  you've got something that you want your entire audience to see, then it’s very very easy to just hit the boost button and pay $5 or $10 and just make sure that your reach gets extended to people who like your page and their friends and so forth.

OK, so: should you use both? Why not? If you have your business and you are seen as an authority in your industry and people have already added you, then post on the page first, and then go to that page and share those posts onto your personal profile.

So now you're doing both and you're reaching both benefits. And yes, if there are people who are adding you on your personal profile and they're not friends as such, then it also becomes awkward, because you don't want to be rude and you don't want to not add them because you want to connect with them. But you can actually exclude posts from them.

So if you have people who are of a business nature that are adding you onto the personal profile, then add them to a list – there's a way that you can do this and you'll see this if you update on a status, there's a little drop down box that says public, friends, and this basically says who has access to the posts that you are posting.

So if you're only posting it to friends, only your friends will see it. If you want to post in public, it means anybody on Facebook can see it. And then, if you have a segmented list, martial arts students or whatever that are, martial arts prospects, you can have that as a list, and then when you do a status update, you can actually segment to that specific list and make sure that only that audience sees your posts.

All right, I hope that helps. Plenty more tips on how you can build your martial arts business . Go to martialartsmedia.com, I'll catch you in the next video – cheers!

 

*Need help growing your martial arts school? Learn More Here.

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