by Mandy Green, Busy Coach
I have spent the last few months studying what the top experts are doing on social media to create a loyal group of followers, expand their reach, and make more sales. I took what they taught and have been using this information to help coaches pivot to using social media more for recruiting purposes.
I heard this fact that recruits retain 80% of what they see, 20% of what they read, and only 10% of what they hear.
Since Covid has eliminated or significantly restricted your ability to show recruits what you are about in person on campus, social media, since it is a visual platform, really isn’t something you can be ignoring at the moment.
I have done the research and pulled out the best strategies that I think would apply to coaches and have been testing them with my private coaching clients.
As I was doing the research, it was easy to see that they all pretty much follow the same 4 steps.
Let’s get into the four steps.
Step number one is to attract. These are your daily posts that grab recruits’ attention and get them to stop and look. In the social media world, it is a war for attention. If you don’t have a system to grab their attention, you get washed away in the noise.
Most coaches know you need to be posting consistently, but there is just a huge lack of consistency. What happens for most coaches is they get excited, they start posting content consistently, but then it starts to take so much time. They get distracted with their program stuff and with life and because they don’t have a system to make this easy, they end up giving up on it.
Step number two is to engage.
You want to make sure you’re posting compelling content that’s going to create that engagement.
When you post content on your profile, the social network is only going to show it to a small percentage of your following, maybe 10% or in some cases even less depending on your following.
But, if recruits like it, if they start commenting and then you get in there and you’re commenting back and you’re engaging, it will raise the relevancy of the post. And it basically tells the algorithm to show it to more people or to stay up on the site for longer.
A lot of coaches have been emails or setting up calls with me to talk about how to reach younger recruits or to expand the number of recruits who see your stuff. Engagement is the key.
Step number three is to connect.
Here is where the magic happens. This is where you get off of the timeline and into the direct messages. This has been where we are seeing a lot more highly engaged conversations happening.
Now, if you’re doing steps one and two right, you’re going to have recruits actively reaching out to you, direct messaging you on a more regular basis that you can then have more serious conversations with.
So, steps one through three are what allow you to move into step four.
Most importantly, step four is the close. This is where you are getting recruits to commit to a campus visit or even to commit to your program.
And for most coaches who are using social media, their biggest challenge isn’t the closing process because they tend to never get that far. For most coaches, it’s that they haven’t mastered the attract phase with enough compelling content at the beginning to create more movement along the process.
This simple four step system is what social media experts are using to not just survive, but thrive during this tough covid time. Coaches, I don’t see why you can’t be doing the same thing with your recruiting. Attract, engage, connect, and close. It’s a simple as that that.
If you’re a recruiter who is serious about learning how to improve your social media recruiting, would like a proven process that’s not going to overwhelm you, and something that you will most importantly be able to be consistent with, I’d like to share with you my social story recruiting, 365 social media recruiting content calendar system.
You’re going to get 365 days of content ideas for every single day of the year. Never again are you going to have to wonder what should I post today.
This is going to save you so much time, so much stress, save you literally hours and hours and hours because it’s got content ideas preplanned out for you for the next 365 days on a fully editable google calendar. Go here to check out the Social Story Recruiting details.