If you are currently navigating a business plan that involves reaching your members digitally, you are likely promoting your virtual classes to your clients. But how are you promoting those classes? There are multiple ways to get the word out, and the simplest, most accessible ways to do that include email newsletters—and social media.

Why Social Media?

Social media is at the foundation of your marketing outreach plan. Not only is it free to use, but it is where your audience spends the majority of their time. According to information from Famemass from 2019, 45% of the world’s population use social media and spends an average of 2 hours and 23 minutes on it per day; this is a nearly double increase from 1 hour and 30 minutes in 2012. Needless to say, social media is fertile ground for modern, digital marketing.

We know social media is a great starting place to share your content and news from your business. But your time is precious, and you don’t have the resources to test and try methods to get results. What are the best ways for you to promote your classes?

Create recurring Facebook events

Facebook has evolved over the past decade to become a truly innovative marketing machine for businesses. On this single platform, brands can promote photos, videos, files, products, services, and finally, events. The event tool on Facebook has been a long-lasting tool which started as a way for users to promote social events among friends but has now become a marketing tool for brands.

With Facebook’s events function, you can create advertising audiences depending on the responses to your event, as well as create recurring events in the future—a function that will save you hours of work each week.

Host introduction classes live on social media

We’ve discussed the best ways to share your classes with your members, but what if you want to explore your social media options to reach a bigger audience and recruit new members? One strategy you may want to explore is using social media livestreaming for beginner’s introduction classes, and then presenting an offer for a discounted class for whomever is interested.

This allows you to share the value of your classes with your students and present an offer on a service you know they are interested in. It is a good way to retain more students during this difficult time.

Share your classes on similar-minded groups

This is a great way to promote your classes with people you know are interested in your service. Facebook’s groups feature has become a new way for brands to share content and exclusive offers to their community. By engaging with members of the group, they know that their members are genuinely interested in their content—rather than just sharing the content on the main page, where it can get lost in the algorithm.

Let’s say you are a yoga instructor who wants to share their hatha yoga class series starting next week. If you are a part of Facebook groups for yogis to talk all things yoga, sharing a virtual class will likely yield more results than sharing it to your company’s page and hoping your audience sees it. Plus, it is a free, organic way to promote your content to a targeted audience.  

Keep up with reminders

Now that you’ve decided where and how you want to share your next virtual class, how often should you share it? It depends entirely on the platform. For example, Twitter is a naturally much faster moving platform than Facebook or Instagram. The same goes for Instagram Stories and Snapchat—these are both platforms where content can get lost in the noise real fast, because it is meant to be quick and efficient.

With that in mind, you may want to share your class promotions up to twice per week on Facebook and Instagram, and at least four to five times a week on Twitter, Instagram Story, or Snapchat. This is particularly true for Instagram Stories and Snapchat, where content disappears after 24 hours.

Retarget members who showed interest, but didn’t attend

As mentioned just above, Facebook events now have a feature for brands to promote content to users who responded to and interacted with previous events you hosted. This feature depends on how many people you promote your event to in the first place, as Facebook audiences need at least 1,000 people to function properly.

The good news is that, no matter how small your audience is, you still use that information to promote to a new audience. Facebook allows advertisers to create lookalike audiences—users who match your audience’s age, location, and interests— for targeting in the future.