Again, the company I am monitoring is Boost Fitness where I work as a certified personal trainer. On their Facebook page, they describe themselves as “the area’s premier independent fitness center that caters to adult professionals in the community. Boost Fitness offers individualized, group and semi-private fitness training programs to help our members achieve their goals.”
My analysis of their social media presence and suggestion for improvement will primarily stick to their facebook. This avenue of social media is where they have had the most relative success and attention, but also still have huge potential to grow. They do not yet have a Twitter, and their youtube presence needs a great deal of work. While they do maintain a “Boost Blog” regularly, it is consistently linked to the facebook, and any traffic it gains comes solely from this area. For these reasons, increasing the effectiveness and outreach of the facebook page is the top priority of my monitoring project. As of now, it has the highest potential to energize clients and facilitate innovation!
Demographic
- As a trainer there, I have a first hand perspective that adult professionals are the demographic most represented in their members. Of these, I would say approximately 60% of Members are women. When it comes to personal training clients, the number is in fact well above 2/3’s!(For me it is 100%).
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Immediately, this is a good sign in-terms of the opportunity to use social media to create and maintain relationships. According to a study done by NetPop Research, a San Francisco-based research firm studying Internet trends, “women in their 30s make up more than half of heavy contributors — that is, they engage in six or more social media activities.” http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2011-02-21-socialanimals21_ST_N.htm. Indeed a quick look at the Boost Facebook page confirms this, as 99% of the contributors are females.
Applied Example:
In fact, after briefly discussing “listening” and inciting dialogue with one of the managers, I suggested a tone for the next post. It subsequently received feedback, and although it was not a large volume, it was very immediate. It is a major issue that nearly all of the excellent blog posts are ignored, as they are not framed with a question that personalizes them and establishes the interaction as a more personable conversation. Again, this goes back to what Li and Bernoff continually state, relationships are EVERYTHING!
Data & Social Media Metrics
Of course, a major component of this project was obtaining hard data of social media metrics, noticing aggregate trends, and performing a qualitative analysis of topics, tone, message salience, word-of-mouth, engagement etc. This was difficult with Boost Fitness, as they are a company with a small outreach, only existing in this central Massachusetts area. With this in mind, I extended my investigation towards other prominent fitness organizations in hopes of finding data I could similarly apply to my situation. The question I asked was:
What are these other Fitness Organizations Doing Well that Boost Could do Better? Where is their Outreach & Energizing Lacking? What can be learned from Them?
Boost Fitness
Google Insights
http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=Boost%20Fitness%20&cmpt=date
- While the volume is low, they are a rising search term! Note the spike in activity each year at the beginning of January. This is when marketing efforts are in full force, as well as customer interest peaking in light of New Years resolutions.
- Boost Fitness does not have a large enough presence currently for me to obtain any data on them from sites such as Addictomatic, Social Mention, etc
The respective Boost Fitness Clubs are "rising" searches on Google
Equinox:
Google Insights
- Again, similar data trends, notice interest peaking early January, then decreasing until March, then subsequently building up again as the fitness community gets motivated for "Summer Bodies." The next major fall in interest is typically around October, as warm weather and revealing clothes are on the way out.
- Social Mention reveals respectable levels of "Passion" and"Sentiment." Also, even the detected "neutral" mentions are in this case more positive. As long as it is not negative, any press is good press in this case.
Gold's Gym:
- Again, same seasonal trends
http://socialmention.com/search?q=Gold%27s+Gym&t=all&btnG=Search
World Gym
http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=World%20Gym&cmpt=q
- Again, seasonal trends mirror previous examples
http://socialmention.com/search?q=World+gym&t=all&btnG=Search
LA Fitness Co.
Social Mention Vibe:
For the clubs that did have a large enough following to leave a footprint on social mention, one trend was overwhelmingly clear. Customers feel passion and sentiment about the organization when it is able to create a sense of community. Equinox in particular does an excellent job in this regard. Not only do they cater to clients health and fitness needs, they also become a high end social club of sorts. Primarily their target is young and middle aged working professionals. Content of their blog and twitter reinforces this.
Example Equinox Tweet:
- This is an excellent example of listening, understanding your audience, and creating content that will engage them on a personal level and establish the "relationships" that are paramount. Boost Fitness can do the same thing, but as stated before, must respect its primary demographic of middle aged women. Many of these women are also mothers, so perhaps they can personalize their approach by adding content that would specifically appeal to them in this regard.
- Boost Fitness already has an EXCELLENT community, feel, but lacks the online community to complement it. Luckily, it should be an easier transition because it has that established “neighborhood” feel where most members know one another and everyone is friendly.
Overall:
Despite a lack of metrics available for analysis pertaining specifically to Boost Fitness, analyzing other companies in the same market provided some very applicable data.
- Figure out strategies for the identified interest"lulls" during the year. When social media interest lulls, energizing, and in-turn revenue decreases. This could be as simple as designing seasonal discounts or marketing specials. IE energizing using knowledge of trends, such as "Don't wait until summer to start working on that body! Get started now!"
- Going to the gym is not just for fitness, it is part of ones lifestyle, or "habitus." It is great if you have encouraged a strong community offline, but if it does not exist online as well you are only gaining half the benefit! Make sure to listen and thoroughly assess customer base to provide adequate response. Equinox's social media campaign is a good example of this, however the same messages will not start a groundswell within the Boost Fitness member base... Different Target audience!
These Equinox advertisements demonstrate the different demographic they are marketing too. They are absolutely begging for a semiotic analysis, but for now lets just use them to affirm the fact that great marketing for companies is not universally applicable, even in the same industry... However, great marketing strategies are! Regardless of some of the questionable thematic aspects of these hyper-sexualized images, the advertisement does finish by asking a question "What's Your After?" This is an intertextual reference that invites the viewer to interpellate themselves into the narrative being created. Whether it is a print or video add, a tweet, or a Facebook Post.. Prompting your audience with questions is one of the best ways to engage the groundswell.
