Fitness24Seven is a Swedish-based fitness center chain with over a 150+ branches in Sweden, Norway, Finland, Poland, Thailand and Colombia. They currently have 110 fitness centers in Sweden and are expanding continuously.
Like most other chains they have a Facebook presence. When PinMeTo started to work with Fitness24Seven in the beginning of 2015 that presence consisted of one national brand page, just like most other chains today. What very few chains seem to have discovered is that there’s an enormous untapped potential for social activity that’s happening in each of the chain’s locations. People checking in, tagging photos, rating and writing reviews.
Social Local Activity - An Untapped Potential
Of Fitness24Seven’s 110 fitness centers in Sweden, customers had been checking-in and bragging on Facebook about their gym activity 303,210 times as of March 3, 2015. That’s an amazing number of times the Fitness24Seven brand was shared by their customers - the best kind of marketing a company can ask for.
The problem was that none of the 303,210 visits were actually made on Facebook Pages under Fitness24Seven’s control. They were posted on fake user-generated pages completely unaffiliated with Fitness24Seven’s branding and missing basic information such as address, direction and contact details. It was basically 303,210 missed opportunities of brand - consumer interactivity.
For chains, Facebook offers a brilliant product called Locations Pages. It’s essentially a Store Finder to locate a company’s locations and is nested under the national brand page. It connects all the local branches to the national brand page.
What PinMeTo set out to do for Fitness24Seven was to ensure that all of their fitness centers had a proper Facebook page, with correct business information and branding - as well as merging all of the user-generated duplicate pages into the official local pages.
What PinMeTo found during the work with Fitness24Seven was nothing short of mind-blowing. As you might be aware, the organic reach (free daily views) of a Facebook brand page is now virtually non-existent. If a company wants their content to reach anyone these days they have to pay.
On Fitness24Seven’s national brand page, the total reach was essentially comprised entirely of paid reach. When they paid ad money, they reached more people, but as soon as they stopped paying, the reach went back to nothing.
Local Page Reach Outperforms Brand Page Reach
When Fitness24Seven added Facebook Pages for their gyms, something magical happened. The total reach of all the combined location pages just kept going through the roof. This reach came from all of the social activity created on the local gym’s pages: people checking in, posting photos and tagging the gyms - realizing the potential of customers spreading the word.
Daily Reach Growth - 3486%
By giving all of Fitness24Seven’s fitness centers a genuine Facebook Page and merging fake pages, they have grown their daily reach from 6,899 to 247,404 - organically! That’s a daily increase of 3486%, or 35 times. Over the course of only two months, that’s 10.5 million people who have seen properly branded, correctly listed, official Fitness24Seven content.
The power is in local - recognizing the quantifiable potential of working at a local level. People are acting locally, going to their local gym, their local grocery store, their local bakery and their local bank branch. That’s why it’s crucial for a chain to act locally online and on social media - where people are searching for places and sharing what they do.
PinMeTo has built a product that makes it easy to do the work of setting up correctly branded Facebook Location Pages with up-to-date information, keeping track of, and removing or merging unwanted user-generated unofficial duplicates. Get started with Facebook Location Pages now!
