Your Digital Marketing Coach with Neal Schaffer

The Simple Formula to Social Media Marketing Success

March 21, 2022 Neal Schaffer Episode 256
Your Digital Marketing Coach with Neal Schaffer
The Simple Formula to Social Media Marketing Success
Show Notes Transcript

I just came back from speaking at Berkshire Hathaway Homeservices, the leading real estate company in the United States and the World,  annual convention. Working with realtors I have realized 2 truths:

  1. They are entrepreneurs and need to build their own business like any other business owner
  2. Like most entrepreneurs, a lot of them simply don't have the time and/or resource to consistently show up on social media

While there are some EXTREMELY savvy real estate pros when it comes to social media, from a numbers perspective, my experience is that an overwhelming majority are still looking for the magic bullet to help them gain value from social media, where they know they need to be more often.

Whether or not you are in social media, I am hoping this message resonates with you as well!

With that in mind, in this episode I share with you a simple formula to give you some boundaries yet concrete guidance to make the most of social media marketing in the smallest amount of time necessary.

I hope this inspires YOU to ACTION!

Key Highlights

[03:50] What I Noticed On Successful Real Estate Agents And Salespeople

[05:36] Reimagining Content for More Impactful Social Media Marketing

[07:43] People Want To Engage With People, Not Objects

[08:4] It's All About Action

[09:35] Include Yourself More In Your Content

[10:15] Visualize Everything That You Do

[11:42] Stick With Big 3 Platforms

[15:00] When To Customize Content For Every Platform

[15:47] Things to Remember If You Want to Publish Same Content Across Platform

[20:00] It's Okay to Include Yourself In Your Content

Notable Quotes

  • I find that a lot of real estate agents, a lot of salespeople, and a lot of businesses are self promotional in their content and social media, which tells me, they don't look at social media as this golden arena where we can develop relationships of value with all sorts of entities, all sorts of people.
  • But more than often, people want to see you they want to engage with you, they engage more with people than they do with logos or inanimate objects. It is just the general rule of human beings and, and how and why we engage with people. And this is what social media is all about.
  • I want to challenge you to be 100% visual, with your content. This is what social networks want. This is what people engage with more. And at the end of the day, this is going to get you the most eyeballs.
  • this is what I want you to think about when it comes to your social media marketing. It should be a process, it should be a system because I want you to save time for the actual engagement for the proactive engagement of finding new people reaching out to new people and the reactive engagement of obviously being there when people engage with you. 
  • And once again, save your creative juices for the engagement and for the content. 
  • There's always room to let people know what makes you tick, what you enjoy doing,  what you're passionate about so that people get to know you better. And not only does that build up your personal brand in their eyes, but it makes a deeper emotional attachment. 

Learn More:

Neal Schaffer:

Are you ready to make your social media marketing? More simple, yet more impactful for 2022 and beyond? How is this possible? You'll find out just how on this next episode of The your digital marketing coach podcast digital social media content influencer marketing, blogging, podcasting, blogging, tick tocking, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, SEO, SEM, PPC, email marketing. Whew. There's a lot to cover. Whether you're a marketing professional entrepreneur, or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing you've got Neil, on your side, because Neal Schaffer is your digital digital marketing marketing coach, helping you grow your business with digital first marketing one episode at a time. This is your digital marketing coach, and this is Neal Schaffer. Hey, everybody, this is Neal Schaffer, and I am your digital marketing coach, bringing your digital and social media marketing, clarity, strategy and results. So I am just back from speaking at the Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices annual convention in Louisville, Kentucky. It was an amazing event. There were 1000s of people there. For those of you who might be curious, we all had to either show proof of vaccination or take and show a negative COVID test before we entered. But I wasn't sure how it was going to go down. But there were very few if any people that were wearing masks, hopefully knock on wood, everything will be okay. I feel fine. And I think it shows just how low the numbers are currently in terms of new Coronavirus infections. And hopefully it'll stay that way. I think we've gone beyond Omicron. And I see a lot of events that are popping back up, I'm starting to get inquiries, again for in person events. So I am really hopeful for the future, not just of our industry and conferences. But for the global economy despite the tragedy that we see going on in Ukraine, which obviously, we are not going to forget about. I also want to say just anecdotally, the planes that I was on were full, they were packed. Every Starbucks and McDonald's and fast food restaurant in any of the airports that had the layover at whether it was Chicago or Houston, there were lines of people 2030 Deep just to be able to get a cup of coffee, or hamburger. So all these signs point to the fact that the economy really is coming back. And I look forward to a great year together with you on this podcast. Now, this is not a podcast about business and economy. So let's get to today's topic. And it bring up the fact that I spoke at the Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices event, because I want to share with you as I like to do on this podcast what I talked about there, so I can give you that same advice. Now, I spoke on two different sessions. As you know, Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices is the leading real estate network in the United States. And in fact, globally as well. They have offices throughout the world. But I spoke on two different things. Now one was very specific to realtors, which was using LinkedIn for your real estate agency. What's really interesting is that similar to work that I do for one of the largest insurance companies and I work with their salespeople, I find that, you know, real estate agents are very much like insurance salespeople very much like salespeople, entrepreneurial, they have to be entrepreneurial in order to succeed. They're sort of like solopreneurs, although some of them do have assistants in the back office, what have you. But I find those that are successful in the real estate world. And in the sales world, in general, are those that are generally a little bit more entrepreneurial, they're not waiting for things to happen. They're making them happen themselves. And therefore whenever I speak, at events that are focused on the real estate industry, as I do, sometimes, I find that there's this huge gap between these very few that are really, really advanced in what they're doing. In fact, anecdotally, one of the guys when I was done speaking, raise his hand because someone had a question about YouTube. And I was talking about vid IQ, which that person who asked the question hadn't heard about, it turns out this guy knows one or the founder of Vid IQ that used to work together the same company. So that is not something I was expecting at this event. But I find people and you know, it's not just real estate agents, it's really everywhere because social media is nothing new. It's been around I've been speaking for more than a decade. Obviously there's going to be some that can school me, but an overwhelming majority are not there yet. And they're at different levels in terms of how well they do this. So without Mind that was a really great event. You know, my first two books about LinkedIn love speaking about LinkedIn, it is one of the topics I often get asked to speak about today. And I love giving my own unique perspective, but with a lot of historical perspective as to how people and companies should best leverage it. Now, the topic for today is going to be about the second presentation that I gave. The first one, LinkedIn for real estate agents was in a smaller room of about 150 seats, I'm going to say, the second one was in one of the main ballrooms that had seating for 500. And both of these were pretty much full. For each of these things that I spoke about. Now, the second event I spoke about, was about reimagining your content for more impactful social media marketing. And there's a lot of different levels of which I can give you the advice that I'm about to give you. Right, because one of the levels was I find that a lot of real estate agents, a lot of salespeople, and a lot of businesses are really, really self promotional in their content and social media, which tells me, they don't look at social media as this golden arena, this golden, I don't want to call it a marketplace. But this is this golden area where we can develop relationships of value with all sorts of entities, all sorts of people. But they treat it as just another marketing channel, another promotional channel, another way to quote unquote, share the word about what their company does or what they do. And man, I mean, you know, now in 2022, more than ever, we know that it's that promotional content. This is why businesses often get dinged. But people can get dinged as well, if their content is just too promotional. I see in the real estate industry in general, that there's a lot of agents that just post, you know, one new listing one open house after another, just like your company might be posting one promotional piece of content after another and it just doesn't work. And it's a waste, it's a waste of your time, because you're not going to get impact. Right, the algorithm is not going to show your content. And it's not why people are on social media, they're not on social media to be sold to right. So with that in mind, I said, Let's reimagine and I told people when I was in line to check in at the hotel, there was an agent in front of me, and she was really pretty advanced on what I was talking about. She was already doing live streams, with influencers in her community on a weekly basis, which is one of the things that I recommended. And she was saying, you know, Neil, was she got to know my name after we introduced each other, you know, but she says, you know, Neil, I find that when I post pictures, you know, they do okay, but whenever I have a picture of myself, I always get way more engagement, I said, Exactly. People want to engage with people, they don't want to engage with objects. Now. You know, real estate is unique, because if you sell luxury real estate, or if you are in a luxury industry, sometimes like when I interviewed the CMO, Maserati, the Maserati is the influencer, people want to engage with that object, they don't need people. In fact, they don't even want people, they want to see the beauty of that car, right. So sometimes when you sell luxury property, it may be the same way. But more than often, people want to see you they want to engage with you, they engage more with people than they do with logos or inanimate objects. It is just the general rule of human beings and, and how and why we engage with people. And this is what social media is all about. So I really wanted to transform people's thinking about social media to bring yourself into more and more of your content. And it's related to what I'm going to be talking about here. Because I find, and I've gotten some feedback, I did a podcast episode A little while ago on why it's all about action. When it comes to social and digital marketing. If there's no action, nothing happens. And I find and there was a leading coach with Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices, who sort of validated what I was talking about. But it's all about that most people are just inactive. They're not active enough. They don't, they don't implement things. They might read a lot of blog posts, they might listen to a lot of people talking about social media marketing like me, but they're not putting things in action. Because they think things need to be perfect, or they're making an excuse for their procrastination. And this is like universal. It's not just, you know, the real estate industry. I think it's like any industry. But for every episode of mind that you listen to, you should be acting upon what I'm talking about. And so my whole topic was, first of all, obviously, we want to include ourselves more and more our content. But more importantly, I want to challenge you to be 100% visual, with your content. This is what the social networks want. This is what people engage with more. And at the end of the day, this is going to get you the most eyeballs so This is a different way of thinking about social media. Now, obviously, there are still link posts, which I still do a lot of, there are still just pure status updates pure conversations, been doing a lot of this on Twitter, you know, views of Ukraine recently. But nevertheless, if we can be visual in everything that we do, we're going to get the biggest impact. And not only that, you have to be visual to be able to perform or to be active the most. Well, from an organic engagement perspective, the most rewarding platforms today, which are Instagram and Tik Tok, LinkedIn being, you know, a third. Now, this particular group of people are speaking to their, you know, their the real estate industry. So let's Tick Tick Tock out of the equation. But what I basically said was, look, I know a lot of you don't post as much as you'd like to. So I want to make it simple for them. And I want to make it simple for you. So this is the same message I'm going to give you. Now, obviously, if you're a fortune 500 brand, or you work with agencies, you have a large budget, this is not for you. This is more for the solopreneurs, the business owners, the entrepreneurs that are listening, right. But I want to keep things really simple. I said, Look, if you can be visual in what you do, you're able to post on the most popular platforms. And I said, let's simplify this. You don't need to be every you don't need to be on tick tock. Are there opportunities and tick tock, depending on your industry? Absolutely. Will it change over time? Absolutely. Will more and more older people adopt it as they have Facebook as they have Instagram? Absolutely. Right now, as I record this podcast, I don't think we're there yet. So I told everybody, and I'll tell you as well stick with visual content, stick with the big three platforms of Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. And you can take that exact same content, and post it on all three networks, that exact same visual content, whether it is and I start really simple photo, or video, I'm not even going to talk about stories and reels. Because once again, for a lot of people, that's just too much. Just even being able to post one thing a day is asking a lot from them. So Photo Video, visual, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, once a day, on LinkedIn, I know a lot of you be saying, well, posting selfies on LinkedIn, or isn't that inappropriate? I'd say no, LinkedIn has really changed over the last several years, it's becoming younger millennials are a majority of our workforce. And I'm finding a lot of people can back me up on this, that it's the personal content that is actually doing really, really good on LinkedIn, it's the selfies. It's the people with pictures of themselves, talking about their opinions, about their business, about work about life, about what's going on in Ukraine, whatever it might be, right. So I believe we're at a stage now where we can get away with posting the exact same content. And the whole idea here is I want you to be more active, I challenge myself to be more active, right? So I'm going to challenge you as well. And five days a week, to seven days a week. I mean, LinkedIn, really, I think Monday through Friday is sufficient. If you can post on weekends, and Facebook and Instagram, that's awesome. But to be out there daily to show up, you don't have to be perfect, right? And this gives you the freedom to say okay, well, instead of having to create like 20 to 30 pieces of content, you know, every week, I can just create five to seven. And that's the mindset I want you to have. Now, some of you may be listening, like I said, if you're a fortune 500 brand, if you have a big infrastructure, you're a market on a big team, because I know, I do have Enterprise people that listen to this podcast as well. You're going to say what this gentleman in the room said during the q&a, who called me out, and I love to be called out. And you should question a lot of the advice out there as well, because it may not be appropriate for everybody. And I really appreciate that this gentleman said, Hey, you're saying I should post the exact same content in every network. Yet the people that are following me on Instagram, and the people that are following me on Facebook, and the people that are following me on LinkedIn are all distinctly different people. They're distinctly different demographics, distinctly different genders distinctly different interests. How can you make this recommendation, which doesn't seem to make sense? And I love the critical thinking, the analytical thinking, the thinking that says, You know what? First I'm gonna make sure if this advice makes sense for me or not. And I find that there's not enough of you that are questioning the advice that you hear, in fact, a long time ago on this podcast, I believe it might have been a blog post, but I said, ignore everyone else's advice. Because at the end of the day, everybody's situation is a little bit different. But I said hey, you know if you are that large brand, if you do have the budget working with a large agency or you have a large staff then Absolutely, you should be customizing every single piece of content for every single platform. But if you don't, and you're a business owner slash solopreneur, or just working with limited resources, I'd rather in the words of Jillian Leslie bloggers genius podcast, I want to give her a shout out, she's been a guest on my podcast as well do B minus work, get out there doesn't have to be perfect. But get out there and show up 80% of success is showing up. I think that's attributed to Woody Allen. You know, we don't think highly of him right now. But it is one of my favorite quotes. And I do believe a lot of success comes from just showing up, and people are reminded that you're there, and it seems conversations, you keep top of mind, etc, etc, etc. Now, that being said, there are a few things if you want to publish the same content to every network, obviously, it's the same visual, it doesn't mean the description has to be the exact same. In fact, I recommended it not everybody was doing this, you know, there's a lot of tools like tailwind, the one that I use, I'll put the link in the show notes, you get a special offer. If you go through my link, affiliate link, of course, Neal schaffer.com/tailwind. But you know, using tailwind, I can publish something to Instagram. And I want to use hashtags. It is a best practice, use hashtags. But I'm going to publish the hashtags in the first comment immediately after publishing the photo. And tailwind is one of those applications that allows you to do it, what that means is, I am automatically sharing my Instagram content to my Facebook feed, which I recommend you do as well. But if you don't have the hashtags in the post, and you put them in the first comment, then when it goes to Facebook, it's clean. Because people on Facebook, don't engage with hashtags. And I would say you want to keep hashtags out of your post as well on Instagram, because it devalues it, the branding just gets a little bit off, people are just focused on the wrong thing. And there's been study after study that shows so long as you publish hashtags in a comment, you know, within a few minutes of your publishing your post, the engagement is pretty much the same. And if you want to call me out on that, call me out on it. But that's what I've found. There's not a lot of difference. In fact, one can say that the performance from hashtags on Instagram, in general, after they've released reels has sort of been less and less impact over time. But regardless, even if you don't use a tool, you know, you can cut and paste those hashtags that you were going to use and just publish it without the hashtags. And then paste those hashtags in to the first comment immediately after publishing your post, that's at least what I would recommend that you do. And then obviously, you want to cut and paste that capture and bring it over to LinkedIn. Right. And you can obviously play around with it, customize it a little bit for that LinkedIn audience. I think for the most part sharing between Instagram and Facebook, you're not going to get dinged or owned by the same social network. They give you the opportunity to publish the same thing on Facebook from your Instagram profile. It's it's supported by meta? I mean, what are you worried about it because I did have some questions about that. But this makes it really simple to be active on a daily basis, and to have the most impact. And this is what I want you to think about when it comes to your social media marketing. It should be a process, it should be a system because I want you to save time for the actual engagement for the proactive engagement of finding new people reaching out to new people and the reactive engagement of obviously being there when people engage with you. And in between, you know, proactively engaging with people in your network, obviously, checking up on your feed every day, and congratulating people when they should be congratulated and keeping Top of Mind with your own network, regardless of which of these three networks you're on. Once you create the process in the system, and there's a reason behind it and rationale behind it, logic behind it. That's when you have success. And you can systemize a lot of this. And once again, save your creative juices for the engagement and for the content. Because it's not easy to create visual content, I get it. This is sort of the backdrop behind this book that I've been working on for some time. And every time I go to a conference where I speak to someone, and I tell them the ideas about the book, they're like, No, you gotta write it sooner rather than later. So I am going to sort of push myself to do that sooner rather than later. But, you know, I have a process for the search part, which is the SEO I have a process for the email side. And this is sort of the the beginner process for the social side. Yes. If you can post videos regularly, then you're sort of or if you can post frequently, you're ready for stories. If you can post a lot of videos frequently. You're ready for reels but before that it's okay not to do that stuff. I'm not going to say you have to do video, you have to do reels, but I want you to be visual, and I want you to try to maintain consistency on these three networks. I'm hoping this simplifies things for you, as I hope I did for that audience and all the time. Time, once you realize it's okay to bring yourself into the picture, I think it actually makes it a lot easier for you to publish this content, it's okay to do selfies, it's okay to show yourself with friends, it's okay to show a picture of what you did today. Now, it should be aligned with your brand and ideally your professional brand. But there is a bucket. And I explained to all the agents in the room what my customized content buckets would be for agents, there's always room for personal passion. There's always room to let people know what makes you tick, what you're about what you enjoy to do, what you enjoy doing, I should say what you're passionate about, so that people get to know you better. And not only does that build up your personal brand in their eyes, but it makes a deeper emotional attachment. And that is what branding is all about. That's why and I talked about this, I talked about it when are presented the other day as well. That's why I still buy Tylenol rather than the generic Assa Modafinil, or whatever you call it. I don't even know what to call because I know it's Tylenol. And if you're nodding, if you're like me, that's the power of the brand. That's the emotional attachment. So just something to think about. Don't overdo it. Invest the time in the content, invest the time in the people. And when you invest in content, it's not just visual content, it's the content for search. It's the content, your emails, obviously. But don't worry about not having anything to say think visual, be inspired visually. You know, the sunrise that I saw from the airplane, going from Louisville, Kentucky, to Chicago, Illinois. Sometimes it's these random things. But it's the caption that I wrote that talked about my obviously speaking so it's part of my Brandon. It's the caption that that brings people in. And that could lead to a call to action. But it could lead to just greater engagements that when you have that promotional post in the future, which is a content book of it of its own, it's okay to do that every once in a while, right. But when you do that, you're going to get more engagement, you're going to get more eyeballs, because all of your previous content did better. And that's really one of the big messages that I want to leave you with. So this is one of my shorter episodes, I wanted to be short and sweet with this. And I really hope I mean, I could draw this on for longer, but I think actually to keep it more memorable, more impactful. And maybe this is a hint that maybe more of our captions and our content should be a little bit shorter and sweeter. That's my message for you today. Keep it simple. Three networks, maximum once a day, be visual, bring yourself into your content, be strategic about your captions, feel free to customize those for each platform. But hopefully this has given you the confidence to say yes, I can do this, Neil. I want to be more consistent. I know I need to do more with social. Start with once a week please, if you're not ready to do it daily, if you've already been doing it daily, then follow this advice. I think you're gonna see better engagement, more impact for everything you do in social. Alright everybody, I want to thank you for listening to another episode. If you're new here. I do hope that you'll subscribe to this podcast. And if you are a subscriber, I would be honored by your view on whatever podcast app you are listening to, if you didn't know, and you're wondering what I do for a living. In addition to speaking and hosting the digital first mastermind community, I am also a fractional CMO. I work with anywhere from startups to large enterprises on a variety of strategic initiatives. And I would love to help you and your business with your digital and social media marketing as well. You can go to Neal schaffer.com/cmo. To find out more fill out a form and let's have a conversation over zoom or the phone to find out more about how I might be able to help your business. Well that's it for another episode of the digital marketing coach podcast. This is your digital marketing coach. Neal Schaffer signing off. You've been listening to your digital marketing coach, questions, comments, requests, links, go to podcast dot Neal schaffer.com. Get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes and Neal schaffer.com to tap into the 400 Plus blog posts that Neil has published to support your business. While you're there, check out Neil's Digital First group coaching membership community if you or your business needs a little helping hand. See you next time on your digital marketing coach.