What Is The Best Way To Use Facebook To Grow Your Health Coach List?
Everybody knows that Facebook is one of the most utilized websites on the planet, with somewhere in the neighborhood of a billion active users and about half of them are on Facebook daily.
The trick is, how can we take advantage of the huge amount of traffic on a site that is designed for building community, to help build our health coach list?
The simple answer is to use Facebook to build your tribe. I have written about this before, but it is a very important concept. You want to find people that are looking for what you have to offer and connect with them.
One mistake I see lots of health coaches make both on their website and on Facebook is simply putting up a little link or opt-in box that says “Sign up for my newsletter”. In case no one told you, the days of that being an effective method are behind us now.
When the internet and email were still a novelty, people would sign up for anything online. Now people’s inboxes are filled with more than they want so you need to entice them with some sort of free offer. This can be as simple as a free report, a video, a webinar, a book, or a free consultation.
Before Facebook made the new changes to timeline, you had the ability to direct new visitors to your fan page to go to a custom tab where you could offer some sort of gift in exchange for a “like” or email, or both.
One of the most major changes is that you are no longer allowed to have a default landing tab. While this is bad news, there is a bright spot. It used to be that the only thing you had on your fan page to tell them about this free gift was a tiny little app icon.
The tabs are now highlighted below your cover image with very visible 111 x 74 pixel images that you can customize as you see fit. Facebook has been very clear that they don’t want any marketing messages or calls to action in the timeline cover, but there are no such restrictions on the tab image or on the actual tab application itself.
This is good news for us, since we can give our visitors some incentive to click on the tab and sign up for whatever free gift we are offering. I have a demo health coaching fan page setup, where I show how this works. You can even put your website into a fan page tab.
By “pinning” a post to the top of the page, you can have a call to action that your new visitor will see first. This is done by clicking the little pencil icon in the upper right hand corner of any fan page post.
A much more effective way to drive lots of targeted people to your fan page is through Facebook advertising. This intimidates a lot of people, but it is really not all that difficult.
Facebook uses what is called pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Basically, when anyone clicks on your ad, you pay. They also use the CPM (cost per 1,000) model, but in my experience this doesn’t work as well.
What you don’t want to do is to pay for advertising and send them straight to your fan page wall. You want to send people directly to a custom tab where you have setup some sort of call to action.
Another important point is that you want to try to determine exactly who it is that you are marketing too. We talk about tribes and target markets a lot, but if your target market is women over 50 who want to prevent osteoporosis naturally, you don'[t want to send them to a page that says “sign up for my health coaching newsletter”. Something along the lines of “6 Easy Steps To Prevent Osteoporosis Naturally” is much more likely to speak to your target market.
The newsletter model can work wonderfully if it is targeted to exactly the subject the people coming to your site are looking for information on. Think about how you found out about Health Coach Weekly. There is a fairly high chance you saw a Facebook ad or sponsored story that spoke directly to something you were looking for.
Once you get people to your custom tab, there are many different things you can do. You can have a like/reveal image which means that if a person is not a fan they will see one thing and once they are a fan they will see something else. Go ahead over to this Facebook tab to see it in action.
Once someone likes your page and you “reveal” your content, you can place pretty much anything you want there. Your website, a video, a report download, an email opt-in box, or even a PayPal button. The only limit is really your imagination, you can even put a custom background behind whatever content you want to put on the page.
By Geoff Young
