- Ethics_Gradient
- May 5, 2015
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Common misconception that; that fun is relaxing. If it is, you're not doing it right.
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SOCIAL MEDIA.
This is the part I'm least versed in, so here's a huge grain of salt 4 u:
Before we get in, let me tell you a secret most people don't know. All Social media sites check for "legitimacy" to some degree in an effort to stem the Scammer Tide. Different sites use different checks, but generally you want your information to be identical across your platforms (name, email, etc) and that's enough. If you have a website or an entry on a Maps service and link it they'll check there too, so try to keep them all the same. Don't do jokes here, listing the White House as your address is stupid suspicious to the Platforms, and appeasing the Platforms is your only goal here. They are your Pantheon now. Put respect on their name, by which I mean park your preferred name on every platform you so much as smell, ASAP. This will prevent scammers from parking them and loving up your empire, as well as ensure that you have a Jacebook account or whatever if it turns out that your demographic is absolutely feral for Jacebook (Jacebook is nothing, i made it up just now).
Also a word of caution, this post is going to be demographically heavy. I will be referring to people by ethnicity, race and gender, over and over again. If that makes you uncomfortable, know it makes me uncomfortable too. I'm sorry. It's also the unfortunate reality of targeting a demographic. If that's cool, barrel straight on in, but skip to the REAL ACTUAL CONTENT heading if you don't want to hear my story, we're doing this like a midwestern quiverfull mom's bad recipe post because I decided that just now. It's the post I want to write. THIS IS A HINT. IT'S NOT EVEN SUBTLE. MAKE THE CONTENT YOU WANT TO MAKE BECAUSE AT LEAST THEN YOU'RE MAKING SOMETHING.
In college I learned Hootsuite (an app which can schedule posts for you and do other things, none of which matter at all it's for scheduling posts) because I was part of the bike club and nobody was responsible enough to make the toosdiegh night ride post on either Monday or Tuesday to remind people to come. These posts were so successful that I ended up setting up a few clubs in the same way. Unpaid on all fronts. On the strength of that, my only social media experience, I got a Social Media Manager job at a Mortgage company. Want to follow in my footsteps? Just loving apply, it's not like that job title has real requirements or meaningful certifications and they're going to hire an rear end in a top hat, why not you?
While working for the Mortgage company I made the most successful branch Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, and Pinterest accounts in the company's 20 year history, each by several orders of magnitude. I credit Hootsuite and Adobe Spark exclusively. I then built a shared asset library in Adobe Creative Cloud so that all the other branches could steal my poo poo, but mostly to convince Corporate to get everyone on a centrally-paid Adobe account (sharing between accounts on the same plan is one-click, sharing between independent accounts is some sort of dystopian loving nightmare that never ever worked). I built a variety of Spark templates in our corporate colors, and when I'd get bored or when I was a passenger being driven to a shoot I'd look at accounts from other companies in our space and adjacent spaces that were successful at social media and create the assets I'd need to be able to create similar content. Eventually I got a real boy budget, and so I'd do things like dress up my loan officers in costumes and paint a pumpkin in the corpo colors and take like fifty shots of each of them as well as the group and various subgroups. Later still I became the Social Media Manager for the entire company for about a week before I got fired for my boss' mistake. I am a dipshit, you can do this. The single most successful post we ever had was my boss in a blue and white (corporate colors) Santa suit, talking about a house he was in. It was mostly successful because his wife hit him in the head with the boom mic. That house did not sell as a result of our social media or through us.
That was common. My boss was an egomaniac who cared way less about conversion (making money) than the numbers at the bottom of the post, so that's what I optimized for on the branch accounts. He did the Ice Bucket Challenge in the year of our lord 2019 and he got ice stuck in his shirt, panicked, and passed out. He hated it. He demanded that I didn't post it. His wife (our accountant) demanded I did. I'd rather face laws than claws, so I did. The following day his passed-out rear end was his Profile picture on every platform at his request because the fucker did numbers.
I also managed the socials of every single one of our branch's dozen or so agents and a handful of our most valued Realtor partners. Social media, you see, is worthless, so you can trade it for things it's federally illegal to pay money for, like Realtor/Financier partnerships. The whole world runs on crime and technicality. Anyway, I set up Hootsuite instances for each of them, then worked with them to create a customized version of our corpo assets (for our employees) or co-branded assets (for our Realtor partners) to suit their personality and preferred posting style, then banged out posts for them a few weeks at a time and scheduled them. These were "heartbeat" posts, meaning that they were background noise to keep the channels active. For agents, the heartbeat cadence was whatever they preferred. For Realtors it was 3 a week, MWF. Then I'd edit any video or photo they took, slap some of the graphics on them, and post those out as primary content. This worked spectacularly.
A word on engagement. Humans do not like watching someone look uncomfortable, especially someone they plan to process the most expensive purchase of their life through. Looking comfortable and natural correlated with way better performance, and way better conversion more importantly. This may be the case for you, or not, depending on what you intend to do with your poo poo. My best performing Social realtor was a black native Jamaican who I, a fat white guy who grew up in South Florida, found nearly incomprehensible. He did crazy numbers with talking heads, had dozens of conversions, and built incredibly strong relationships with his customers and partners. I went to his house on Thanksgiving at his request specifically to shoot them laying out the table, sitting down, and having a performative "family" conversation. I couldn't identify half of what was on the table, but it was delicious, and also the single best performing Agent post of 2019 company-wide. It also opened him up to a whole new demographic, older white couples, who were previously essentially a non-performing demographic for his posts. He signed a deal for a four million dollar property soon after, which he attributed to that post and me. You see, most of our deals were teardowns, fixer-uppers, and investment properties (this is code for "the worst looking house on the block"). It also helped that the boss' wife was Jamaican, so we got a lot of mileage out of talking heads of the two of them and it drove the impression that we were a Jamaican friendly company where people could speak normally and comfortably without being judged, which to be fair we were but only for the one specific Agent.
Our worst performing Agent on socials was a guy with who spoke perfect, coached English. Every picture and video he ever took looked like it was at gunpoint, and even staring at a script, even with a teleprompter, he could not speak seven consecutive words on camera without pausing and looking like he had just poo poo himself. He also insisted on doing those videos. It didn't matter, because he made 400 cold calls a day and made fuckpiles of money hawking lovely little duplexes to flippers. I mention this so that you understand, bad socials can only really hurt you if good socials are the goal. If the goal is Youtube success, poo poo out whatever on the Faces Books and then base your future posts on what does well, or less-poorly.
 REAL ACTUAL CONTENT
Each social media site is a totally different beast with different preferences and algorithms. Unfortunately they change so often that any guidelines I post will be pretty much the broadest of possible strokes. Full disclosure I am basically paranoid and don't use social media on personal accounts, even though I have one of the most common first+last combos on Earth. I do still do some things professionally in the space, but only for people I have an existing relationship with and even then only in desperate times. Anyway, a post that does well on Instagram will not do well on Pinterest, etc etc etc. I mention Pinterest a lot because it was highly relevant to the Real Estate space due to demographics. I'm going to use it as an example because it's very different from anywhere else, so it has to have the most unique strategies for success, and I have deep knowledge of it because we used to make $mountains with it. In all likelihood you will park a Pinterest name then forget about it forever unless your target demographic lines up, because it is laser-focused.
Based on numbers I just pulled from a variety of sources as well as the data my idiot CEO used to pay marketing companies for (don't, do not, do not it's all lies), Pinterest is still somewhere between 60 and 80% female. Female users dominate engagement, with around double the time spent on the platform per week. Past here the numbers get way more fuzzy, which is impressive considering the 20 percentage point range I just posted like meaningful data. Critically for our real estate success, the median Pinterest user is part of a household that makes over $100k a year, and is between the ages of 25 and 35. This is the core market for real estate sales, and the fact that they are women is a significant bonus as the majority of home purchases are driven by a woman, most commonly a female partner but surprisingly often a daughter, parent, or friend. The primary audience is largely Caucasian, though not disproportionately given the demographics of the countries where it's most popular. Asian ethnicities, specifically Asian-American ethnic groups are overrepresented compared to the same demographics. Are you loving uncomfortable yet? God knows I am. Unfortunately it pans out. Weaponizing Pinterest was the single most effective thing I ever did for conversion by miles. It's not a Real Estate listing site, so you can photoshop everything to hell and back and get away with it. Misrepresenting a property's condition on an MLS (Multiple Listing Service, which is where Realtors have to post houses) is grounds for revocation of your MLS contract, revocation of Realtor status, and a lifetime ban (if you get caught lmao). Photoshopping on Pinterest is a borderline requirement. Crime and technicality wins again. Look at trending and popular tags and post things that fit them. This necessarily means posting simple pics that would not perform well on other sites, like a cold shot of a pool or fireplace with actual humans in the picture (another MLS no-no). We sold a 2 million dollar house as a direct result of a picture of my boss' wife sitting on the most incredible stone fireplace you ever did see. The house we sold did not contain the fireplace, as the fireplace was in a lodge in Minnesota which was not a home at all. Didn't matter. They reached out to our email, I handed off the deal to the Jamaican guy I mentioned earlier, and he sent them pics and a short walkthrough video of a house he happened to be standing inside at the time. They bought it without having set foot inside. Weaponizing platforms works, but you can never feel clean again. I will never feel clean again. I scrub so hard. It doesn't help.
I won't be touching on demographics much past here, I just wanted to give you an example of weaponization.
In general, your goal will be much simpler. You're looking to convert users of one platform to viewers of your content, regardless of platform. If Youtube is your chosen platform, this means making a Facebook user watch a video, any video by you, by whatever means necessary. You're not looking to convert users of one platform to another, just get your content in front of them on whatever platform you can. Never link people offsite directly, as nobody wants people clicking out of their horrible trap. Meta in particular loving hates that and will do all sorts of lovely tricks like transparent rehosting, throttling all your content, wasting your ad spend on people who fit your target audience but Meta knows won't give a poo poo, don't do it. If you make videos, cut shorter versions for your non-preferred platforms if you want to apply conversion pressure. Facebook does optical character recognition and voice-to-text on videos, so it's hard to hide from them. Some people get around this by wearing those Creator shirts with the Youtube logo and channel name. Some make banners. Some try to make their URL look all hosed up like a lovely captcha. Do any of them work? God alone knows, but for small, non-established accounts Meta seems to punish the entire account and all linked accounts (Threads, Insta, Facebook, Whatsapp) for a time after an infraction of this unwritten rule, so my personal recommendation is to match your account names across all platforms, put a Youtube logo somewhere, and hope for the best if any of those platforms matter to you.
Ultimately your socials will establish rapport with users and hopefully, maybe lead to conversion to your preferred platform. Like I alluded to above, squeeze gently. To maximize your success, every post on every platform should be substantive enough that a person who sees that post as their first engagement with your content will immediately understand who you are and what type of content you put out at a bare minimum. Also know that the vast majority of exposures will not engage, but Facebook also looks at the amount of time a post is visible in a feed for popularity, so your content on socials should take time to engage with. This incentivizes inscrutable posts somewhat, so let your inner cryptid out. The above info often means your social media content will be shallow and re-tread the same points over and over, and definitely involves breaking kayfabe (if you do a halloween special with a mask on, your Social videos will involve you taking off the mask or having the mask off regardless of if that occurs in your preferred platform content). Facebook won't know, but this is a squeeze too. Your base on Facebook should see a post of yours, be reminded of your preferred platform, and go there "organically" (Youtube loving loves it when people search your channel name, did I mention that? Pretty sure Boylei Hobby Time's success is based primarily on this because he is wacky successful given his operating scale and post cadence. Also I love him and he should post more). Anyone not in your base will see them as incentive to find out more about you, which they can do on-platform or off. Your commenters will say dipshit things like "I love your Youtube videos" and you can Love or Like react to them to highlight them and bring them to the top. Once a video has run its course, make a gif of a money shot from the video and post it on your socials to drive Share interaction. The Share button is your secret goal, as it is the absolute strongest tool on every platform and on Facebook specifically Shares are treated as separate posts of your content (meaning any throttles you've encountered are reset for that instance of the post), so a Share has ludicrous power, and a Share from a user demographically dissimilar to your base can drive engagement that Fecebook would normally never give you. Do not ask everyone on your Friends list engage with your content inorganically, especially if they don't normally engage with other peoples' posts, as this is known to stifle posts badly when done at scale. Don't worry about your many and varied grandmas who like everything you post though, as not only are they likely outside your normal demographic and also Facebook seems to know about Grandmas of this stripe and doesn't seem to care much. Plus, Grandma is going to miss some, or angryface React at your blasphemy, or comment on every third post asking how your cat is doing, and that's organic enough.
A brief word on Reactions: Like and Love are safe on Facebook and always positive. Other Reacts may have varying effects on posts, but it's unclear because of how goddamn much static every Social Media platform uses. Don't talk about this with social media people, blood feuds have been sworn over varying opinions and will be again. Just use the Like-est Reaction u got and you'll generally be safe.
Even though you likely hate it, saying "slam that like and subscribe button" or "I'm gonna count these fuckin' jellybeans but first drop a comment with your guess" are unfortunately effective. Obviously need to be tailored per-platform but it is what it is. Generally younger audiences are more receptive and older audiences are less so or even reject it, so again consider your target demographics and act appropriately, but basically every successful YouTuber engages with the "like and subscribe" bullshit either verbally or as a motion graphic. You can be counter-culture about it (Folding Ideas used to ask you to join the cult of "Like, Comment, and Subscribe" for example, AvE makes jokes about it usually for another) but it's probably a good idea.
gently caress this poo poo is long. I don't know if I hit everyone. Congratulations everybody you've now passed my 4 hour Realtor Social Media training course we used to use as bait. Now you can use the Partner graphic in your listings and I'll do a free house photo/video package for any home you want once a month so long as you've sent us a deal this year. Great job. Bad news is, statistically 90% of you will not be Realtors this time next year. Ah well, wanna buy a house?
This is amazing, thank you for posting!
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Oct 13, 2023 15:31
