Beachbody powered by social media

© Pinterest. Retrieved on March 10, 2017.

Social media is changing the landscape of the fitness industry.  Beachbody represents the perfect example of how fitness companies are harnessing the power of social media to build successful empires.   Beachbody sells fitness packages which include workout DVDs, superfood shake powders called Shakeology; and simple eating , portion controlled meal plans.  Beachbody has a network of coaches that are essentially successful customers-turned-salespeople.   Coaches obtain a portion of sales they bring in and as they build a network of customers beneath them, they obtain a portion of the sales from their customers who themselves become coaches.

The use of social media is a critical factor in the business model’s success as the more people that can feed into their network, the more powerful and successful their program becomes. Social media is used by the coaches to showcase the programs successes in order to motivate existing customers to succeed and to recruit new customers and eventual coaches.   As the Beachbody business model is so reliant on the power of social media to meet their business goals, the utilization of social media metrics is equally as important.  Given the Beachbody program is fundamentally a continuous sharing of communication amongst its community of coaches and users, social media metrics provide valuable information to help Beachbody understand what messages and programs are working and consequently what areas to improve.

© Baking2Burprees Blog. Retrieved on March 10, 2017.

Beachbody uses social media in a number of ways.

Team Beachbody

Team Beachbody is effectively a community created to share information for coaches, users and anyone considering Beachbody as a fitness solution. www.teambeachbody.com uses a series of different social media strategies including:

• Message boards
• Ask the Experts: Users can ask any health and fitness question and receive timely responses
• Newsletters: Users can sign up for a regular newsletter which provides information on special offers and shares health and fitness tips.
• Live Fit Clubs: Gives users access to groups utilizing program within a 50 mile radius of your home and facilitates connections with coaches
• Team Beachbody Coach blogs
• Challenge contests: Encourages people to join the program for a chance to win $100,000 and/or $500 in daily prizes.
• Beachbody Challenge Groups: As a means to help users stay motivated, users join a community of others who have the same goals.
• Success stories: a gallery of before and after photos shared by Beachbody users all over the world.
• Zoom Video Conferencing for Internal training of coaches

You may have noticed a recent influx of Beachbody Coaches showing up daily on your social media feeds showcasing Beachbody products namely Shakeology and video clips of exercise segments with one of the various Beachbody programs. Coaches are encouraged to utilize various social media platforms as a means of showing results and sharing information about the programs and ideals with the goal of recruiting new customers and converting existing customers to coaches.  Following are some samples of the use of social media by Beachbody coaches:

Facebook: One of the key social media platforms used by coaches to meet their performance goals is Facebook. When I asked Beachbody coach Alisa Bennett-Infanti to share some insight as to the use of this social media platform, she stated that “with the goal of drawing people to my business page, I often boost my posts which for a fee, my posts can appear higher up on my audience’s news feeds and appear on the feeds of targeted people that are not currently followers.”

Facebook Groups: are created by coaches for existing customers to communicate, share stories, progress, provide daily motivation and insight, recipes, information on the products, answer questions, organize and monitor challenges.

Live videos:  Coaches also use live video feeds to showcase various work out programs and to motivate fellow challengers to be active and fully engaged in the program.  According to Alisa “by sharing my own fitness journey, I am holding myself accountable. I want my group to know that I can identify with them and that the struggle is real for me too.  We all have bad days when we get off track, the key is to own it, move forward and never give up”.

,

© My Protein. Retrieved on March 10, 2017.

As the Beachbody business model is so reliant on the power of social media to meet their business goals, the utilization of social media metrics is equally as important.

Beachbody coaches use social media metrics to determine the effectiveness of their various posts.   Platforms such as Facebook, reward posts that create “a buzz” (essentially a post with a high number of comments) by giving the user’s future posts more visibility.  As the goal of a Beachbody coach is to draw people to their business pages, heightened visibility is key.  Hence, monitoring the level of likes, comments and post shares and is vital as coaches need to understand which posts stimulate activity.  According to Alisa Bennett Infanti, “when I see  that my post has inspired a high volume of likes and comments, I know that I am on the right track to helping people”.

Another social media metric used is the monitoring of the number of private messages received and the types of queries received.  With the understanding that social media platforms reward activity, posts that generate a high level of queries via private messaging give evidence of an effective post.

The social media activity on TeamBeachbody is an important business driver and indicator of the program’s success.  A heightened number of program queries via for example message boards and “Ask the Expert”,  are a positive indication of social media effectiveness, as queries are often directed to Beachbody coaches which stimulates business growth.

Lessons for Others

© Alisa Bennett Infanti. Retrieved on March 10, 2017.

Social media is changing the landscape of the fitness industry.  Beachbody represents the perfect example of the power of fitness companies are harnessing the power of social media to build successful empires.

Key takeaways:

• People are motivated and inspired to make a life change by seeing the progress of people in their social media network.
• Companies can utilize the power of social media to meet their performance goals.
• Social media has the capacity to essentially have your customers do all of your marketing.
• Social media can help organizations build trust and form relationships that can foster business growth
• Social media metrics provide valuable information that can help organizations improve performance and better achieve its goals.

If you have concerns as to the accuracy of anything posted on this site, please send your concerns to Peter Carr, Program Director, Social Media for Business Performance.

References