For the last three months I have run three bandit social media profiles for my local kickboxing gym because the owners are not interested in maintaining profiles for each of their four locations. That wasn’t OK with me so I created a Facebook Page, a Twitter Profile, and a Google+ Page for the 9Round gym I attend at Penrose Square.
Since I am sort of doing this as a hobby/experiment/proof of concept, I decided I needed to make this entire endeavour as simple and easy as possible.
First, I basically share all the posts from 9Round Corporate and 9Round NOVA; second, I have set up my comped SOCi account (they were a client) to do all the heavy lifting and engagement.
Why? Well, all most 9Round gyms share are motivational graphics and photos, which is motivating but isn’t very engaging.
So, what I did — what I do — is spend a little time every couple weeks in the SOCi Scheduler searching for evergreen articles from around the web about health, nutrition, fitness, lifestyle, exercise, and even the relevant posts I am writing for my newest fitness blog, RNNR.us.
I can sit down at my SOCi Dashboard and queue up 10, 20, 30, 40, 100 evergreen posts over the course of an hour or so, once-a-month or even once-a-quarter, and have lots and lots of relevant 3rd party content engaging and attracting your community even when you’re not around.
Or, in this case, when you’re busy opening 9Round after 9Round, gym-after-gym, studio-after-studio, in the hyper-competitive and expensive Northern Virginia and Washington, DC, market.
Right now, I have pretty great content queued up for all three of my 9Round Penrose account through May 12, until almost a month from now. It was completely painless, easy, and simple to do. But you can’t cheat too much, you really do need to spend some time writing a witty and salient business plea.
I think it’s actually fun (though who knows, I am a bandit so I am not doing a good job at all when it comes to following any of the social media rules, restrictions and leashes that 9Round Corporate has to muzzle it’s 9Round franchisees.)
When I recently wrote Build a Page and Profile for Absolutely Everything and Unique locations deserve unique profiles I had my local 9Round gym in mind. The owner of my local gym, 9Round Penrose Square, not only owns several more in the area but is opening additional gyms.
He, his partners, and trainers are not prioritizing social media marketing and currently are maintaining a single Facebook Page and Twitter Profile for all of their Northern Virginia locations. A lightbulb went off in my head and I wrote Why 9Round Should be Using SOCi for Social Media Management.
People love to learn and grow. People also love motivational posters and fitness encouragement, it’s true. People love seeing what’s happening at the gym the most, that’s also true, but until I spend much more time at the gym, I have decided to add volume and value to the @9RoundPenrose profiles. And I don’t just share, either, I make sure that I customize each and every share with something that makes each post of someone else’s fitness- and health-related content relevant to members of 9Round. It’s a lot of fun, actually. For example:
“What you eat after @9Round is as important as the 30-minutes you left everything on the mat,” — what I wrote — is associated with a share titled 14 Awesome Post-Workout Meals for Vegans. See, isn’t that fun? Here’s another one, “I hate to tell you this but you’ll be doing lots of push-ups at @9Round — Hooah!” linked to How to Get the Most From Your Push-Up Workouts. I have fun with it and always make it reflect something I like and respect about what I know about my 9Round gym, assuming they’re all like that.
What makes SOCi so perfect for me is that whenever I post something to my bandit 9Round Penrise Square bandit accounts, they always look really nice unlike those terrible posts that people drop into places like Facebook and Google+ where the stupid URL is in the post, where it really shouldn’t be, at least on Facebook. To me, it always looks messy, lazy, and incompetent when, after Facebook has been in business for over a decade, people still can’t get cross-posting right.
At least SOCi has it all sorted out.
Good luck and go git ’em Tiger!
