3 Social Media Myths to Ditch from your Coaching Business Today

Social media is a wonderfully powerful tool in marketing your coaching business. It helps people discover you and your brand, and builds that know, like, and trust factor that’s so important in getting people to book with you.

At its start, social media was created as a way to connect with old friends, college pals, and family members spread around the world. It’s meant to be a sharing platform for snippets of your daily life. To help you keep in touch with people you don’t get to see everyday.

But as you well know, social media has grown into so much more than that. Now, it’s a way for businesses to reach their ideal customers. It’s a way for people to get involved with groups and causes they care about. And it’s a way to spread messages far and wide across the globe.

Social media has evolved to be so many different things, and so useful in so many ways, that we, as business owners, sometimes find it hard to determine exactly how we should be marketing ourselves on it. I mean, just look at the TikTok and IG Reels trends of coaches and other business owners dancing while sharing their message. Not something we would have predicted 10 years ago.

So while we know social media is ever changing and the rules of how to use it are ambiguous at best, I want to share three myths about social media that you can ditch today, to help you be more effective in your social marketing.

Let’s dive in.

Myth #1: You should be on every social media platform

We love setting the record straight on this one…you should NOT be using every single social media platform (unless you’ve hired a team member who does nothing but post to social all day — and even then, probably not).

For one thing, getting content up on all those platforms is a time suck. You could spend hours every day filling all your feeds with the type of quality content it takes to get clients on social media. Who has the energy for that?! Not to mention there are other important things you need to be doing with your time.

Secondly, your dream clients are not on all the platforms. The demographics of each social platform vary widely by the type of content and the users’ interests. Just because Facebook has over 1 billion users doesn’t mean your dream clients are on it and will find you. Likewise with all the other platforms.

Part of your job is to do market research, and that means identifying where your dream clients hang out online. Then, once you know, you should use that social media platform to reach them. Even if you don’t like that platform.

It’s not about what you like to be on, it’s about where your people are. Find them, and then work at getting their attention on you and your brand.

Myth #2: Aim for every post going viral

Viral posts are always fun and noteworthy, but can you remember a company sponsoring the last viral content you saw? No? Me either.

Having your post go viral does not mean it’s going to get you any clients. Truthfully, by the time it hits viral status and it’s spreading across the globe, chances are your name might not even be attached to it anymore. It’s one of the flukes of social media.

Focus your attention on creating high-value content, not entertainment. It’s much more likely that you’ll actually make money or book a client from posts that help solve your customers’ problems rather than posts that only make them laugh or have that shock factor.

And your dream client will remember you a lot longer for helping change their thinking than they will for going viral. So focus on creating that valuable content that gets you remembered.

Myth #3: More followers equals more money

Followers are great. A large following makes you feel like you’ve built a community of people who are interested in you and everything you do, and are going to hire you any day now. But unfortunately, that’s not really true.

The honest truth is that you’ll never know if your followers are legitimate leads who might someday turn into customers, or if they’re simply following you because they enjoyed that one viral post you put out.

Either way, you can make sure you’re putting your best foot forward to your audience by creating great content that’s relevant to their specific problems and how you can help. That will help ensure that the people who do join you online are much more likely to be your dream clients.

On a related note, the other ‘more = more’ myth on social media is that more likes equals more money. This one is also false.

One of the best reality checks I’ve ever gotten was when a guest coach spoke to a mastermind I was in. She’s huge on Instagram — she was focusing on video long before video became the ‘go-to’ for the platform — and she shared with us that 90% of her clients never once liked or commented on her posts before hiring her.

Yes, really. Instead, they lurked in the background and absorbed all of her content without ever engaging — and then when they were ready to work with her, they reached out.

More likes do not equal more success. They just mean more likes.

More followers do not equal more success. They just mean more followers.

So if you’re a new coach with a small following, take heart. You might be a whole lot closer to booking your next client on social media than you thought you were.

And if your biggest goal on social media has been getting more followers, reconsider whether you need to change your strategy.

Create a Social Marketing Strategy and Stick To It

We’re well aware that social media can be confusing and problematic. There are so many distractions, trends, and so-called ‘gurus’ out there to get caught up in.

But there’s actually one surefire way to make sure your social media content is actually serving you, and that’s to create a strategy that appeals to your dream clients, and then follow it.

If you need help making that happen, check out our free Social Media Strategy Checklist that you can download from our resource library. It will walk you through the steps you need to take in order to build a strategy that works for your coaching business. Because the strategy that works for your dream clients might be completely different than the strategy that worked on you.