By Lorin Anderson, Founder
Among marketing options used by our coaches, social media is the number one most used choice with 88 percent of our members currently using at least one social platform. Email marketing was second at 86 percent and a Business Website was third at 59 percent.
After a decade of trial and error and experimentation our coaches have generally settled into a routine for social media use for their businesses. In our 2023 Operations and Compensation Survey we found that there are only five platforms that are in significant use at this time (It’s the same 5 that were mentioned by coaches 5 years ago, too):
- Instagram 81%
- Facebook 81%
- YouTube 47%
- LinkedIn 41%
- Twitter 40%
Since our survey five years ago Instagram is up 16 percentage points while Facebook is up 2 points, YouTube is up 21 points and LinkedIn is up 17 points. Meanwhile, Twitter is down 22 points.
For the first time we asked our coaches how many followers they have on Instagram and the overall average was 5,855. Employees averaged 2.011, Independent Contractors averaged 1,827 and Academy owners averaged 34,569. The median for all of our members on Instagram was 600 followers which means the average was elevated by a small number of super users with massive audiences. At the extreme, the highest number of followers for a Proponent Group coach was 537,468.
Our coaches are very active on Instagram and Facebook. Not as much on the other three with 78 percent having posted to Instagram in the past two weeks while 68 percent have posted to Facebook during that time. Only 27 percent have tweeted, 20 percent have posted a video to YouTube and 20 percent posted on LinkedIn during that same time span.
As far as time spent crafting social posts, only 14 percent of our members currently spend more than 5 hours per week on social for business while 45 percent spend less than an hour a week on business posts while the remaining 41 percent spend between 1-5 hours weekly posting for business. Time spent has been stable for many years. When we surveyed five years ago 15 percent of our coaches were spending more than 5 hours per week on their social accounts for business and 42 percent were spending between 1-5 hours weekly.
In general, employees spend the least time posting, independent contractors are a bit over the averages, and academy owners are the most prolific users of social media.