Evening all,

Recently my circumstances have changed and i am now looking to teach privately full time. I currently have 12 students on my roster so i feel that this is a great time to bite the bullet and give it a go.

My question is about Facebook. I was wondering if any of you advertise your services on there, and whether you have had any positive gains from using it as a teaching/advertising tool?

I have plenty of friends on there, and i am thinking of setting up a teaching page as such, so i can keep my private goings on.. well private! :-)

Any thoughts would be grateful

No one?

Haven't seen any music teachers on there, but our local dance teacher has a page. Mainly used for communication - when term starts again, what time to be at event etc.

Not sure how useful it is as a marketing tool versus a website, but if you don't have a website then it is probably good. I think if you ask all your friends to "like" the page, then their friends will be able to see it and it should cascade. You may be able to link to community pages as well.

Obvious child protection/data protection stuff to be aware of, eg not posting photos or exam results etc. (Unless everyone got a distinction!) If you teach children you will get friend requests from them to your personal account. (And from their parents as well)

Why not give it a go! Good luck

In just under 9 hours, which are overnight, I wouldn't be surprised that you didn't get a rush of replies

I have a FB page for my business as a whole (so, not just teaching). Existing and past pupils also use it to keep in touch with each other, but mainly I just use it for promotion purposes. I'm not sure it's that useful - it only reaches the people who've 'Liked' it and getting people to 'Like' it who aren't friends/contacts already is near impossible. I don't imagine it would ever serve as a useful tool for promoting my teaching.

I would probably be more inclined to use Twitter, which, when done well can be very useful and tends to attract a much wider base (e.g. people connect just because you're local rather than because they're particularly interested in the service you provide unlike FB - the local connections are very useful because it at least means people know you're out there!).

Thanks for the reply guys,

i was beginning to think no one loves me :-), but i understand that it might take a while to get some replies.

I do have a website which i do push a lot, i direct all my students there for resources, and using musicteacherhelper, i can direct them to their login page from my website. So it was just more to see if it would be worth the extra effort with Facebook.

I will try twitter to find some local services and plug it from there.

Cheers again

J.

I think you can probably presume that not many people here use facebook for advertising. People tend to pile in on a topic if they have experience of it - if it's something less common, you may get less answers. Don't take it personally!

Sorry, I meant to reply to this when I first saw it!

I have advertised on Facebook before. It didn't work for me, I paid a fortune, and was never convinced that it hit the right people in the right location. I think I tried it for about 6 months and gave up.

To be fair, it was actually nearly 11!