Facebook is an invaluable tool for promoting your membership club.

Does your membership club have a fan page?

Set one up immediately if you don’t! You’d be missing a huge opportunity for growth, since most people have a Facebook account.

Here are some great ways to leverage it and promote membership clubs on Facebook!

Social Challenges

A friendly contest or challenge is always fun, and one of the best ways to engage membership clubs on Facebook.

This tip comes from Netpulse’s blog:

“Create social challenges. Similar to how your workout challenges operate, you can host monthly competitions where the member who checks in or posts photos at your club the most wins a large prize. Offering something as desirable as an iPad is a great way to make sure your members are engaged and coming to your club as much as possible, and give your club maximum social promotion.”

Use a Variety of Content

Good Sport’s blog points out one of the most important tips in engaging membership clubs on Facebook.

Don’t let it get boring.

“Facebook allows you to post images and video. It allows you to post links to other interesting sites and articles. The list below represents the different types of communications you could include in your Facebook posts:

A statement – eg. “training is cancelled today”
A picture
A video
A link
A question
A poll
An invite to an event
A joke”

Just make sure all the content is in line with the values of your membership club.

Delicious Recipes

Recipes are a hit on Facebook.

No matter what kind of membership club you run, you can successfully include recipes in your social content.

Everyone loves food, and they want to eat well on limited time and money.

Here’s a tip from Clickz.com:

“Food plays well on social media for a variety of reasons, but mainly because it’s such a universal pleasure. Who doesn’t like to eat? Pictures of food can be particularly colorful as well, so they stand out in a cluttered news feed. Healthy eating? Now that’s the perfect combo for this particular audience, people who can certainly appreciate good food, but who know that food that’s good for you…well, that’s even better.”

Include Calls to Action

Urge your fans to participate!

Ask them questions and encourage them to contribute to a conversation in the comments on a post.

This post on CMAA says:

“To better engage your members, invite them to contribute to the conversation with action words such as “post”, “what do you think about…”, “Tell us…”, “comment,” etc. Request that people get in on the action. Ask people for their opinion and ask questions. It is best to do this toward the end of the post as it will increase the response rate. Be direct; ask for “likes”.”

Promote Events Better

It’s not enough to just create an event on Facebook.

Retention Management gives us some great advice on how to promote an event on Facebook:

“A great source of Facebook content is pictures and video of the events themselves. Posting them after the event and tagging the people in the pictures will certainly increase engagement. And it is not difficult. At your club events, make sure someone is responsible for taking pictures of all that is going on. Take pictures of staff, members, etc. Capture all the fun that everyone is having. Holding an educational seminar with a guest speaker? Post a picture of the panel or speaker. Tagging people in the pictures also helps expand your reach.”

Create Great Images (Easily)

Facebook is highly visual.

A post with a good image will do far better than one that has no image, or a low-quality one.

Check out Digital Marketer’s advice on the subject:

“People like them (quote images on Facebook), share them and engage with them. Don’t lie… I know you do too.

But smart marketers realize that posting quotes from Steve Jobs, Maya Angelou and Michael Jordan might get solid engagement but they don’t…

Advance their own brand
Advance their own message
Drive traffic to their content

If you’re going to share quotes… why not share your own?”

What is a great inspirational quote that you’ve said in the past?

What great values do you and your members have?

Brainstorm and write them down!

Now you have some great ideas to go on to engage membership clubs on Facebook!

Engagement is important, since you’ll be using this to create pixel ads to target and retarget your offers to similar audiences!

Go here to learn more about pixel advertising on Facebook.