Part 3 of Using Social Media to Grow Your Gym

Read the entirety of part 3 by clicking here.

For the last two weeks, we have been talking about how to use social media to strengthen your community and create a lifestyle that persists outside of your gym. To make this guide more concrete, we have been referencing the social media campaign of Junior Achievement, using their challenges and their successes with online communities as a framework for jiu-jitsu communities.

Once you have created advocates and built an online community that reflects your offline community, the next step is to empower your advocates to spread the word about your gym for you.

When I reached this point with Junior Achievement’s fundraiser, we had built up so much momentum that advocates gladly promoted the fundraiser and related events to their friends and followers. Multiple journalists and bloggers wrote about the fundraiser and tweeted about it. Our Facebook and Twitter followers shared and retweeted our updates. And local celebrities plugged Junior Achievement through their websites and social media. On this front, Pittsburgh Dad was the highlight. If you don’t know Pittsburgh Dad, you’re probably not from Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh Dad YouTube videos have become a part of the local culture, and his following is enormous. When he posted about the fundraiser, our revenue skyrocketed almost instantly.

Why would Pittsburgh Dad want to tell people about Junior Achievement? Because he found our message to be engaging and worth talking about. Junior Achievement’s work resonated with him, and he cared enough about the cause to help out by talking about it.

The parallel with your students should be clear: by creating a worthwhile community that serves your students, you impassion them. They want to tell their friends about their awesome hobby and how much fun they have on the mat. It is known: jiu-jiteiros love to talk about jiu-jitsu, and many of your students have probably already told their friends and family about the gym.



...read the entirety of part 3 by clicking here.