Medalist Athlete Branding Guide

Using a Facebook page to promote yourself can be highly rewarding for your personal brand. It’s a great way to rassemble those who are already following your career on Facebook and use it as a base to grow your audience and grow engagement.

Just ask Mikael Kingsbury about it! He picked up 25 000 followers during the Winter Olympic Games. In all fairness, it helped that he was the defending world champion and runner up to Olympic champion Alexandre Bilodeau and that the moguls duo went on to become one of the most hyped up rivalries of the Games.

Nonetheless it remains a good branding strategy. Are you ‘big enough’ to create a Facebook Page?

If you feel awkward every time you have to accept friend's request from your friend's mom, your elementary school teacher and the guy from the gym under the premise of growing your brand and sharing your athlete journey, it may be a sign that you're ready for it.

An other good indicator that it’s time is if you're already sharing most of your results and sport related news through your personal timeline and getting around 30 likes every time.

Fit right in? All right, go ahead and create your Facebook page.

Creating the page is the easy part. Getting a bazillion people to like it and thus grow your ego to outrageous proportions isn’t as trivial as it may once have been. Nowadays it requires more efforts and energy but don’t worry, with the right content and proper sharing technique, it's still doable.

Before getting into any of that, you need to get this shameful situation out of the way:

... and make it look more like this:

There are few tried and true ways to jumpstart your page likes count from 0 to 1k likes.

Here’s the checklist:

1. Post it on your own timeline – Potential: 100 - 200 likes

*duh… obviously* (No explanation needed)

2. Get your club/team/sponsor/partner to share it on their own page. – Potential: 100-200 likes

Leverage your network to create a network effect. A couple days before creating or launching your page, ask your sponsors, partners, team and/or club to share the news. The best way is usually to contact the person in charge of social media and give her the link to your page and let her know of your intention to announce it on a given day. Timing is key as it will amplify the reach of your announcement. Speaking of which, you might want to have a look at how the Facebook algorithm works before going all in on this.

3. Use the ‘Invite your friends’ feature.  – Potential: 300 - 500 likes

This is the silver bullet of quickly growing your life from nada to a lot. It consists in manually inviting all (or almost all) of your Facebook friends to like your page. It’s a simple tactics and it works brilliantly, especially with athlete pages since they are so personal. I mean, you have to be a real jerk not to ‘like’ your friends own page.

4. Exploit the ‘Invite your friends’ feature.  – Potential: 100 - 199,999,999 likes

Okay, this one is bit abusive… but works like a charm. It consists in doing step 3 with as many of your friends as possible. In practice, it’s fairly easy to do especially during training camps where you have plenty of teammates or fellow athletes in sight. Now, you’ll notice that in order to ‘Invite your friends’ to a page you need to be a page admin. No biggie, simply follow the steps here and you’ll be good to go.

5. Buy yourself some reach.  – Potential: 100 - 200 likes

I’m including this one because it works. But unless your life depends on it, don’t do it. (ie.: only do it if you’re making 6 figures in endorsement deals and the value of those deals is based on how many people follow you. Otherwise don’t even bother)

Disclaimer: Depending on how big of a deal you are in your sport, you may or may not be able to reach that number of likes in that time window... and to be honest, you shouldn't care. What will move the needle in the long run is your ability to create engaging content by sharing your amazing lifestyle in ways that will resonate with your crowd. That's for another article!