Engage & Provide Value To Your Audience with Val Borbone

I have a flurry of real estate agents in my feed and I must admit that the majority of them are not really giving me any reason to stay connected to them. I'm finding very little value in what they're posting. If I want to see sales in my feed, then I'll go to realestate.com.au to get my information, because it's an aggregated site that cuts the noise out for me.

Talk back to the audience. Engage. Ask yourself, what is your audience going to get from you that's valuable to them?

If I'm in a community environment, I'll be looking for things that support my living within my community. That might be property listings for an investment purpose. Rather than just telling me that you've got something listed, tell me why it would be a good investment for me, particularly in the area, particularly if I'm one of the residents of that area, or if I'm looking interstate or out of my region. Tell me why that is a growing part of the market.

BE STRATEGIC WITH SOCIAL MEDIA

Understand what it is that the audience actually wants and what you have that's valuable enough to say. Understand what social is going to deliver for you. Develop a strategy that says I know what I'm doing here. I know what my audience actually wants. I know what content I need to start creating to make sure that I can maintain that engagement, and I need to start by looking at how the consumers behave.

I often see very slow moving videos on Facebook on open homes for the weekend. You’ve got 1.7 seconds to grab the attention of your audience. Some of these videos are taking 20 seconds just to prepare and show an open home. In 20 seconds - I've scrolled on. If you're not able to capture attention quickly, people move on very quickly. The job of content is to attract and engage.

Further, understand how your consumers behave. When are they sitting on the couch? When are they considering property decisions? When do they have time to discuss this with their family members or their partners? Posting at 11 o'clock in the morning is pretty useless, because there are a lower number of people actually online. We tend to go online in the evenings.

We also tend to go online around the three o'clock mark, which is typically a school pick up time. It’s also the time people take for an afternoon break because everyone either needs a sugar hit or a coffee run, and they have a ten to fifteen minute window where they'll jump back onto social and clear their mind a little for the rest of their afternoon.

With Instagram, it's a very, very visual medium so whatever you post has to be enticingly visual. Really poor photography or video work won't really cut it when you're trying to sell a luxury mansion, for example. The medium has to match the purpose, and this is where most agents are getting it wrong, particularly in drone footage. The drone footage I've seen around has been very basic. I don't need to see a sweeping picture of a roof, because I'm not interested in the roof. I'm interested in the greater landscape and how quickly I might be able to get from, let's say, the front door of my property to the beach front that you're selling me.

SOCIAL MEDIA TOOLS

Use Later, a marketing platform for Instagram, to create really nice branded visually interesting templates, which you then save to your phone. It takes a lot of the hard work out of becoming a graphic designer and a videographer. When you're creating posts, they will be on brand and all of your watermarks will be ready to go.

https://later.com

Also use Plann, a tool for Instagram, to create a visual look for your Instagram feed before you post it. You can see what nine images look like together at any one time, and you can click and drag and move them around so that visually it looks fantastic and you're not trying to do everything necessarily on the fly.

One beautiful part about social media is you can plan ahead, and these tools allow you to schedule ahead, so that you can be flexible. If something amazing happens on a Tuesday morning, you will have space in your planning calendar to say, ‘Oh, I can do this quickly as a story, because I've actually got my scheduled posts for the next two weeks ready to go and there's a nice gap in here’. It also takes away the stress of thinking every day, or every second day, ‘Oh gosh, what am I going to post?’ I see agents just grabbing the next listing or grabbing a sneak peek coming soon random photo and posting it, because they feel like they need to post, but they haven't actually got their purpose worked out or how they're going to measure it.

https://www.plannthat.com

SOCIAL MEDIA EXAMINER

This is a website that focuses purely on social. They're one of the first to release updates that come out from the big social giants, and they do screenshots and instructions about these tools so you can see how they work. I really like Social Media Examiner because it's one of the quickest ways to stay up to date with what's happening.

https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com

MAKE CONNECTIONS ON LINKEDIN

Do not focus on LinkedIn as purely a sales channel. LinkedIn is for making connections within your industry, your peers, high net worth individuals, and to position yourself as the industry leader or thought leader. See LinkedIn, as your professional space. Show what you know about the industry as a whole, how you support the industry, how you support your clients, and showcase your expertise. When a person is ready to make a move, they will already have your name in the front of mind.

Focus on touchpoints in your LinkedIn feed. We work off a rule of about seven presentations of your name in someone's feed before there's a recognition. To make that seven touchpoint work, you need to probably post let's say 15 times before seven of them will stick, and then you end up with a warm introduction. I have had amazing career opportunities presented through LinkedIn, simply because firstly I'm present, I'm present regularly, which means I get my touchpoints in their feed, and then when they're ready to talk to me, they already know how to contact me. I've been very lucky to have people come back to me ten years since I've met them saying, ‘Oh, I need to talk to you about something’, and I've not had any phone call or email in between that time, but I've had a presence on the feed the whole time. They see that I'm fairly consistent and that I've got a position in the market that they like to listen to.

 Article sourced directly from Real Estate Hot Topics Library.