How to Use Social Media as a Digital Coach (and Why You Should) A robust social media strategy is a must for a digital coach for his/her audience and a great way to gain insight into their needs and problems.
By Siddharth Rajsekar Edited by Chelsea Brown
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Social media is key to establishing a strong presence online for digital coaches and attracting the right quality of leads, particularly if you conduct webinars as part of your digital coaching. Social media, by its very nature, increases your audience's awareness of your courses because of features like comments, likes, shares, reposts and saves by people who follow your account.
Before you become active on social media, you need to be very clear on what you are selling and what's going to be the lead magnet. If your lead magnet is not clear, and if you don't know what you're selling, then you're just wasting your time. Your audience is going to be looking at your social media for answers to their questions.
Related: How to Use Social Media to Get Clients for Your Coaching Business
Here are a few tips to help boost your social media presence and make it valuable for your customer:
Don't make all of your content posts about yourself and your course: Use your various social media channels to deliver valuable content. This will get the audience interested in your courses.
Create a Facebook or Telegram group to stay in touch with your prospects: It's a free and easy way to build a community, as almost everyone uses it anyway.
Work on a holistic, well-rounded digital marketing strategy: Organic traffic is going to help people get to know more about you as a digital coach, but you need to have a combination of organic and paid traffic to make it work. Paid traffic is the fastest way for you to attract your ideal customer. It takes money to make money. Depending on your budget, use paid ads when you want fast results.
Use a combination of long-form and short-form content, based on the platform: I prefer spending 80% of my time developing long-form content for platforms like podcasts and YouTube and 20% for short-form content on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok. Pinterest, Snapchat and Clubhouse are popular with young adults. LinkedIn is for working professionals looking to network and seek out new opportunities.
Your content across these platforms should vary in tone and match that of the platform. Naturally, the content you post on LinkedIn should be formal and professional, while your Instagram will be informal and entertaining. You may want to have the same message across all channels, but you have to alter the style and tone.
You have eight seconds to capture someone's attention span. The primary goal of short-form content is to lead people to your long-form content through engaging quotes, images, carousels and reels. Using relevant hashtags will spark interest as it links back to a podcast or video. This is when the crucial pre-framing happens, and you can add links to your digital course.
Gain insight into your audience through your YouTube Live and tutorial videos: Ask for responses on your videos, and gain insight into what their problems and needs are. This has shaped my whole delivery style to help them get to their goal much faster.
Focus on evergreen strategies: As a digital coach, it's wiser to focus on evergreen strategies and principles. Personally, I'm delighted when people are still seeing value in videos I created three years ago.
In fact, 80% of my YouTube videos are tutorials, 15% revolve around tactics and 5% are on tools that will still be useful five years from now. Consistently sharing informative content ensures that you're seen as an expert in your niche. When people look to you for in-depth teaching, you're not perceived as just a marketer peddling your products.
Always keep testing and making improvements through data-driven results: Google Analytics is a good tool to get this kind of information. Once you analyze it, you will know what is working and what needs to be revised. Keep monitoring and tracking your analytics to understand what types of posts get the best response. This will help you tweak your media choices.
Keep track of your competition: Another great benefit of using social media is that it shows you what your competition is up to. This time, as part of the audience, you'll know the courses or classes they are rolling out. You'll be able to judge what is and isn't working for your competition and use that knowledge to make better choices yourself.
Related: 4 Steps to Building a Successful Coaching Business
The final piece of advice is to ensure that the content you share on social media is well-researched, so your information is personally tested and not misleading. Scams and manipulative practices have made social media users suspicious. As a coach, I advise you to use social media responsibly by creating content that will awaken people to the realities of life. When you constructively use social media by focusing your energy on teaching others how to balance their lives, you are building enduring relationships.
