Social Media Strategies That Attract Buyers & Sellers • Close-ing Time • Chris Linsell

Welcome to our monthly feature, Close-ing Time – in partnership with TheClose.com.

Chris Linsell from TheClose.com discusses social media strategies that bring business to agents. Chris also emphasizes the importance of selecting the right social media platform that suits best the agent’s character and business. According to Chris, is it crucial for every agent to know where their audience is so their content is shared directly to them. Finally, Chris explains why agents should not aim to go viral.

If you’d prefer to watch this interview, click here to view on YouTube!

Chris Linsell can be reached at chris@theclose.com.

This episode is brought to you by Real Geeks and FollowUpBoss.

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Transcript

D.J. Paris 0:00
which social media strategies actually result in getting you more clients? We discussed that today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our show.

Welcome to keeping it real the largest podcast we hire real estate agents for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through the show today is our monthly series called closing time with Chris Lin sell from the close. Now this is a partnership between keeping it real and the closed.com. And let me tell you more about the clothes the clothes.com is the kind of real estate website designed to give agents teams and brokerages actionable strategic insight from industry professionals so they cover real estate marketing, lead generation technology and team building strategies from the perspective of working agents and brokers who want to take their business to the next level. Please visit the clothes.com That’s th e Cl O s e.com. To check out their articles. You can also subscribe to their newsletter when they’ll send you an email every time a new article goes live with us as always is crystallin Sal, he is the staff writer. He is a staff writer and real estate coach for the close. Chris is the closest resident expert on real estate topics ranging from marketing lead gen transactional best practices and everything in between. He’s a licensed agent in the state of Michigan. Chris has been part of hundreds of transactions from modest rural starter homes to massive waterside compounds. When he isn’t writing you or servicing his clients, you’ll find Chris fly fishing or performing on the stage of his community theatres production. In fact, Chris just got back from a week of trout fishing. So very glad to have him back. Chris, welcome once again to keeping it real. We’re excited to have you,

Chris Linsell 3:01
DJ, thanks for having me. Yep. I just spent a week in the Blue Ribbon trout streams of Michigan, disconnected from all of you lovely people. So everyone who sent me emails, I’m working on it getting back to you, everyone who sent me, you know, derisive comments on Twitter. I’m probably not getting back to you. But I’m gonna read them all. So you know, keep it common. Yeah,

D.J. Paris 3:25
it’s, I am very excited to see what happens with Elon Musk’s Twitter bid, whether that goes through, I think that could really revitalize the platform that so many people just are not engaging with anymore. And I’m hoping that it’s such a great place to have conversations and some not so great conversations too. But but if they can clean up some of the toxicity of it and just, you know, somehow figure out how to have more constructive conversations. I think, I think Twitter maybe maybe due for a renaissance. We’ll

Chris Linsell 3:57
see. Thank you. Right. And you know, by the time this hits, the the podcast, the patent podcast services, we may know something else. My two cents is there’s no way this is going to close. But I hope it does, frankly. Yeah, I think it’d be pretty interesting. But that’s an interesting Convo relative to what we want to talk about today. What’s your social media, right? Yes. So I’m actually working on some content right now. Might be out pretty close to when this podcast gets released. So if you’re watching or listening on Facebook, got a little while to wait. If you’re checking it out on a podcast app, you this might be out now, but I’m working on some content for the clothes.com about social media content strategies, basically, some some ways that you can take social media content and make it more about your business and your goals instead of just, you know, random collections of likes and comments because one of the problems with so Some media content often is that we are measuring success with the wrong metrics. Like we think about a successful social media post is something that gets all these likes, and everyone is just in love with what you wrote, or the picture or the video you made. You get all these shares and all this social media accolade. And then most of us realize, at the end of the day, we say, Wow, that was just so fun. And I got no clients out of it, and I got no leads out of it. And I really have not advanced my business in any kind of measurable way. So what can we do to create content that actually does what we want it to do?

D.J. Paris 5:42
I absolutely agree. And let’s maybe define quickly, just what we’re talking about with, to sort of very common, and not that these are in any way mistakes, but but a common strategy for agents to use on social media, which is, I’m going to post because I just got a new listing, and I want to show off some photos of the home, I want to post because now it’s under contract, or it just closed, or I want to post because I’m heading to the gym this morning. And I want my, my my sphere of influence to see that not only am I a hard worker, I’m also staying in shape. You know, we I see a lot of those posts. It’s a lot of like, here’s what I’m doing in my personal life, or here’s the dinner I just made. Or here’s all the cool stuff I’m doing in my real estate business. That’s what I see more than anything for realtors.

Chris Linsell 6:32
Yeah, yeah. And you know, frankly, there’s nothing wrong with that content. There’s nothing wrong with the things that you said you want to do here. The only thing that I’m that when I hear those things that that I my ears perk up, and I say now wait a minute, let’s talk about this is why I didn’t hear anything in those in those those what I want out of social media that actually I would say are direct contributors to getting you to the closing table, that you can actually track towards building a better GCI, and a more dependable funnel of leads. And part of the reason that we we face that that challenge in social media content, as far as I have observed and and in my own practice, and in my practice of advising other agents is that most of us don’t have and this is this is one of the first strategies I’m going to highlight I want to highlight here is most of us don’t have a plan for what we want the people who are consuming our social media content to actually do after they after they read or watch or have, you know, experienced a post by us, most of us just think, Well, what I want them to do is like this, or comment on it, or share it. And those are okay things to want. But what else do you want, we should be thinking about social media content as not the end. But just as a step in our lead funnel. So for instance, if I’m posting about a new listing, my goal here should be creating content that is going to generate somebody’s somebody’s desire to click on the post to visit like the my website, the property web page may shoot even Zillow, if that’s what it takes. But we need to have some sort of plan for what we want these people to do after they consume our content. So if you this is my first strategy for folks, if you want to create better social media content, you need to think about your content. And then what’s the and then with your content, if you don’t have a clear, and then frankly, you’re creating a post without a purpose right now.

D.J. Paris 8:56
Yeah, so what we’re talking about is some sort of action step, whether it’s a direct action that you’re asking someone to do. If you’re making a video, perhaps say, Oh, by the way, I can help you in the same way for your situation. Here’s how to reach me, here’s how to, you know, reach out that that would be a call to action, right? Whether it’s a good call to action or not is debatable, but at least having something that they can do or like you said, visit my website, or perhaps even look at Zillow, having some sort of action step, either at the beginning of the content or the end of the content, I think can be very effective.

Chris Linsell 9:30
Totally agree. And I want to really encourage agents to not just have the step in mind, whatever that next step is, but to use that next step as your yardstick for measuring success. So for instance, if your post if you create some social media content and the desired next step is somebody to go to your website and fill out a form requesting information. Let’s say for instance, let’s say you have I’ve got a video on Facebook, all about how homes in a certain neighborhood of your target market have never been worth more. And so if you have a home in this area, reach out to me, let’s get a home valuation done for you. So you can at least understand what your options are. Your measure for success on this social media post needs to be how many people actually did this? It doesn’t that’s maybe not the only measure for success, because social media content is multi dimensional and has multiple purposes. But if you’re not actually measuring your success based on what you want to happen, it’s kind of like a runner, measuring the success of their training with metrics other than, well, how fast did they run the race. If you don’t think about how fast you run the race, you know, what you actually want to accomplish out of your training, then you are using the wrong metrics to measure your success. So make sure that you’re including that that next step as a metric for success. And if you’re not finding success, then you need to figure out how to adjust your content strategy so that you’re meeting those goals.

D.J. Paris 11:14
I want to pause for a moment to talk about our episode sponsor are one of my favorite companies out there follow up boss. Now after interviewing hundreds of top Realtors in the country for this podcast, do you know which CRM is used by more than any other by our guests. Of course, it is a follow up boss. And let’s face it, following up is the key to taking your business to the next level follow up boss will help you drive more leads in less time and with less effort. Do not take my word for it. Robert slack, who runs the number one team in the US uses follow up boss and he has built a one and a half billion dollar business in just six years. Follow up boss integrates with over 250 systems, so you can keep your current tools and lead sources. Also, the best part they have seven day a week support. So you’ll get the help that you need when you need it and get this follow up boss is so sure that you’re going to love their CRM that for a limited time, they’re offering keeping it real listeners a 30 day free trial, which is twice as much time as they give everyone else. And oh yeah, no credit card required. So you can try it risk free. But only if you use this special link visit follow up boss.com forward slash real that’s follow up boss.com forward slash real for your free 30 day trial. Follow up like a boss with follow up boss. And now back to our episode. Yeah, I’d like to just add a point to the measurement because I think so many agents put together a piece of content on social media, video, static image, post, something informational they’re super passionate about they take the time to make it, maybe they even edit it, they put it out there. And you know, maybe there is there was also an action step possibly at the end, and then they don’t get the results they want. And I think it’s important to remember from a branding perspective, you’re going to need to drip that action step likely on those that same audience, you know, maybe a couple of dozen times before they actually take action. So measuring just one video one post? Yes, over time, you’ll want to see which videos perform better, which which get you more clicks and action steps completed. But it’s gonna take a while to build up that brand, or do you disagree? I’m certainly happy to

Chris Linsell 13:28
hear either I think you’re right on that. And there, you’re right you we have to consider that social media is cumulative. Instead of is not these like sniper shots, once one shot and then you’re like jumping the entire funnel like social media bill is a cumulative strategy. Especially when you’re dealing with organic, non paid posting, like you’re just showing up in people’s feeds multiple times until they start to get the sense that this person knows what they’re talking about as I see them more often than not. But honestly, there are strategies within the social realm where your content is something that you should expect direct results from the first time like paid advertisement, which is very important on social media platforms. We’ll talk about that in a second. These are these you are paying for ads on these places, and you should expect an ROI. If your goal is to get form fills from an ad and you get no form fills this social media content was not successful. So keep in mind that organic strategy where you’re creating this, like consistent posting schedule of value that you’re delivering to your followers on a regular basis, that’s one thing but if you are if you’re paying to play, you should expect a return on your investment and if you’re not getting a return on your investment, you’re not doing it right.

D.J. Paris 14:53
And I also just a real quick pro tip if anyone out there is spending money on face Facebook, Google Instagram, certainly, you know any of the social platforms or even Google as a search engine themselves. If you’re paying for ads, and you’re not seeing the results you want, almost all of those services have free advisors that you can contact, who will literally look at your account, because it is complicated, it’s very complicated to set up these ads and understand the metrics and best practices. And they will literally I have done it, they will walk you through. And I, you know, I don’t know if everyone will get that kind of access, but you probably will, because they want you spending money on their platform. And they know that if you’re not successful, you’ll stop

Chris Linsell 15:34
100%. And I don’t mean to throw shade on real estate technology companies. But there is kind of this frustrating trend that I see, especially in the customer service, versus sales departments have a lot of real estate technology companies that they are very attentive, before you have signed on the dotted line, and then are a little less attentive after you’ve signed on the dotted line. The same is true when it comes to ad spend companies like but except you could always spend more with advertising platforms. So if you’ve got questions about spending money, 99% of the time, these folks are more than happy to answer, because they want you to keep doing that. So yeah, I wanted to hit on another platform, since we’re kind of talking a little bit about these, these platforms, another strategy, I mean, and this is kind of a call to the carpet, for agents, especially for those who, you know, have maybe one particular kind of content they’re most comfortable with. And they’re not really interested in branching out. The fact is, guys, not every social media platform is right for you. And I’m saying that generally. And for those of you who are listening, I want you to think about me saying this specifically to you individual listener, not every platform is right for you. And it’s not because you couldn’t be on there, you can start an account anywhere you want. But frankly, you might not be very good at the content necessary to be successful on that platform. And acknowledging that is really important. So why I use a pretty simple test when it comes to social media platforms, you want to if you can answer yes to the following three questions. You are in the right place. The first question is, Are my is my audience here? Are my are my clients here are my prospects are my leads here? Or is my audience on this platform? So as an example, if you live in Dubuque, Iowa, and you serve us, a lot of retirees or maybe farm buyers and sellers, Twitter is probably not a social media platform where you’re going to have a lot of success, because most of your audience is not their Twitter users tend to skew very heavily on the east and west coast, a little bit in the Midwest, but it’s mainly in cities like Chicago and Indianapolis and Cincinnati. But it’s a lot of Coasties. It’s a lot of younger, more affluent buyers, and sellers, it is very rarely the suburban or rural buyers and sellers. So Twitter is does not pass the audience test for you. That’s question number one is my audience here. Question number two is can I create the content that does well here, if you can’t do video comfortably, tick tock is not a platform for you. There is no other option on tick tock other than video and there are some people who are trying to like, like shoehorn bad non video content, like still

D.J. Paris 18:53
images that rotate or things like that. Yeah, that sort of stuff does

Chris Linsell 18:56
not do well on tick tock. And in fact, it is a like, if people laugh about it, you have a negative brand impact for being for putting the putting the content that does isn’t designed to be on a platform consistently on those spaces. So question number one is my audience there. Question number two, can I create the content that does well on these platforms? So tick tock, this would be video content, Instagram, this is a lot of photos and video, Twitter. This is a lot of text, some some images, but a lot of text, a lot of links a lot of what’s happening right now current events like in the market today, sort of thing. What are these Twitter’s is really runs the gamut but has a lot of like community oriented content. Pinterest has a lot of like home decor, Home Improvement home renovation curb appeal, a very visual search engine. YouTube is obviously a video a little bit longer form video, you need to find a platform where you know, you can create content that’s going to be successful there.

D.J. Paris 20:07
I’m just gonna suggest one quick one quick way, if you’re not sure where your audience, your, your, your previous clients, your existing clients or your, the people you want to work with, if you’re not sure where they spend their time, ask them send out a survey to everybody, you know, and say, Hey, I’m wanting to I’m looking to focus on one social media platform in the next year. And I just want to get curious, you can even make it anonymous. But say, you know, I’m curious on which platforms, we did this in a nonprofit that I helped with. And we found out that all that the vast majority of our, of our constituents, were on LinkedIn, we had no idea. And we went okay, well, we now have to now we’re going to publish more professional content on LinkedIn, because that’s where our audience hangs out. But we just assumed it was Facebook. And it turns out, it wasn’t, it’s, that’s a, that’s a really great point, your, your, your client base, the people who already know like, and trust you, they will respond to these sorts of questions. So ask them, that’s it. That’s a great, that’s a great, great strategy to use. So those those three questions it was, where’s my audience? Can I create content that does well on the platform, my audiences is where they’re living. And then the third question is, Can I do it consistently enough to meet the platform’s standards. So for instance, if you want to be active on Tik Tok, especially in the beginning, this is not a joke, you need to be posting five 610 times a day. Okay? If you want to be active on Facebook, this is a one post a day sort of thing. In fact, more than one post a day on Facebook is will downgrade you people don’t want to see that much from you. If you want to be active on Instagram, it’s more like to post three posts kind of depends on what you’re doing a little bit there. But you need to be able to commit to a consistent cadence, that’s going to give you the success that you want to have. Because if you are active in places where your audience is not, you’re not going to get any leads. If you’re active in places where your audiences but you’re not creating the content, they want to see, you’re not going to get any leads. And if you’re active in places your audiences, and you’re making the sort of content they want to see, but you’re not making it enough, you’re not going to get any leads. So use those three rules to answer the question of, should I be active here? Yeah. Or should I leave this one and focus somewhere else? The last question I’d like to ask you is around content. So that is that so once we determine our platform, maybe look at the frequency of posts, the type of posts we’re going to make, whether they’re videos, still images, etc. Now, we got to figure out, okay, we know where to go. And essentially what to do, we’re not exactly sure what content or you know, is is needed curious to get your thoughts on determining content ideas.

Yeah. So every one is going to be a little bit different here. So I want to give a couple of kind of more general 30,000 foot view, pieces of advice. And hopefully, this points people in the right direction. So a couple of content rules that you should consider. The first is, you should always create social media content with your audience in mind, not with you in mind, you’re not making what you want to see, you’re making what they want to see, you have to remember, this isn’t your personal video blog, where you are like a video diary, where you’re writing down all of your thoughts or putting all your thoughts down on video. So you can your children can review it for posterity, you’re doing this to make money. So create the content that is going to elicit a response from your audience, not just from the things that will create or elicit a response for you. So that’s the first first kind of big rule. The second rule is, think about your content as an emotional trigger. Whether it is a happy trigger, or an angry trigger, or a motivated trigger or a sad trigger. Social media platforms are designed to prompt a response. And they want their users to then share that content so that it prompts a response in the their users circles. And so if you think about content that prompts a response, frankly, just a copied URL from your local MLS with new listing, there’s no response that happens here. This is boring. You need to create content that prompts a response. Think about what the emotion is that you want to prompt and create content around that. No more boring content. I see so much boring content on social media and guess what it has zero likes, zero shares, zero comments, because most people don’t even see it. They’re blind to it now. And then the last piece of content advice that I would give folks is, frankly, we got to stop trying to go viral. going viral is not a goal. It’s not a goal for you, it’s almost not a goal for anyone. There are very few people in the social media space, who should have a goal of going viral. And the reason here is going viral first of all, is extremely difficult. And it happens based on factors that are almost always out of your control. And to consistency is a much better way to drive action on social media, social media platforms, reward consistent posting of quality content. So instead of trying to make that one crazy post, that’s going to get shared 1000 times you should be shooting to make 100 posts that get shared 10 times. Because that sort of consistency is going to help 99.9% of agents level up their social media game. If you’re an agent like Tyler Whitman, or Ryan serhant, in New York City, and you have millions of followers, going viral is a little bit easier, because you’ve got such a bigger base to build from. But if you have a couple of 1000 followers, frankly, 75% of them are probably not very engaged in what you’ve got going on. going viral is very difficult. So you should work on consistent content that is going to regularly elicit an emotional response and is content that is in line with the platform you’re participating in. So without going too deep into specific content suggestions, because everyone’s market is a little bit different. If you follow those rules, your social media content will be more successful.

Yeah, and just as a quick addition to that, for content, one content idea is to and there’s obviously a million different content ideas. But think about the questions you get asked by your clients throughout a transaction or prior to a transaction even starting. Those are all content ideas. They’re not might not be the right content, ideas for engagement with social media. But that is a great place to start. If you’re sort of thinking, Gosh, I don’t even know what to talk about. Well, what was the last question when your clients asked you and then turn that into a video if you want to. But there’s, we can talk about content ideas on on another episode too. But that was really helpful. In other words, just to recap, what we were talking about is choosing the appropriate platform that your clients are engaged with. And that also works for your type of content. So those are two different things. So we want to make sure we’re hanging out where our agents are, or sorry, where our clients are, and then giving content that is sort of best suited for that particular platform. And then also trying to come up with with a consistent model, a consistency model. That’s how we built this podcast. It’s how you guys have built the clothes. It’s all around a small victories as singles and doubles and supposed to homeruns singles and doubles will win the game. homeruns are great. But we focus on singles and doubles and will win. So consistency consistency, we are at the end of this episode. So I will we will say goodbye to our our friend and co host Chris Lynn, sell from the closed.com. Please everybody go visit the close.com. It’s just the best resource that we have found online for teaching agents how to grow their practice through best marketing, marketing practices, tech reviews, if you’re like thinking of adding a new system in and you want to see what what the experts say as far as different CRMs etc. lead sources, the close is the place they go deep and they go wide. And that is it is just they have great true journalists working there. So please check out the closed.com. And Chris, on behalf of everyone. As always, we say thank you for your contributions to the show. And Chris is now speaks all over the country. So we’ll have to have your calendar maybe put on our site so everyone can follow you and see if you’re coming to their town to talk because when Chris speaks people listen. And he has he just has great insight into what’s going on currently and what’s on the horizon for us realtors and the real estate industry in general. So, anyway, on behalf of Chris and myself, we also want to say thank you, and please tell a friend about the show. Tell a friend about this episode. Go visit the clothes.com and we’ll see everyone on the next episode.

Chris Linsell 29:27
Yep. Thanks, everybody. We’ll talk to you soon.