This is your ultimate guide to using social media as a coach.

Here, you’ll learn:

• How to grow your business with social media (even if you’re brand new)
• Guides to getting clients on social media platforms
• And much more!

Want to learn more? Read on!

How social media helped me grow my business to 6-figures in my first 4 months in business

What’s your goal for your coaching business?

Let me guess:

You want to grow a business so that you make as much, or more, than in your 9-5. This business will then let you spend your time the way you want to — while also doing something truly impactful.

Social media will help you start your coaching business

Good news. When you’re new to coaching, social media is a really great tool to connect with potential clients, build an audience, and share more of yourself and what you know than with other marketing tools.

Because here’s the thing:

Never before has there been such an effective way to connect with people on a deeper level. 

Just think about how an influencer like Kylie Jenner was able to bring Snapchat’s market value down by $1.3 billion with a tweet. 

According to Statista, 4.41 billion people will use social media in 2025. In all likelihood, your clients are using it as well. And as an industry study shows, 9/10 people report that they buy from brands they follow on social media. 

These days, social media is an invaluable piece of your business.

It’s a great place to get started and connect with people quickly and get your first paying clients. 

Down the road, social media will help you build a deeper relationship with your existing audience so that they see you in a way that just your emails and other content can’t.

Your social media audience will likely trust you more and have a deeper relationship with you.

And ultimately, they buy more from you.

I grew my own business to 6-figures with social media 

How do I know?

Because social media made ALL the difference for my business early on. 

I was in my 9-5, dreaming of being able to work for myself. I was building a side hustle that would hopefully let me do it. 

Within four months, I had grown that business to six figures, which allowed me to walk up to my boss and hand in my resignation letter.

That was all thanks to social media and the way I used platforms like Facebook. 

Sure, I didn’t scale my business using social media. That’s what I did with email marketing — it’s because of email marketing that I grew my business to $1+ million in a year. 

I never wanted to rely on social media.

But it did help me get a great start. And as I added on more social media to my business (like Instagram), I’ve just seen even more engagement and sales from all different channels. 

In the same way, I’ve had clients who have crossed five figures and more in sales with social media alone.

A few of those clients include Emily, who is a career coach. Emily used platforms like LinkedIn and Pinterest to get her first clients. 

Ruby is another client who successfully used social media (Reddit) to start her relationship coaching business.

And Cristina, a naturopathic doctor, used Instagram to get one of her first paying clients. 

Here’s how to use social media for coaches, even if you’re just starting out.

How to get clients from social media… Even if you’re brand new to coaching

Look:

Social media is a great place to start to get your first paying clients. 

By finding that watering hole for your audience (where your clients hang out online), you can naturally start building relationships with your audience. 

Ultimately, I see social media as a great way to engage. 

You have true engagement and real-time conversations with people. 

Thanks to this engagement, I can tell if a topic I share is a really helpful topic and if it “clicks” with my audience from how often people like or respond to a post and message me.

One of the first things I do in the morning is to see all the random and fun messages I get. That helps me get to know my audience even more.

But there are plenty of social media platforms out there. Which one should you choose? 

Good question. First: Choose ONE platform. That platform should be where your clients hang out, not where you like to hang out. 

We’ll look at each social media platform in separate chapters. 

But for now, ask yourself:

Where are my clients spending their time?

For example, when I started my digital advertising coaching business, I found my audience in Facebook groups for entrepreneurs. But your audience could be on YouTube, Instagram, Reddit, or LinkedIn. 

Once you’ve chosen your platform, it’s time to start engaging with your audience. 

That’s what we’ll look at next. 

Avoid these social media marketing mistakes

First, what are the top social media marketing mistakes people make ALL the time? 

Here are the top mistakes I see my students make that keep them from making sales and growing their businesses. 

Mistake #1: They sell on social media 

The first mistake is to start selling the minute you enter a social media group. 

But people don’t go on social media to be sold to. 

Yes, you can sell on social media. But that’s not the first thing to do. Make it about connection and conversation and make it fun. 

If you do that, sales will naturally follow. 

My own goal is to make my posts something that people want to check, just like they want to check for updates about their favorite channel or TV show. You’ll naturally become the person they look to for more help on what it is you offer as a coaching service. 

Mistake #2: They rely on social media alone

The next mistake is to rely on social media alone to grow your business. 

But at the end of the day, the social media platforms you use are not your own platforms. That’s why you need to think about them as part of a multi-channel approach. You have your different client acquisition channels — your email list, your social media channels, and maybe some other acquisition channels down the line, like advertising. 

They work together to bring leads and clients to you. But you shouldn’t rely on just ONE of these for your business. 

Mistake #3: They overwhelm themselves 

The third mistake is to overwhelm yourself to the point where you don’t get things done.

Something I do is I will reshare content from my different channels because not everyone is on every one of my channels. 

And so if you’re feeling overwhelmed, that’s something you can do. 

I also don’t try to be everywhere at once. I started out on Facebook and around that same time, I started to build my email list. Over the years, I added on Instagram, YouTube, and more. 

Choose one platform, master it, and get really good at it before you move on to other platforms. It’s better to have one channel where you’re doing well and where people love to connect with you versus trying to do all of them. 

Create engaging and converting social media posts 

Now that you know which mistakes to avoid, it’s time to look at what content you should create for each platform to get engagement and, yes, sales.

But remember:

Social media was not built to help you grow your business and make sales. 

The way you use social media has to be aligned with what social media was intended to do. 

Think about how YOU use social media. You probably check your Instagram feed or Facebook updates to be entertained, to see what’s going on, and to learn something new. 

As a business, think about this: 

How can I use social media in that way? 

Your content needs to build on these three pillars:

#1: Connect

#2: Entertain

#3: Learn

Really often, I see people posting just about one of these pillars. For example, they’ll post motivational quotes. Or they ask fun, engaging questions (“Tell me a fun fact about yourself”). Or they’ll only share facts.

When I started out on social media, I thought that the more information I would share, the more people would appreciate me. I’d share long and dry posts like this one:

But that’s not all people want. And when I started using more fun pop culture references and shorter, crisper content, people immediately responded so much better:

Use a mix of ways to deliver your content

Written posts will only take you so far, but video content helps you connect with people much faster. 

That’s why you need to mix up your content — written content, videos, livestreams…

For example, when I was marketing myself on Facebook, I wrote posts and did livestreams.

Also, consistency is key. The more consistently you show up in people’s feeds, the more they will think about you and get interested in what you have to say. 

Create a schedule where you deliver different types of content on a regular, daily and weekly basis. Example: One post every day and one livestream every week.

Use different types of content

The way you teach can be mixing in different types of content. Something I’ll do is that I deliver what I want to teach as a series of posts. Or I’ll share tips, stories, or the high-level strategy, depending on what it is I’m teaching and what works best for that topic. 

A few ideas for posts are to: 

• Post content that helps people interact socially with each other. For example: Ask people about their interests. 
• Post informative content. For example: Share your expertise. 
• Entertain people. For example: Share fun quizzes and facts. 
• Share your opinions. For example: Ask a question to get people’s opinion.

You can read more about different social media content types here. 

Ultimately, it all comes down to mixing it up so that people have fun AND they learn about who you are and what you offer. 

But once you have content to publish on your social media platform, how do you get your first paying clients? That’s what we’ll look at next. 

Use social media to get your first clients

Social media is a great place to get started fast and don’t have a lot of proof or a reputation built up. It helps you connect with people — and that’s also why I recommend it as a place to start out on.

Granted, you don’t want to rely on social media long-term to get all your clients. But even long-term, social media will help you build and boost relationships with people in your audience. 

That said, if you’re looking to find your first few clients, you will probably want to spend some more time on social media. 

How do you do it, though?

When I started my business, I didn’t know anything about using social media to get clients.

At this point, I didn’t hang out in Facebook groups with the intention to sell. I just wanted to know more about what I could sell. 

That’s why I used to engage with people who posted questions related to what I was hoping to sell (digital advertising). I’d answer their questions and be helpful in any way I could. 

At one point, I happened to message this woman who was asking a specific question about ads and I offered to give her advice in return for a market research call. She said yes and so we hopped on a call.

Over the next two weeks, she messaged me with a bunch of follow-up questions. 

During those weeks, she got so much value so she ultimately messaged me and asked if we could work together. 

I ended up offering a $5,000 package, which she said yes to without blinking. 

That’s how I got my first paying client on social media — without any sleaziness or salesyness involved. And that’s what I recommend that my clients do as well. 

Use social media platforms to give A LOT of value 

The way I started engaging in social media groups was to make sure I did it every day. 

I believe that what’s in your calendar gets done, so I essentially scheduled time to work on my business every day. I’d do this during my lunch hours, in the evening, during weekends… 

I recommend you do the same.

Schedule set times when you get in front of your audience on the social media platform of your choice. 3 x 15-minute time slots every day is enough. During the weekend (or when you have more time), you can create content to share. 

The important thing to focus on is to create conversations with the people you are connecting with. 

You’ll likely not start with a ton of people in your audience and you’ll likely not get a huge amount of engagement from your posts in the beginning either. 

But if you do it in the right way, the people you DO connect with will be so much closer to wanting to work with you because they’re getting direct access to you — not reading automated emails or watching scripted webinars. 

That’s why it’s so important to remember: 

Your posts aren’t one-sided conversations. Create them FOR your ideal clients and create them to initiate conversation. 

And besides publishing posts and doing livestreams, search for conversations in groups you engage in. For example, if you’re a health coach for busy professionals, you might search health-related groups for things like:

“Busy”

“Healthy lunch” 

“No exercise” 

Once you find those conversations, you can start answering people’s questions and giving your insights. 

Turning a conversation on social media into a client relationship 

How do you eventually turn people into paying clients?

Well, that’s probably not how you want to think about it. Because not every person you talk to will buy from you, so your sole focus shouldn’t be “I’m going to make a sale with this person.”

Instead, approach it from the perspective of “This person might or might not end up buying from me. But I’m learning so much from talking to people and ultimately, this will help me create a really great offer people want to buy.”

Now, actually transitioning to a sale can be very natural.

People might ask you how they can work with you. Or after engaging with someone for a while, you might ask if they want to learn more about how you can work together. 

Something I did myself and I recommend my clients do when they don’t have any testimonials or “proof” is to give a free 15-minute coaching call for free. I call this the “Taster Technique” because what it does is it gives your potential clients a taste of what it is to work with you.

During that call, they first get the free coaching where you give them ONE “aha.” 

Then, you say, “Would you like to talk more about how we can work together?” 

How to use social media platforms for your coaching business

Now you know how to use social media for coaches.

But how do you use the social media platform of your choice? 

Here below, you get in-depth guides for different social media platform. But remember: Choose ONE platform and start by mastering that platform. THAT’s the secret to getting coaching clients on social media. 

Facebook for Coaches

Facebook Ads for Coaches

Instagram for Coaches

LinkedIn for Coaches

Want to get started right away? 

There you have it. Now you know how to use social media for coaches. 

What it comes down to is building relationships that build up trust and interest. By taking these steps consistently, you’ll sign up clients faster than you think.

But mastering social media is just one part of building your coaching business.

How do you build a sustainable and profitable business?

That’s what you’ll learn in my free blueprint on how to grow a six-figure coaching business: