6 Fitness Social Media Post Ideas Inspired by the Best Content Out There

It’s no secret that social media is an excellent tool for gyms and fitness studios. When used well, it’s great for building brand awareness, extending your reach, fostering loyalty, and generating leads.

Knowing who your customers are is essential for creating and sharing content that resonates with them, driving engagement, and encouraging people to take action. You should have this nailed down before you dive in with creating your content because it will help you form a strategy and goals for your social media marketing efforts. Creating personas for your members is a great place to start; we’ve written a detailed guide on generating gym personas here: Creating a Gym Persona for Your Marketing Strategy. 

If you already know your personas, you’ll know how to personalize and tailor content to appeal to them. There’s a huge selection of health and fitness content that will resonate with most gym-goers on social media. Here, we take a look at 6 fitness social media post ideas to inspire your content. Skip ahead to:

• What Should Your Gym Post on Social Media?
• 6 Easy Social Media Post Ideas for Engaging Your Audience and Offering Value

What Should Your Gym Post on Social Media?

Before we dive in, we’ll take a quick look at a couple of health and fitness businesses thriving on social. We’ll briefly highlight what they do particularly well, and you can check out their profiles to see for yourself. For a more detailed overview of fitness brands excelling on social, check out our article on 4 Brands to Inspire You to Stand Out on Instagram. 

The Squad

Instagram: @t_h_e__s_q_u_a_d

The Squad is a gym and fitness center in Cork, Ireland, that offers personal training and group fitness classes. With almost 8,000 followers on Instagram and a high-level of engagement, the brand has built a loyal community. The Squad promotes its classes and shares recipes and nutrition tips, but most of all, it shares the people behind the business. Check out their posts and stories, and after a few minutes, you’ll feel like you’re best friends with the owner’s Kate and Josie. 

Giving your audience a peek behind the scenes of your gym is a great way to create a sense of authenticity on social media. According to a Social Media Today study, 86% of people say authenticity is important when deciding what brands they like and support. The report also points out that this is especially true for younger generations; a staggering 90% of Millennials say brand authenticity is important, proving that younger consumers prefer ‘real and organic’ over ‘perfect and packaged.’

Trifecta

Instagram: @trifecta

Trifecta has been designed to be the all-in-one nutrition, fitness, and tracking app. With over 750+ workouts and a database with more than 6 million food items, the brand’s goal is to give users everything they need to stay on track of diet, nutrition, and workouts. Trifecta has thought of every aspect of fitness; it even offers a meal subscription service providing ready-made macro balanced meals straight to your door.  

Its services encompass all things health and fitness and makes for a bright and bold variety of different content on social media. As you can see in the snapshot above, the fitness brand promotes content sharing various quotes, workouts, meals, and nutrition tips. While the business’s premise is different from a gym, any fitness business can share the same content selection to keep things varied and engaging.

Gymbox

Instagram: @gymboxofficial

Gymbox positions itself as the alternative to ‘boring’ gyms, and this personality shines through on social media. The brand uses Instagram to promote its unique online offering and events and to appeal to its target audience. Gymbox has a fun and bold style in the different content it shares, from images and videos to and bold text-based posts. The fun tone makes its content relevant and engaging to users.

6 Easy Social Media Post Ideas for Engaging Your Audience and Offering Value

Here, we’ll lay out 6 examples to inspire your social media posts and overall strategy. They’re tried and tested content ideas, and using a combination of a few different ones will add variety to your posting schedule. You can personalize and adapt them as you map out what will work best for your fitness business and appeal to your audience. 

1. Champion Member Success

Making member success a part of your social media strategy has never been more important. While lockdowns may be keeping your members physically apart, seeing familiar faces on your social media pages is a great way to remind them that they’re still a part of a community. 

How you do this will depend on the nature of your business; perhaps it’s a simple member of the week post that you share. You don’t necessarily have to focus on physical results; there are plenty of other reasons you can shine the light on your members. Perhaps one week it’s a member who’s attended the most classes; another week, it’s someone who’s reached a new fitness goal or highlighting somebody’s fitness journey with you.

Sharing content that champions everyone’s efforts will keep your audience engaged and increase motivation. So champion your members! Once you get going with a few posts, you can make this into a weekly event that engages your audience by encouraging members to nominate each other for recognition. It’s a great way to get people invested in each other’s progress.

2. Get Your Audience Excited With Giveaways

Running giveaways is a great way to generate engagement, get members motivated, and create a sense of excitement around your business. 

When it comes to giveaways, you can get started by working with the resources you have. It could be branded clothing and accessories, a class pack, some 1:1 training sessions, a free nutrition plan – the list of options is endless for a fitness business!

If you want to think bigger, consider partnering up with other like-minded brands; you could team up with a local health food store to provide the winner with a goody hamper from them and a selection of free classes from your gym. Both you and the store would run the giveaway, and each pick a winner – it’s a win-win situation as you’re exposing each other to each of your customer bases and expanding your reach. 

However you decide to run the giveaway, ensure you lay out the best way for generating the most awareness. On Facebook, for example, the best bet is asking people to share the giveaway post to their own page as part of entering. This way, you’re maximizing your potential reach. It’s a similar story with encouraging people to share the post on Instagram, but keep in mind that Instagram users tend to be more comfortable with tagging friends and commenting on the post itself. You can still encourage people to share the post for an extra entry. 

3. Inspire and Engage With Quotes

Motivational quotes can be an excellent way to inspire and engage your audience. Luckily, there are thousands of examples out there. Just search for #quotes or #gymquotes on Instagram, or be more specific if you know the kind of inspiration you’re looking for. When it comes to hashtags for your quotes, like with any fitness hashtags, make sure you use a combination of popular and less used ones to maximize visibility. Let your brand personality shine through, and have a clear idea of how you want your quotes to make people feel. Do you want to make them laugh? Feel inspired or motivated? Perhaps the quote itself is short, and you have a personal story related to it in the Instagram caption. 

When used well, quote posts can generate a tonne of engagement from your audience. These are a couple of Examples of Toronto based boxing gym Girls Just Wanna Box. The gym was created as a space to empower women in boxing, and as you can see, the design of the quotes is very simple. The empowering messaging aligns perfectly with the brand, making it more likely to resonate with the audience. 

4. Promote Reviews and Testimonials

Reviews and testimonials can form a great part of your content strategy on social, and they’re a valuable asset for attracting new members. According to Qualtrics, 91% of 18-34-year-olds trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations, and 93% of consumers say that online reviews influenced their purchase decisions. 

When you’re in the habit of asking members for reviews regularly, you can repurpose this across all your marketing channels. For reviews, you want them to be specific to your business, but you can be a little more creative with sharing testimonials on social. Think along the lines of a weekly ‘questions’ feature on your IG stories; ask your community what’s helping their mental and physical health this week and turn it into a motivating post to inspire your audience.  

5. Share Your Expertise With FAQ’s

You probably get asked a lot of questions about nutrition, health, equipment, workout routines, and general fitness. Offering professional insights on these topics is a great way to provide your audience with extra value and establish your business as a source of educational authority in the industry. And it’s simple enough to compile the most common questions you’re asked and turn your answers into content. There are a few ways you can choose to share this information, either in videos or graphic images, using a free tool like Canva. We’d recommend using a combination of both because:

1. It keeps your content varied.
2. Different people will like different formats.
3. Live Q&A videos are great for answering questions and repurposing in image form.

Let’s use that last point to get you started with sharing FAQ’s: Begin hosting weekly live Q&A’s on platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Promote the event to get your audience excited to have their questions answered, and then repurpose them by making graphic posts that you can share to your feed.

6. Add Value With Recipes and Nutrition Tips

We know that healthy food and good nutrition is an important part of fitness and seeing results. We also know that healthy recipes and #mealinspo make regular appearances on social media. 

It’s a great way to add value and variety to your content, and there’s no need to panic; you don’t have to cook up gram-worthy recipes every time you make a meal to share this type of content. It will really depend on the vision you have for your overall strategy. If you think back to the examples we shared at the beginning of this post, Trifecta shares a combination of food images and tip-style graphics with hacks for high protein meal swaps.

As well as the examples illustrated by Trifecta, we’ve listed a couple more below to help you incorporate recipe and nutrition tips into your social media:

• Short videos making healthy meals using a platform like TikTok – you can repurpose this across all of your social media channels. 
• Use workout and nutrition statistics as a base for offering advice. For example: “X% of your breakfast should be protein-based. Swipe through the photos to find out why 3 protein-packed recipes to kick-start your day”.

In Summary

The content opportunity for the fitness industry on social media is endless; the examples we’ve looked at in this article highlight just how much you can share. 

To nail down the right approach for your gym or fitness studio, you need to know your target audience, stay true to your brand values, and let them shine through. Social media is full of inspiration, so get inspired by what’s already out there – and make it your own.