With social media available to everyone nowadays, more and more athletes and fitness ‘models’ are creating pages and are active on social media. While that is pretty great, there are some things that new athletes should probably be aware of when posting things, though small they can end up having quite an effect.

Here are a few things to consider when starting off on social media:

Tagging everyone

Everybody wants to be known, and they way to do that, apparently, is to post something up and tag every person and every company that you know.

While it can work sometimes, the people who get tagged can become highly annoyed, especially if with every post you make you tag them.

This can be seen very well on Instagram where if you click the image you can see these hundreds of tags. Tagging so many people does not really increase the number of likes or exposure of your image.

I remember one comment made by Andrew hudson, where someone tagged him in a picture on Facebook amongst many other tags. His comment was along the lines of “Very nice, but what does this have to do with me?”

So you get the point.

Tagging and never interacting

The tagging gets worse. Some newbies will do the tagging thing all the time but will never even interact with or even follow the page they are tagging. This is really just common courtesy, if you are going to tag them in your image at least be following them and like or comment or contribute something to their page.

Build yourself over time

With everything it takes time. Aim to build yourself and your brand over time, don’t just expect to post one or two pics every now and again and tag everyone in them and become famous and gather a huge following. Most times it takes time and consistency, just like the training that you do.
Build yourself up organically and your time will come where you will be sought after and interviewed etc.

Tag ‘occasionally’

It is still good to tag certain people or pages every now and again or once in a while, just to let them know you are still there improving and doing your thing.

A few tips to help build your social media presence:

• Be regular and consistent. Make sure to upload some content at least once a day so people can see that you are active and there is stuff for them to see.
• Post quality pictures. Every phone nowadays has a great camera so be sure to take some decent photos to use and make sure the lighting is adequate. There is nothing worse than a picture that is so dark and blurry no-one can make out what exactly it’s of.
• Post creative individual pictures. Many athletes are sponsored or want to be sponsored by clothing lines and supplement companies, and in turn post up pictures of the sponsor. While this is fine, no-one only wants to look at pictures of supplement bottles all the time. Be sure to be creative with your pictures and put yourself in the picture at least. Subtlety is always a winner.