The Life Coach’s Guide to Getting Clients on Social Media

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You’re here because you need practical, step-by-step information on social media for life coaches.

Well we’ve got some good news: you can transform your social media presence into one of your most cost-effective marketing tools for your life coaching business.

Let’s tackle how to leverage social media to attract your dream life coaching clients and seriously grow your business.

Why Life Coaches Should Include Social Media in Their Marketing Strategy

73% of marketers say that social media has been an effective marketing tool for their business, and it’s easy to see why.

First off, organic social media, if managed by yourself, costs pretty much zilch. It can help you build an organic following online in a way that allows you to interact with your community.

That’s why social media is one of the most realistic ways to market a life coaching business, especially if you’re just starting out.

The traffic you generate from social media can then be redirected to your life coaching website or blog, in order to push your potential clients further down your sales funnel – for example, by growing your email list! And because they already know who you are, they will be more likely to trust you and book a discovery call with you down the road.

[ Read: Get Leads From Your Coaching Blog: How to Create a Simple Funnel That Works Around the Clock ] 

Social media for life coaches is, by nature, social. These platforms are designed for you to grow a relationship with your followers, instead of providing a one-way line to dump whatever info you want on them. And you can’t successfully grow a life coaching business without having a trusted relationship with your clients in the first place.

Figure Out Which Social Platform Your Target Audience Hangs Out On

If you’re a life coach for professional women 40 years and up, it wouldn’t make sense to build your social media presence on TikTok

There are so many social media platforms available, and unless you have a big marketing team at your disposal, you can’t be on all of them at once! 

Start by doing some research to find out where your target audience hangs out online. 

[ Read: The Coach’s Guide to Finding Your Niche ]

Maybe it’s certain Facebook groups. Maybe it’s Instagram. If you work with millennials, there’s a 91% chance they’ll be watching Youtube.

The more specific you can be with your target audience, the more you’ll be able to establish a social media marketing strategy that attracts them – as long as you’re on the right platform.

Facebook Tips for Life Coaches

If you want to tackle Facebook, you should definitely have a business page. However, organic traffic is quite low on business pages, so it may not be the only tool you can use.

Facebook pages are effective when you want to start running paid ads for your coaching business, but groups are where it’s at! (Check out our sister company, MeetEdgar, which automates your posts to Facebook groups!)

Facebook groups allow you to create a community that represents your values. The best part about groups is that you don’t need to be the only one creating content, since your community can ask questions and help each other out, too!

To grow your Facebook group organically, provide an incentive for people to sign up. Maybe you can run a free 5-day challenge that’s only available in the group, or offer a valuable freebie for everyone who joins!

Here are a few things to keep in mind if you want to use groups as a marketing tool:

  • Establish clear community rules, and moderate your group to ensure your community feels safe and secure
  • Create posts that incite engagement without always trying to sell something
  • Engage with your members on a daily basis, and answer their questions

If you prioritize community building and engagement over selling, you’ll find it easier to convert clients, when the time does come to sell – and some members may come to you for support, themselves!

Twitter Tips for Life Coaches

If you already use Twitter, you’ll know the key to getting good engagement on this platform is frequent and consistent tweeting.

We suggest at least one to five tweets per day to keep your momentum going. Make sure to use images, gifs, and videos to catch the eye of your audience and communicate more with less – remember, Twitter has a character limit of 280 per tweet!

Because Twitter works with hashtags, you’ll also need to do some hashtag research to reach your audience. Using 1 or 2 hashtags – and no more – will help increase your engagement by 21%.

Take a look at the Top 10 Trends on Twitter to see what hashtags are trending, since you’ll get a lot of traffic if you use these. But only use them if they are relevant. 

(Wouldn’t it look weird to tweet about the purpose of life with a #superbowl attached to it?)

Hashtagify is a great tool if you want to find relevant hashtags without the guesswork. You can even get custom suggestions for your next tweet!

The only exception? If you’re trying to drive traffic to your website, lose the hashtag, since tweets without hashtags generate 23% more clicks!

Finally, don’t hesitate to ask for a retweet! You have a 12x higher chance of getting retweeted when you specifically ask for it.

Instagram Tips for Life Coaches

Instagram is amazing for life coaches, because it’s much easier to get organic reach compared to Facebook pages.

And unlike Twitter, you can create Stories to create more spontaneous content that isn’t as curated as the rest of your Instagram feed.

With Instagram, you should put your focus on the caption. 

Wait, isn’t Instagram a visual platform?

While that’s true – and while it’s your images or videos that will catch the attention of your audience – it’s the caption that helps them know you better and establish a relationship.

You can use your captions to tell authentic stories, discuss the results you’ve gotten for your past clients, bust some common misconceptions about life coaching, and so much more.

However, you shouldn’t just focus on your grid posts. You can use Reels, Stories, and IGTV to create a variety of content on the platform.

Stories, in particular, are a fun and effective way to interact directly with your audience! By using tools like surveys, questions, polls, and more, you can generate more engagement and have your audience respond directly to your inbox in some cases.

And once they’re in your inbox, you can get a conversation going, which is the best way to grow a relationship with future clients.

Just like Twitter, Instagram uses hashtags, and you can use the same tools to research your perfect hashtags. But don’t just use one or two – you can use the full 30 hashtags allowed in a caption to get the maximum reach possible.

That will allow your future followers to find you!

You can also find potential followers by looking at some competing accounts. Spend some time each day following new people and directly engaging with their content – interact with their stories, like their posts, and write meaningful Instagram comments on their posts.

Youtube for Life Coaches

Youtube is a bit different from other social media platforms, because it behaves more like a search engine than a traditional social media platform.

This means it has more in common with Google, its mother company, than with Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

When you optimize your video titles and descriptions with the right keywords, you’ll not only show up on Youtube for relevant search results – you’ll also have more chances of showing up on Google!

But SEO is just the beginning. If you want to grow your subscriber base and eventually generate clients from Youtube, your videos will need to be highly engaging and relevant for the audience you’re targeting.

Here are a few tips to make it work on Youtube:

  • Brand your channel to make it stand out and make it attractive for your target audience
  • Post regularly – the algorithm prefers channels that post as regularly and as often as possible
  • Reply to all comments when you’re small enough to do so
  • Don’t be shy to call your viewers to action – ask them to like, subscribe, comment, and check out your other videos
  • Add a link to a freebie in your description to grow your email list (and ask them to check it out), or redirect them to your calendar so they can book a call with you

Finally, make sure you spend some time creating eye-catching thumbnails! Even if your videos get recommended to viewers, your title and thumbnail are all you have to convince them to click and watch.

Social Media For Life Coaches: General Tips on Growing Your Followers and Organic Engagement

No matter the platform, your goal should be twofold – grow your followers, and increase organic engagement.

High follower counts without engagement are worthless, and high engagement without enough followers won’t help you grow your life coaching business.

In general, here are some ways you can do this that apply to all platforms:

  • Vary the type of posts you publish – don’t always try to sell, and always look for ways to mix it up or make it more interesting
  • Share content from your audience or clients, to give another perspective
  • Always respond to your followers – unless they’re trolling
  • Use audience engagement tools like polls, surveys, and questions
  • Run contests or giveaways, in exchange for follows and shares
  • Collaborate with other brands to expose yourselves to each other’s audiences
  • Follow other relevant accounts, and engage with them
  • Use a holiday calendar to preschedule social media posts during holidays

But here’s something many coaches forget – have some fun with it! Yes, social media can be an amazing marketing tool, but it shouldn’t stop you from enjoying the process of building your audience and getting to know your future clients.

We love and recommend MeetEdgar for scheduling all of your social media posts. It’s the best social media scheduling tool that lets you load up your whole back catalog of content and ensures that it’s systematically re-purposed to get in front of your audience.

Should You Be Advertising On Social Media?

Paid ads are a powerful amplification tool for your marketing efforts. By this, we mean it will amplify your current efforts.

If you don’t have a life coaching offer that’s proven to convert, throwing money at it on social media won’t help. 

Before you launch paid ads, you should start by growing your audience organically and validating your offers. If you’ve got a high-converting offer that you want to scale, then paid ads – especially Facebook and Instagram ads – could be a good idea.

Get More Clients by Winning at Social Media for Life Coaches

There you have it – by now, you’re ready to dip your toes in social media marketing, to help you attract more of your dream clients for life coaching services!

Remember that success on social media won’t happen overnight. Consistency is key, so keep at it, and you will see results.

And if you’re looking for the best life coach software to run your business, check out Paperbell. It’s the all-in-one solution that manages your scheduling, billing, contract signing and more.

social media for life coaches
By Charlene Boutin
Charlene is an email marketing and content strategy coach for small business owners and freelancers. Over the past 5 years, she has helped and coached 50+ small business owners to increase their traffic with blog content and grow their email subscribers.
March 13, 2021

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