Image Source: Leeroy via Life of Pix + edits.

Facebook Marketing Basics for Yoga Studios

How to grow your yoga studio’s presence on Facebook — even if you have a limited budget.

Every yoga studio’s marketing strategy should incorporate a website, email list, and social media presence. Of the social platforms, Facebook should be your highest priority simply because it has the most users and the best advertising system.

My partner and I have worked to attract over 20,000 fans to his Facebook Page in a little over a year. Although we don’t run a yoga studio, the keys to success on Facebook are universal so TribeGrow’s editor, Dylan Robertson, has asked us to share with you the lessons we have learned.

You don’t need to be a celebrity, a marketing guru, or have bucketloads of cash to build an audience on Facebook. We’re just ordinary people, and grew our following on a shoestring budget — along with hard work, attention to detail, and paying close attention to our audience. Below, we’ll teach you how to do the same!

1. Facebook Page Basics

What is a Facebook Page?

There are three main parts of Facebook you need to be aware of when it comes to marketing; Profiles, Groups, and Pages. We’re going to focus on Pages in this article, but let’s first define what these three parts are so that we avoid confusion.

• Profiles: Chances are you already have a Facebook Profile, which allows you to become “friends” with those you care about and generally be active across the various parts of Facebook. Profiles are meant for individuals.
• Groups: These are areas of Facebook you can join to discuss topics of mutual interest with like-minded people. Facebook Groups are usually non-commercial in nature.
• Pages: If you follow a brand or public figure, you probably have clicked “Like” on their Facebook Page. Pages are meant to represent a public figure or a brand. You can use a Page as a separate place to promote your studio without bugging your friends and family with updates.

Setting Up Your Page

To create a Facebook Page:

1. Go to facebook.com/pages/create
2. Click to choose a Page category. For a yoga studio, you’ll want to select “Local Business or Place.”
3. Select a more specific category from the drop-down menu. Most people classify their studio as, “Spas/Beauty/Personal Care.”
4. Fill out the required information.
5. Click “Get Started” and follow the on-screen instructions.
6. You can continue to manage your page via the desktop web or the dedicated Facebook Pages Manager app.

Branding Your Page

The Lululemon Athletica Facebook Page as seen on an iPhone 6.

To get people to Like your page, you have to communicate what you offer in a clear and attractive way. The two most important items for this are your cover image and profile image.

• Cover Photo: Add a unique cover photo for your page. Note that it can not be more than twenty percent text, which is great because nothing is more visually pleasing than a picture that speaks a thousand words. A yoga pose photo or one of a class in session would be ideal.
• Profile Picture: This is the smaller square image that pages use for their icon. Note that on some mobile devices it will look minuscule, so use something simple that will look good even when shrunk down. Most studios use their logo. If you don’t have a logo, low-cost design options include Fiverr, Envato Studio, and Tailor Brands.

Check how your chosen photos look on desktop, tablet, and phone. Note that the majority of your audience can be expected to access your Facebook Page via their phone, so ensuring it looks great on small screens is the highest priority.

Some great Facebook Pages to check for inspiration include Athleta, DoYouYoga, Lululemon Athletica, and Yoga Journal.

2. The Key — Human Connection

The keys to success for your studio on Facebook are to offer a rich source of inspiration and motivation while maintaining a healthy balance of authenticity and a community leadership.

• Share Yourself: Your community members like a personal connection not only with each other but with their yoga teachers. This increases familiarity and trust, which can be big factors in student loyalty. Of course, where you draw the line with your personal privacy is up to you, but showing your lifestyle to some degree helps make it easier to feel a connection.
• Interact: Your students crave friendship and acknowledgment. For this reason, interact with your audience through comments. You want to be able to show the radiance you have as an individual not just as an instructor.

3. Content — What to Share

Your studio community will react well to a variety of content.

• Notices: Obviously, you need to keep your students up-to-date on teacher substitutions, dates the studio may be closed, or any changes to the class schedule that may affect their experience.
• Class Information: Don’t expect everybody to remember all the different types of classes and excellent teachers you feature. Post about them once in a while.
• Special Events: You likely already know that your Facebook Page has a built-in event calendar. Make sure you use it!
• Photos: Show what is happening at your studio by taking pictures and posting them regularly. Show everybody how beautiful your studio is, the amazing people there, and even healthy options for eating nearby. Learn how to take great looking yoga photos.
• Video: Remember that 85 percent of Facebook video is watched without sound. This means the best type of videos are those that don’t require words. If you do want to use speech in your video, you should be adding captions.
• Blog Posts: Not everybody is a writer, but if you have mastered the basics of blogging, be sure to share links to any posts that your students might gain value from. Generally, Facebook users tend to prefer to stay on Facebook, so your headline, image, and excerpt need to be compelling enough to make them want to click and jump to your blog.

4. Knowing Your Audience

Facebook Page Insights is an incredibly useful tool for learning about your community and how you can better serve them. It will break down the number of views, engagement, reach, and much more relevant information that you didn’t even think of so that you can learn which actions are working for you. To access it, go to your Page and click the upper left “Insights” tab.

How to find your Facebook Page’s “Insights.”

You will see the overview of the most recent activity on your Page. Scroll through the different tabs on the left-hand side for the details of each category.

The “Likes” and “Reach” show how the numbers change throughout the most recent days. If you notice a dip on the graphs, evaluate what affected the decrease in your reach. Perhaps it was something you posted that the audience wasn’t necessarily interested in.

Here is what our Facebook Page’s Insights Summary looked like as of October 2nd, 2016. Notice the menu on the left-hand side.

Your Page Insights can also give you demographic data on your audience and even tell you the kind of device they use to view your Page. Take your time to get to know all the relevant details about your followers so that you can better serve them with your future posts.

Within the Page Views section, you can filter by age and gender. As you can see, our largest audience segment are young men.

Your Facebook Page allows you to schedule posts in advance. To ensure your posts come out when they are most likely to be seen, check the “Posts” tab to see the times of day and days of the week when your followers are most active on Facebook.

Within the Posts section, you can see when your fans are online. The peak time for our Page is 7 pm but may differ depending on your audience characteristics.

Look at specific posts on your Page and identify your audience even more by going to “People” tab. The example below gives you an idea of how it looks once you acquire a large community. It displays the demographics of individuals who are your current fans and strangers who have viewed your content. It even shows their countries, cities, and the language they use Facebook in!

Within the People section, you can see a breakdown of the people who have liked, commented on, or shared your posts or engaged with your Page in the past 28 days.

5. Reaching More People

Types of Reach

There are two types of reach you need to be familiar with on Facebook:

1. Organic Reach: This is the number of people who see your posts without you having to spend money to boost their exposure. In the early days of Facebook, there were far fewer users, but the rate of organic reach was very high. Over the years, as Facebook’s popularity has grown, the platform has deliberately decreased the rate of organic reach to encourage people to pay for reach.
2. Paid Reach: You guessed it — this is the number of people who saw your posts when you pay to get Facebook to show them to more people. On Facebook, this is referred to as “Boosting” a post.

What Determines Your Reach

Facebook automatically determines who sees what on its platform. Their goal is to show each user the content that they are most likely to value. Generally, this means that updates from family and friends are given preference.

In the early days, many yoga studios enjoyed strong organic reach. However, Facebook has been slowly tightening things over the years as use numbers grew. Today you cannot expect much organic reach at all for posts made to your Facebook Page.

For your Page’s updates, the number of people you can reach with a post will be influenced by various factors including:

• Media Type: The type of content in your post (text, link, picture, or video). As of the time of writing, Facebook’s News Feed algorithm tends to be favoring video (video uploaded to Facebook— not links to videos on other platforms such as YouTube). Especially live video.
• Engagement: The more people who engage with your post (Likes, comments, shares, clicks on links, playing videos, etc.), the more Facebook will show it to others — especially their friends.
• Campaign Parameters: Obviously, if you are paying to boost the reach of a post, then other factors such as the audience you target, your budget, and how long you run your campaign will influence your reach.

Within the Promotions section of your Insights, you can see a summary of your current and past campaigns.

6. How to Boost Your Facebook Posts

Below I’ll walk you through the process of boosting a post. Don’t worry — it’s not as hard as it seems and you can set a tiny budget so that even if you make a total mess of it (which you won’t), your loss will be negligible.

First Steps

• Post: First, go ahead and post on your Page just as you normally would.
• Boost Post: Once your post is live, in its bottom right corner, you will see a “Boost Post” button. Click it, and you will be presented with various options to set up your campaign for that individual post.
• Edit Audience: Click on “Edit” to change your default audience so it will be easier in the future when you decide to promote your post.

When you go to “boost” a post, you will be given a popup like this. Click the “Edit” link to edit your target audience parameters.

Existing Fans

If you have a substantial number of followers, you can select, “People who Like your Page.” If you don’t have many fans, you could choose “People who Like your Page and their friends.”

Creating a New Audience

Another alternative is to select, “Create New Audience” and define parameters to target new people.

• Reference back to your Page’s Insights to get a better idea of your existing audience, but don’t let that limit you.
• Adjust your preferences for gender and age range. For example, if your post is about yoga for seniors, then perhaps it’s better to target people over a certain age. Or, if you are running a class for pre-natal yoga, then you may decide to limit your targeting to women in a particular age range.
• You can add to reach your within a fifty-mile radius of your city. In some cities, people prefer somewhere within walking distance from their homes, in others, they may be prepared to drive for miles. Calibrate for the most likely scenarios in your community.
• As for interests, you don’t just want to select “Fitness and wellness;” narrow it down further to “Yoga.” You may like to add in meditation too if that is a big part of what you offer. Depending on how big your city is, you will want to tweak the interests to focus further.

Facebook allows you to set your target according to various parameters.

Budget and Duration

• Budget: I have seen great results with reach, engagement, and views by investing just one dollar per post. Start with this minimum amount and later, once you feel comfortable with the process, you can experiment with spending more.
• Duration: This refers to how long your boost will run. The shortest period is one day — start with that and see how that goes. You will often find that it’s enough since most people use Facebook at least once a day.

Here you can see the fields for setting your budget and campaign duration. Pretty straightforward, right?

• Boost: Once you click “Boost” to submit your post, it will take a few hours to be approved by Facebook because they will have someone check that your post complies with the Facebook Advertising Policies.
• Start: Once your ad is approved, you will receive a notification, and it will start to be shown at the very top of people’s newsfeed so they can’t ignore it!
• Finish: Facebook will notify you again once your campaign has ended and you will be able to review the results.

6. Promoting Your Facebook Page

We’ve discussed above how to boost an individual post to have it reach more people. However, there may be times when you would prefer to focus specifically on getting more people to Like your Page.

To create a campaign for your Page go to the top right corner, click the drop-down menu and select, “Create Ads.”

There are actually two ways to start creating an ad to promote your Page. We’ll cover the one on the right — clicking “Create Ads” from the drop-down menu.

Select Your Objective

You will be asked to specify the objective of your campaign. Here you would click, “Promote Your Page.”

These are the different types of promotions you can run on Facebook. We’ll be talking about how to promote your Page.

Specify Your Targeting

Next, you will be given different choices for targeting such as a location, age range, gender, interests, and language. There is a “Save this audience” option — be sure to click this so you can use it again.

Here you can setup your target audience and save it for later use.

Budget and Duration

• When you get the “Budget and Duration” section, change the daily budget to five dollars*.
• Take note of the “Estimated…Likes per day” so that you can later compare Facebook’s prediction with the actual result. In our experience, the actual Likes per day exceed those numbers.
• As for the “Duration,” just go for the minimum seven days*.

*You can spend more and run a longer campaign later once you are confident in your knowledge of how the whole system works. For now, keep everything at the minimum settings.

Again, here you can set your budget and campaign duration. Looks familiar right?

Billing

• Facebook limits Page owners to spending a maximum of twenty-five US dollars during their first campaign.
• They will not bill you until your campaign has completed, on the seventh day.
• After your second or third advertisement, Facebook will increase your limit to fifty dollars.
• Soon enough Facebook will increase your threshold and allow you to spend over 100 dollars. However, we have never spent more than thirty-five dollars per week.
• When your budget exceeds 100 dollars, Facebook will change to monthly billing cycles.

Be sure to check your Insights and continuously re-calibrate your targeting to ensure you are getting the best return for your money.

Review

Once your campaign has been submitted, you will see a summary of your advertisement while Facebook reviews your campaign. Once they approve it, it will start running automatically.

Facebook reviews all new campaigns. The process usually only takes a short while, and your campaign will automatically begin running as soon as it’s approved.

What’s Next?

Once you’ve followed all the instructions above, you’ll have a Facebook Page that looks great, offers fantastic content, and you’ll know how to build your audience.

What’s next? We believe we’ve given you more than enough to work with above, but when you are ready, check out Facebook’s Power Editor for finer controls over your campaigns.

Well, Facebook is constantly innovating, and there are always new things to try. We’re learning new things every day and expect you will too. The key is to continue experimenting and paying close attention to your audience. We look forward to seeing what you can do!