A Great Way To Kill Your Social Media
If you’re looking to seriously undermine your ability to maximize your efforts in the gym, on stage, and networking backstage, with companies, and potential clients, then make your Instagram profile private. Most people aren’t going to request to follow, wait minutes hours, or much less days. They’ll just keeping going to public profiles. What ever it was that sparked their interest in you is GENERALLY not strong enough to warrant PATIENCE. It takes PATIENCE to request to follow someone and wait for that greenlight. Social media is about narrowing geographic gaps, bypassing language barriers, and providing that very impatience with a near-instant connection. Anyone who makes their profile private is doing a tremendous disservice to their social growth online. It’s also a bad look businesswise.
I’ve been involved in the fitness industry for fifteen years. I’ve run the athlete program for Tokkyo Nutrition, the ambassador program for Blackstone Labs, and the affiliate program for MuscleGelz. As someone who has been entrusted by companies to oversee sponsored athletes, ambassadors, and paid affiliates, I can tell you I never allowed any of them to have private profiles. Wearing my lawyer hat, I’ve advised company owners the public/private profile issue when drafting contracts for these programs.
As a company owner, if you choose to sponsor an athlete, you’re paying that person money just to be on the roster. Some athletes don’t compete for a handful of months per year, they don’t go to expos, they don’t work booths, either. They’re basically getting money, YOUR MONEY, every month for nothing. If you then were to allow sponsored athletes to have private profiles, then your company would be taking a total loss with that athlete’s pay every month. That’s just plain stupid. It’s worse than stupid, it’s wasteful. Any company with a stable of sponsored athletes doing that, will be broke in six months. A sponsored athlete is like a human advertisement. They don’t want potential customers wanting to visit a sponsored athlete’s page only to see their avatar and a totally blank page. No company allows private profiles for that very reason. Not only don’t they allow it, but they might not even talk to you to begin with. If a company recruiter has heard of you and/or seen interviews with you and then see that you have a private page, they’re on to the next prospect. It goes back to patience. A headhunter in the fitness industry won’t have the patience to deal with someone with a private page. They don’t want to wait around to be accepted and then come back. They probably figure they’re going to have to convince the person, if signed, to go public. People don’t have patience for that. Patience is a virtue, but making money is making money.
With regard to @NATTYCOMPETITORS I won’t follow private profiles. It’s impossible to repost them, even when the athletes give me permission and/or try to tag me. If the profile doing the tagging is private, the links won’t work when reposting. The privacy setting puts a wall around the account and all media originating from it. Social media is all about tearing down barriers, not putting them up.
And what could you POSSIBLY have on your Instagram that requires that level of privacy? Do you cook your chicken breast in a top secret way? Do you hit your biceps in a revolutionary trademarked angle? Are your pictures with bedhead so classified that they require a top secret clearance? WTF! I don’t know. And if your Instagram is for family and close friends only, but you’re competing and killing it on stage, why not start a fitness page? Have something, ANYTHING, for that part of your life. Otherwise, your private profiles are undermining the great work you do on stage, with interviews, and in day to day life.
