Personal Trainer Social Media: Ideas, Examples & Schedule
Thinking of personal trainer social media ideas can be tough, there are dozens of factors to consider and knowing where to start can be difficult.
Fortunately, this guide is filled with inspiration about what, when, and where you should post. More specifically, we’ll cover:
- Platforms You Should Consider
- Developing a Personal Trainer Social Media Strategy
- Content Themes & Examples for Personal Trainers
- Content Schedule Example
- How Often Should You Post Content?
Perhaps the most consistent way to set your fitness content ideas apart from the crowd is by diversifying the services that you offer by completing further qualifications, such as a Level 5 Nutrition certification.
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Platforms You Should Consider
Before we get to personal trainer social media ideas, let's start by deciding what platforms to use, as this can have a huge impact on the kind of content you post, and how it’s received by your audience.
Although it is a good idea to use a wide range of social media platforms, you may find that prioritising some over others directs your brand to the correct audience.
It’s important to ensure that the fitness content ideas you create can translate across multiple platforms, and appeal to the different audiences you have, as these can differ.
First, let’s take a look at one of the most popular apps when it comes to social media - Instagram.
Instagram is a very visual platform, so you should focus on posting aesthetically pleasing imagery, rather than posts with lengthy captions or descriptions.
Instagram is the kind of platform that people quickly scroll through and so you need personal trainer content ideas that catch attention - but whose attention would this be?
Statistics on the users of Instagram found that over half of global Instagram users are aged 34 or younger, making it a great platform to use if your target audience is within this bracket.
This platform is brilliant for interacting with both current and potential clients. You can show off clients' success and it is particularly useful for showing progress pictures to advertise to potential clients so they can see what they can achieve with your help.
This demonstrates how your data, or at least what you advertise, has credible truth behind it by showing what your clients have achieved.
This is primarily aimed at potential clients, but can still be a great way to show off to current clients too, and prove to them that their training is effective.
For example, current clients can see their progress pictures on your page and feel part of your team.
By publicly interacting with them on comments, stories and even live streams you’re creating exclusivity to your brand, and a sense of community and belonging for those who view your content.
This is just a snippet of what’s capable on Instagram, as alongside posts alone you can use stories and live streams to show off more of your personality, and update your followers on your daily life.
This is particularly useful for personal trainers, as you’re expected to have a confident and inviting attitude, so why not show this off in your daily stories?
Next is Facebook, and it’s likely that one way or another, you have either heard of it or have your own Facebook account.
What you might not be aware of, though, is that it’s incredibly beneficial when it comes to deploying your personal trainer's social media ideas.
Facebook is the biggest social media platform, connecting people of all ages from all over the world. This is of course one of the key reasons why you should use it but for personal trainers in particular, there is the reasoning behind Facebook being so beneficial of a platform.
Firstly, you can utilise the likes of Facebook groups and pages. Groups can be the perfect spot for clients to communicate and get in touch with one another and are also a great way to share their successions.
For example, take a look at this personal training business below that has a public page for members of their team to get in touch with fellow clients and the trainers themselves. It displays the sense of community that potential clients can become a part of.
Alongside this, you can create a Facebook business page that can share all important contact information, map location and posts regarding any surrounding information you wish to share.
Facebook also features the option for stories and live streaming, all of which can be incorporated into your social media strategies. However, you should understand that Facebook has a slightly different user base.
Though many people of all ages have a Facebook account, it’s far more popular with adult users, with recent statistics showing that almost 3.45 million people in Ireland are Facebook users.
YouTube
One of the most popular social media platforms is of course YouTube, and with video becoming more predominant on almost every platform, it should be a key player to consider.
YouTube is not only one of the biggest social media platforms, but it evolves in the same way that other apps are doing. For example, with TikTok booming, YouTube quickly adapted to create YouTube Shorts - which are bite-sized videos in a similar layout to that of TikTok.
We’ll touch on the prevalence of TikTok more shortly, but the video is hugely important when it comes to fitness content ideas
YouTube is particularly useful for personal trainers because you can share full workout videos that demonstrate your capabilities, as well as shorter-form content that shows off your personality and expertise in key areas, like nutrition or session planning
Video is great for communicating with potential or current clients on a personal level - talking to the camera has a more approachable feel than trying to portray that in a lengthy caption.
These platforms are the ones that you, as a personal trainer, should be drawing your attention to for the best ways to promote and communicate all in one place.
This isn’t to say you should not utilise the likes of Twitter, Reddit or any other social platform - it is a good idea to do so for brand awareness at least - but to get clients on board, you need an interactive base.
TikTok
TikTok is a social media app that’s recently experienced a huge boom in popularity. In fact, according to SEO site BackLinko, TikTok amassed over 3 billion downloads in less than four years, which is a huge audience that you could be taking advantage of.
TikTok is primarily used for entertainment, and though your main concern may not be fishing for clients on this platform, it could work in your favour if you’re confident enough to become a TikTok creator.
This is perhaps most evident with brand awareness on this platform, it would be a great place if you want to allow people into your personality and the fun things about your business but probably not the best place to try and communicate information.
For example, you may want to film a 60-second day in your life video, where people can see you with clients and how you train yourself alongside others. This is one of the personal trainer social media posts that is seen often, so you can join the trend!
LinkedIn is maybe not the place for your most valuable fitness content ideas, but it is a great place for personal trainer networking. LinkedIn is a place where you can share your business successions and how far you have come.
You may want to save your inspirational content for the likes of LinkedIn, it is a career-based site and people want to see motivational content. Though you’re a personal trainer, you are also a business owner and progression is a popular topic that people share on the platform.
Moreover, you can move away from worrying about personal trainer content ideas on LinkedIn, as you can prioritise making professional relationships and even partnerships.
You can get involved with relevant brands such as nutrition businesses while also keeping an eye out for what your competitors are up to all the while.
Overall, it is a good platform to consider, you should keep it professional on this site and save the more fun and personal fitness content ideas for the likes of Instagram and Facebook.
Developing A Social Media Strategy
When it comes to thinking of the best social media ideas for your business, you’re going to need a solid plan to succeed and thrive with your trainer social media ideas.
Avoid posting whenever and whatever without a real plan in place, as you could lose sight of the goals that you want to achieve with the help of social media.
You should lay out stages in which you hope to grow successful on social media or you will lose your organisation and potentially, your image will suffer. So, let’s see where to start.
#1 - Research Your Competitors & Find Out What Works
How do you plan for success when you don’t know what it looks like? You can't! So, before you start brainstorming social media content ideas, you’re going to not only want but need some inspiration.
This is as simple as seeing successful players in your area of practice when it comes to personal training. Ask yourself:
- How do they communicate with their clients?
- How do they promote their business?
- Do they portray their personality away from the business?
More specifically, you should focus on your chosen personal training niche, and how content creators in that niche interact with their followers and clients.
Having a niche is the route many personal trainers take to direct their energy and time to the right audience.
There are plenty of potential clients out there with many different needs and reasons for needing or wanting a personal trainer - so the ability to cater to every kind of client is very unlikely to come across as genuine.
If you do have a niche as a personal trainer, you should try to present this clearly to your followers. This could mean naming your social media account accordingly.
A great example of this is personal trainer Lee Plant, whose Instagram handle (@lptrainingnutrition) demonstrates their focus on weight loss through the help of nutritional education and personal training.
As you can see, from the get-go this account has all of the key information that you should know about him, before you’ve even started considering his services.
The key feature that you should take away is the fact that his education and niche of nutrition are in the name of his Instagram account.
Not only that, but the short description shows his key areas to cater to our nutrition and online personal training, as well as how he displays his level of authority by showing how he is a gym owner.
This is a great example to look at if you have the same or at least a similar niche. You should analyse their content and find what draws you in, and what would make a potential client buy into their service.
In a similar vein, we need to target your demographic a bit more clearly.
#2 - Defining Your Target Audience Demographic
So although you have a niche, to create social media content ideas that are going to have a positive impact on your business you’re going to know what demographics make it up.
Social media has extremely useful tools for directing your marketing efforts to the correct demographics, so you should certainly take advantage of this and make your invested time worthwhile.
So you can see this in action, one personal training business in London trains only females with female trainers. This is exactly how you target not only a niche but a demographic of people too.
As you can see, this social media account directly displays who they are targeting and what their service consists of as a personal trainer.
By now, your strategy should have two steps set in stone, which are:
- Research of successful personal training accounts and
- Defining your niche and target demographic.
Next is how your strategy gets put into action with the setting of goals. These goals should be measurable and luckily, social media makes it rather easy to measure success.
#3 - Set Engagement Goals
Now, you should set realistic goals to measure progress and success in your business. These should be actionable goals rather than engagement alone, for example:
- Increase engagement on communicative posts by 5% by the end of the month.
- Book at least 5 consultations by the end of the month through Instagram or Facebook.
- Convert a minimum of 50% of said consultations to clients by the end of the month.
These kinds of goals measure the success of your social media platform and directly track what sales are coming from your efforts in your social media content.
This way, you can see which content is bringing in the most engagement, and thus, the most clientele getting on board and then you can focus on these kinds of posts more, this of course alongside the other most compelling pieces of content.
The idea of social media goals is to directly measure the impact of what is going well and push direct messages to convert customers.
So now that you have these goals set, you should pursue a schedule to introduce some organisation into your social media content and ensure that no time is wasted.
#4 - Organise and Create a Content Schedule
Ultimately, if you’re working as a sole trader, your time is precious and you don’t want to be putting little effort into this time for almost no return.
To organise your time wisely, though, you can set up a schedule either yourself or with the help of handy software, which of course depends on the financial investment that you’re able to put into your marketing.
Before we show you an example of a week in the life of a personal trainer with a social media marketing schedule, we’d suggest alleviating the pressures of creating consistency using technology. Here are a few options that can help you:
The good thing about these sorts of software is that you can avoid jumping from one platform to the next and posting at various times.
Instead, you’re able to post on as many platforms as you like all at the same time. You can then schedule a week ahead so that all of your free time can be dedicated to clientele.
For instance, Sprout Social allows you to view multiple different interaction opportunities across your social media accounts, and control how and when you post.
Their example shows both Instagram and Facebook, two of the most popular social networking sites, as well as integration with Twitter, which can be a great way to interact with the latest in fitness content, developments and ideas.
Be sure to stick around to find a full 7-day content schedule example soon so you can get plenty of personal trainers' social media ideas, but first, we will take a look at some themes and content ideas to get your creativity flowing!
For some more useful resources on how to better promote your personal training business, read our helpful articles below:
- How To Be Your Own Personal Trainer (2022)
- 9 Expert Tips on Creating a Personal Trainer Leaflet
- How To Use Google My Business As A Personal Trainer
Become a Level 5 Personal Trainer Become a Level 5 Personal Trainer with OriGym's specialist courses!
Content Themes & Examples
After you have come up with a useful strategy on how you’re going to tackle social media, you may be wanting some inspiration on what content to post.
With our next section, we’ll explore some personal trainer social media post ideas, and how this can directly influence the impact you have on your audience, as well as how your clients (and potential clients) interact with your content.
Entertaining Personal Trainer Social Media Posts
Entertainment on social media is why most people get involved with the app in the first place, so although you’re trying to maybe promote your service as a personal trainer or get your personality out there.
You should have in the back of your mind consistently that the entertainment factor is not to be overlooked.
It doesn’t matter what your account is created for. With confidence and an understanding of the fundamentals of social media content ideas, you can always adapt to create a sense of fun and enjoyment for your followers.
For instance, we do this on our OriGym social account where we upload memes weekly which enforce a great level of engagement, while still retaining the core ideas we promote with our bespoke personal training courses.
Here is an example below of one of our favourites so you can understand what light-hearted personal trainer social media ideas look like.
This is an example of how you can still maintain a sense of consistency and an overall theme, but push the boundaries of what your followers might expect, prompting engagement and interaction with your fitness content ideas.
Engagement is extremely valuable so ensure that you’re doing your best to increase this, while still retaining relevancy to what you offer, and how it can impact a potential client.
Inspirational Personal Trainer Social Media Posts
Next are inspirational posts. This kind of content is designed to give your followers the motivation they need, especially as a personal training account you’re arguably expected to be able to motivate your followers as you would in the gym with clients!
Inspirational posts can come in different forms, and can be through:
- Storytelling
- Progress images
- Motivation quotes
- Words of encouragement
With this in mind, take a look at our page, where we upload weekly inspirational posts for some simple words of wisdom to get people going. For example, take a look at this post below.
This kind of graphic makes it easy for a user to read and move along, giving them a dose of positivity to their day, as well as helping boost the content you produce.
Communication is everything, and if your followers see you consistently providing some motivational words, they’re likely to stick around on your page and interact with the content you post.
If you need further help with how best to communicate, check out our article on key personal training communication skills here.
Personal Trainer Social Media Promotions
Of course, as a business owner, you’re going to want and need some self-promotion. It’s likely one of the main reasons you’re looking for personal trainer social media ideas.
This is when things like advertisement-style videos come in handy, and though it may take some investment and time, it is certainly worth it.
Promotional material consists of things that show your service and advertise why you’re the best in the business. This can be reflected through multiple different aspects, including:
- Your level of experience
- Your additional qualifications (like Level 5 specialist certifications)
- Your pricing structures
- Your personal trainer package deals
- Any special offers you’re running (such as Black Friday or New Year promotions)
A great example of this comes from The Zone PT studio, which promotes its service in a professional-looking short video that you can view here.
This is all it takes to get your business seen by potential clients, this way you can show off your business in action with real clients and even be able to build a rapport with people who you haven’t even met yet!
These reels are easily found by users who have an interest in fitness, in this instance. So, there is even more reasoning behind why posing promotional material is a good idea.
You may wonder if there is any point in posting a promotion to followers who are already interested in your account, but this kind of material is easily shareable between other users and the aforementioned explore page is a great place for those to find you and don’t already follow you.
Not only that, but it can work in your favour when it comes to location-based posts. If the hashtags on your post are relevant, you have all the more reason to be found.
For example, you could use the hashtag “#personaltrainerliverpool” and with this alone people can see what you offer and where you can be found.
Plus, you’re able to tell Instagram what your page is about and thus, find yourself on the correct explore pages!
Personal Trainer Social Media Post Ideas: Educational Posts
Educational posts or informative content is key to showing how you’re a reliable part of the fitness community and demonstrates to potential clients why you should be trusted.
Contrary to popular belief, these don’t have to be boring or mundane. They can combine your personality with the interesting content itself. Take a look at this example here.
This not only shows the PTs themselves in action but also creates an informative short clip that is easy to watch whilst taking in the all important information, in this instance “what does failure mean”.
Your followers and potential customers need to know that you're well-educated in fitness and care about the small details, and it’s videos and content like this that communicate that perfectly.
Personal Trainer Social Media Ideas: Share Personal Posts
Personal posts are vital to ensure that you come across as the best version of yourself, you should be able to communicate the top traits of what makes an excellent personal trainer within videos or posts to show why clients should trust you.
This doesn’t necessarily have to be promotional, it can be about your progress, your success and your personal fitness goals.
This shows your relatability and provides the public with the ability to get to know you as a person. For example, a popular video on almost every platform is “A Day in the Life”
Take a look at this example from El-May, who’s using social media to explain to her followers and potential clients what she does daily.
Some can be more lengthy and personal than others, but short clips that won’t take up too much of your time are always effective and are great for the weeks you don’t have time to pump so much effort and precious time into filming and editing content.
Personal Training Social Media Posts: Share Interactive Content
Finally, we have all-important interactive posts that allow your followers to get in touch with you. These can include the likes of:
- Instagram Polls
- Q & As
- Swipe up links
- Feedback forms
- Comments
- Reposts (feed and stories)
These are super popular and are almost always on the most successful personal training pages. Encouraging conversation in the comments is always a good way to increase engagement and even spark a community within your followers.
This is not only helpful to you, in the sense of feedback and comments, but also for your audience.
You get to see what your followers want to see and you get to create more tailored content for your current audience - it's a win-win!
Now that you have a good idea of what kind of themes you can set for your content and at least a starting point for some inspiration, below we have a list of examples that you would typically see on a personal trainer’s social media page.
Examples Of Great Personal Training Social Media Posts
So you can see this in action, here is a popular approach to content surrounding fitness - below you can find a video named: My Morning Routine
This is popular content that people like to see and it clearly shows, with this video having almost 2 million views!
On the other hand, if you don’t want to take the personality approach you can use your clients as the spotlight.
Below you can see a prime example of what this could look like in a simple Instagram post providing your client with rewarding words while also showcasing what is possible with your help to others.
Some other titles that you could use are:
- Mini Workout session with [Insert business name]
- Your Personal Fitness Accomplishments
- What I Eat in A Day (When on a bulk / When on a cut)
- Client Spotlight
- New Member of The Team
- Behind the Scenes of [insert business name]
- Monthly Challenge
With these examples in mind, you can make them your own - put your twist on things and create a schedule that will help you organise your time wisely.
So you can understand what this may look like, we have created a 7-day week content schedule example below.
Content Schedule Example
Monday:
Content: Inspirational Post to start the week: A positive quote or words of encouragement.
Channels: Instagram and Facebook
Tuesday:
Content: Transformation Tuesday: Show a client or your own fitness progress images.
Channels: Instagram & Facebook posts and stories.
Wednesday:
Content: Happy Hump Day! - Ways to find motivation midweek.
Channels: Instagram & Facebook posts and stories.
Thursday:
Content: Engagement focus: “Ask me Anything” questions and polls.
Channels: Instagram Stories
Friday:
Content: Happy Friday! - A congratulatory post for clients that have done well and reached goals at the end of the week.
Channels: Instagram & Facebook stories.
Saturday:
Content: Polls on Instagram stories - Who works out on the weekend?
Channels: Instagram stories.
Sunday
Content: Video - Easy yoga sequence for a restful Sunday.
Channels: Tiktok, Instagram reels and Youtube shorts.
This is a 7-day schedule and you may not find LinkedIn on your list week on week. This is because LinkedIn doesn't require regular updates, and should instead be reserved for any career developments or changes in the services you offer.
For instance, if you complete a Level 5 in sports nutrition, and plan to offer diet plans and tailored dietary recommendations as part of your service, you should change your professional profile on LinkedIn to reflect this.
So, with that in mind you’re ready to start planning; don't forget, if you're looking to make a statement through social media, you may find creating a website is a good route to head down too.
How Often Should You Post Content?
Now that you have overcome the difficulty of coming up with content and sticking to a consistent plan schedule for your social media, you may be wondering how often you should be posting at all.
So, the best advice we can provide is to always prioritise quality content over quantity. Pumping out 3 posts a day on the same channel is not always the best idea and it actually might work against you with particular algorithms.
You should take a look at successful competitors and their frequency to understand what works for accounts just like yours.
Ensure you understand the difference between stories and grid posts, this is because stories are used much more casually than a grid post and many successful accounts post multiple stories in 1 day - so don’t be afraid to try this out for yourself.
However, when it comes to actual grid posts on all channels, no more than 1-2 a day is typically sufficient. For a holistic view of what is seen to be the most effective, HootSuite conducted research and found for an optimal return you should post:
- On Instagram 3-7x per week
- On Facebook, 1-2 times per day
As for YouTube, the process of creating a video and getting it edited and uploaded is much more lengthy than a post or story, so you would be expected to upload once every week or 2 - depending on your specific goal for YouTube engagement.
So, though these are useful guidelines to at least begin with, you should conduct your experiments and try different methods until you find one that works for your engagement goals.
Before You Go!
Now that you have the tools and skills to create some great social media content ideas, it’s time to put those into practice.
Investing in your own business with your time is the perfect way to show potential clients just how dedicated you are, and it can all be communicated on social media.
If you’re looking to take your business to the next level, why not qualify with a Level 5 nutrition qualification here at OriGym? Don’t forget to browse through our extensive list of fitness courses that we have on offer here in our downloadable course prospectus.
Become a Level 5 Personal Trainer Become a Level 5 Personal Trainer with OriGym's specialist courses!