Social media marketing can be a very effective tool for a dance studio owner to market their studio without investing the financial resources that can accompany a marketing or advertising campaign. Creating profiles for your business, posting relevant and interesting content, and engaging your followers all represent simple and cost-effective ways to spread knowledge and information about your studio (which is, obviously, the best studio around!). Even better, social media marketing can be significantly less expensive or free, but you will need to invest a bit of time. You may need to shell out big bucks for the print ad in the local paper, but you don’t have to pay Kayla’s mother anything to get her to “Like” your page on Facebook or “retweet” your current promotion. Ready to get started? Here are 6 social media tips to make it easier for you:

1. Start Somewhere. Start Small:

Especially for a dance studio, the most important step to getting started with social media marketing is identifying your customers and figuring out which social media outlets they use most. You may want to ask some of your parents or dancers which medium they use most often. Facebook has become such a widely used resource by people of all ages that it is fair to assume you will be able to reach out to your current and prospective clients through this medium. So, creating a Facebook page and using it to post updates and engage the community could be the most important way for your business (i.e. a dance studio) to reach its targeted market niche. And hopefully, dedicating yourself to managing only one online profile can eliminate a lot of the stress that you’re feeling about getting involved with all of this newfangled technology in the first place.

2. Be Diligent When it Comes to your Social Media Responsibilities:

Many businesses approach social media and social media marketing in the way you or I approach our New Year’s Resolutions: We start out unbelievably excited about the prospect of making a positive change in our routine and after a month or so we’ve given up or put our resolution out of our mind completely (this will not help you increase your visibility!). So, once you decide your plan to start marketing with social media, force yourself to stick with it– If you decide to post content once a week, post content every week. Whatever plan you determine best fits your studio, stick to it (even if progress seems slow at first). This segues perfectly into our next tip:

3. Patience is Your Friend:

They say that Rome was not built in a day, and neither is a social media profile garnering millions of “Likes” built overnight. Think of building your profile like building anything else: do it one piece at a time. With a social media profile, build your presence one piece of content at a time. Be cognizant of your audience when creating or posting content. If you post things that your small cohort of followers likes, they’ll share it with their small cohort of followers, and so on and so forth. This kind of organic growth is especially important for a business like a dance studio. It’s not that impressive to a parent of a prospective student that 10,000 people (most of whom don’t live in your town or are robots) like your page. What will impress them is seeing parents they know liking your page. And this kind of growth can only happen with time.

4. Elicit Responses to Your Posts:

Try your best to post content to your page that gets your followers to respond and join a dialogue with your studio. For example, any time you post a video or an image or an update, think about adding “Tell us what you think” or something similar to the end of the post. Simply encouraging responses from your followers is a great way to make them feel involved in your business and your page. Plus, a series of comments on your post makes your page look and feel more active, so more people feel encouraged to get in on the action. Finally, asking questions like “What kinds of classes would you like to see us offer?” or “What was your favorite part about this class?” are easy ways to find out areas where your studio can improve that you may not have been aware of previously.

5. Use words that describe your studio:

One simple trick to increase the exposure of your page on the internet is to load your page with Search Engine keywords. For example, if your studio is competitive, you can do a post titled, “Our Competitive Teams Gear up for Competition Season.” Unity in Motion’s FanPage is a perfect example of this.

6. Use local directories:

While the global nature of social media is certainly commendable, the real impact for a studio is local. Create business profiles on Google, Yahoo!, and Bing to set up local pages in each search engine and help ensure that you show up when people in your area are searching for a dance studio on the internet. Also, get your business listed in online local directories such as Superpages and Citysearch. These profiles will help increase the number of times you show up in search results because all of your different profiles across these platforms will show up individually.

So there you have it: our tips for growing your studio with social media marketing. As always, if you have any questions, please Contact Us.