How To Grow A Quality Following Online
You know those blogs and posts promising you thousands of followers overnight?
Yeah, this isn’t one of those.
Instead, this is about growing a quality following online for your health practitioner biz.
I often see practitioners who have a decent amount of followers, but aren’t getting clients from it. There are a lot of reasons for this, but a common one is that their followers aren’t the right audience!
Let’s dive a little deeper.
Tips For Growing A Quality Following Online
Forget about the numbers (mostly)
The most important thing with social media - or any community - is that your audience is high-quality.
What does this mean? It means your audience is mostly your ideal client, whoever that is.
If you work with mums, you don’t want a bunch of 19 year old single guys following you.
If you work with elite athletes, you don’t want an audience of couch potatoes.
The problem is that a lot of practitioners jump on the bandwagon of following other pracs in follow trains and the like. So they end up with a bunch of their peers. Sure, peers are great for cheering you on, but not many of them will be your ideal client (unless you’re in a support role like yours truly!)
Want to know a secret?
You can have 10,000 followers on Instagram - and still struggle to book clients.
Or you can have 300, 500 or 1000 followers and be booked up for months in advance. I know - quite a few of my clients fall into this category!
So with that in mind, let’s look at how to improve the quality of your followers on social media.
Appeal to your specific audience
If you try to please everyone with your socials, you’ll end up with no one listening. Get specific to your audience and speak to them directly. This can mean:
Using the right hashtags for Instagram (hot tip - no one is following ‘nutritionist’ unless they are a nutrition geek or student!)
Using images that your ideal client can relate to - so stop using stock images of 20 year old models if you work with perimenopause!
Asking questions that call out your ideal clients specifically, rather than being general (or not asking questions at all!)
Share your story, particularly if you fall under your own ideal client umbrella
Create content that is tailored to that ideal client
Mix the content up
Social media likes new and varied content, and so do most people who use social media. So if you’re posting the same type of content all the time, you may get crickets in response.
So when it comes to posting to your socials, experiment with the newer features.
For Instagram, give lives, video content, reels and stories a try. Reels are getting particularly good traction right now as they are new, and they also reach a greater audience. If you hate the thought of the new content styles, at least focus on creating content that is shareable or worth saving.
For Facebook, you want to create a variety of different post types. Facebook lives get better reach overall, and if someone comments on it, their friends can potentially see that live. So if you make sure the heading and blurb is interesting, you’re more likely to reach new potential clients.
For examples of how this is done, check out the old videos from Natural Super Kids. This is one of the main marketing strategies that Jess used to grow her following online! Each week she would cover a topic, and each week she would get new followers and eventually new clients.
Dump the duds
This is a little unconventional, but bear with me. On Instagram, consider removing dud followers. By that, I mean spam bot profiles with no content, people who are very clearly not your ideal client, or anyone that gives off a bad vibe.
By removing these, you actually improve your engagement and reach - and therefore your chances of reaching the right people. It increases your percentage of engagement and Instagram thinks you’re awesome.
Sure, you might lose 50, 100 or 300 followers. But if they’re just sitting there not engaging with you, it’s 100% a vanity metric that serves no purpose. A smaller higher quality following is more likely to lead to clients converting.
Help Sam, my online following is absolute crap!
I’ve got you covered boo. There is a brand-spanking-new course opening up all about social media, and it’s got your name on it.
In Social Media Marketing: How To Use Social Media To Build Your Health Practitioner Biz, we'll be covering:
Facebook
Instagram
Other platforms
Using analytics to your advantage
How to build a following of dream clients online
How to take followers and convert them into paying clients
Creating a schedule for your content
How to create content quickly
And many more!
Don't have thousands of dollars spare to throw at social media marketing? No problem - this is 100% about organic (free) content marketing strategies, so you don't have to spend a cent if you don't want to!
Still a student? You can still build an audience now and reap the benefits when you graduate!
Suck at tech? Don't worry - I'll give you step-by-step info and tutorials on how to use different tools and aspects of social media.
