Katie Lance, CEO of Katie Lance Consulting – many of you have seen her speak, read her book or watch her blogs. She is a great content and social strategist and coaches many agents, teams and brokerages on how to leverage their social media accounts to the best of their ability. We went live with Katie on Facebook and asked her to share her tips and tricks to running a successful social media presence. Watch the video below or listen on our new, Game Changers podcast channel.
Our first question is about Facebook ads and Facebook boosts. What’s better – boost a post or run an ad?
First of all, when it comes to boosting, I don’t think there’s anything necessarily wrong with boosting, but one little, sort of secret tip, that I don’t think a lot of people realize, is that, if possible, boost your posts from your computer or your laptop versus your phone. And the reason for that is, when you boost a post from your computer or laptop, for whatever reason with Facebook, you have more options with your targeted. So, for example, if I just posted something this morning, I want to go back to my business page and boost it. If I do it just from my phone, I only really have one option when it comes to looking at all of my audiences. But, if I do it on my computer, I can pick from multiple audiences. Which is awesome, right?
And that leads me into the other part that I was going to mention, which is audiences and creating unique audiences are really important. I think that it’s valuable for an agent and a broker to target your warmest audience possible. One of the mistakes we see agents and brokers making, is they spend $25 or $5 or whatever it is and they target this really big audience, right? Everybody in my area who’s over 25, right?
And that’s like a huge net. And let’s face it, we’re not Coca-Cola, we’re not Delta Air Lines, we don’t have millions of dollars to spend on Facebook ads. So, you wanna target your warmest audience possible.
Warm audiences could be people who already engage with you on Facebook, people who’ve already engaged with you on Instagram, people who’ve already watched your videos, people who’ve gone to your website, people who are already on your database. And so, going into Facebook’s ad manager, there’s a place right in there that says, “Create Audiences”, and you can create a number of audiences. Then when you’re going over to boost, you can pick a couple warm audiences and what that does … I know you and I talked about this before, is that it just sets yourself up for success. So, people are seeing your ad, and you’re already kind of looking a little bit familiar to them, they’re more likely to like or comment or engage.
And then just one other quick tip I’ll mention also, is there’s nothing wrong with running ads to that bigger audience, but understand, when you’re running an ad to a big audience, it’s gotta be more of an awareness campaign. If you’re asking someone to convert, meaning give you their name and email and they have no idea who you are, your conversion rates are gonna be super low, right? Or you’re going to be paying a ridiculous amount for every conversion. So, when it comes to ads, there’s nothing wrong with running an ad to a warm audience to try to get them to convert into a lead, but then also thinking about your ads from a brand awareness standpoint where you’re putting out content, maybe it’s video content, blog content. Just kind of getting those little digital breadcrumbs out there, so people get a sense of, “Oh yeah I’ve seen that person. I know who that is.”
On one of your vlogs, you said that, “If you do get names and emails from an open house and you want to connect on those leads in person too, the best place might not be to go and friend request them really quick. It might be to go somewhere else.”
Because the thing about Facebook is, like you were saying, its important to get that lead in the proper way. Is it kind of creepy to go and friend request someone the second they walk out the door? Or is there another way that you can go and do that, that helps increase your brand awareness as well without it being kind of crossing the line?
Yes, absolutely. I think, unfortunately, a lot of agents and brokers still kind of have that reputation as that super aggressive salesperson and I definitely think there’s a way to take what happens in person and then to take it to social media.
So, one of the tips I’d recommend is to use LinkedIn. Though LinkedIn is really the only professional social network and so, if your LinkedIn profile is out of date or there’s not a lot about you, there’s a perception that you’re not in business. So first of all, you want to make sure that your profile is updated, you’ve got your contact information there, don’t be a secret agent. But, when it comes to meeting people in person, especially from an open house, there’s an opportunity to take that list, look on LinkedIn, see if they’re there. If they are there, if they look like they’re somewhat active, they’ve got some connections, send them a personal note and it can be as simple as, “Hey Suzie, I really enjoyed meeting with you and your family this weekend. I’d love to connect professionally here on LinkedIn.” It’s not creepy, as you said, it’s a very natural next step to connecting with that person.
In terms of creating the overall content and plan of your strategy too, how do you create the perfect social marketing plan? Do you focus on growing your followers first and focusing on getting the content to get a huge database or a following first? Or do you create a plan, focus on content first and have really good content that hopefully will draw people in?
I actually recommend starting with content first. I think that followers and how many people like your page, that’s not necessarily the best metric to follow or to kind of measure. I think, especially in real estate, real estate is such a local business, that I think it’s always better for an agent or broker to have a small audience if they’re engaged in that audience, right? Versus they don’t need 10, 20 thousand, 50 thousand followers, they just need a few hundred people in their local community, right?
I would recommend thinking about content first, but I think you actually have to take a step back and really think about what it is that you want to convey, why you love what you do. I really think that there’s a lot of value in taking a little bit of a, almost a branding exercise if you will. This stuff’s not gonna take a long time. Take 15 minutes and really kind of, close your phone down, take out a piece of paper, and start to think about why do you love what you do? Why are you doing this? And who do you love to work with and who do you not love to work with? And those are gonna set the foundation I think, for everything else.
And then from there, thinking about what are the questions you get asked all the time. If you were really to think about it, you could even look in your email, look in your sent email box at all of the emails that you sent, and start to brainstorm. What are the things that you get asked all the time? What are the things where you get asked and you think to yourself, “Oh my gosh. How do you not know this?” Right? That’s a great question, write those down and those can be the beginning of your content strategy. And so, you start to think about who you are, what you want to convey, you start to kind of create this list of topics and then from there you can really start to think about what that content looks like. And for anybody at the beginning stages or maybe even if you’ve been doing this a while, my biggest tip is just pick a day that you’re gonna publish content and stick to it.
