Our Social Media Strategy - Elevate: A Podcast For Driven Real Estate Agents - Episode 8
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When used correctly, social media can be one of the most effective tools in your arsenal for reaching out to potential clients and letting them know you exist and you're there to help them with their problem. This week's episode is all about the social media strategy we employ not only for the Elevate Podcast but also for Crossgate Realty Media.
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Nathan Whitworth:
The first side of being strategic in your content creation is document what you're doing, document over creation. That was a very much a Gary B thing and I found it to work really, really well. Okay? Because honestly, I'm a creator and it is a lot of pressure for me to have to create something new all the time. It's pressure for me. I can't do it. And I'm a creator. This is what I do for a living. And I can't create stuff off the top of my head all the time number one, because I mean, that's a lot of pressure. But then number two, I just don't have the time. Hey guys, welcome back to the episode of Elevate. It is just me here again today, and I hope that you guys had an amazing Thanksgiving. So this is a topic that's been coming up in a lot of circles that I've been talking to a lot of agents recently about social media creating content for social media, and I figured I would do an episode today kind of talking about what our experience of has been here at Cross Gate to Media.
Not that we have a huge account, and I am not a forefront guru on how to grow an Instagram account or how to grow a TikTok account, but what I can tell you is that we have been strategically trying things to see what works, and I'm actually going to share those results with you today. All right, so the first thing I wanna say is this Last night I was at a gala event for agents and realtors. It was the real upstate world producers. It was a black tie event. And I had somebody come up to me and say, are you Nathan? And I was like yeah, yeah. And I said, I, he said, with Crossgate Realty Media. And I said, yeah. And he said, Hey, so somebody do you? He said, do you know so-and-so? And I was like, I don't think so. And comes to find out this person had known me and was able to pick me out of a crowd because of the work that we've been doing on Instagram, because she found us, she followed us and she's been kind of checking out what we've been doing.
And I gotta tell you, that was a little weird. It's the first time, probably the first time that I've ever experienced that. And we have been spending really about the last 90 days, which is what we're going to focus on. We've been spending the last 90 days with a content strategy that seems to be working. And that's what I wanted to share with you guys here today. So first off, before we get into any of the statistics, before we get into any of the strategy, before I share with you anything, I want to first start out with the mindset because I feel like most every agent at this point, most every person, understands that there is a gigantic opportunity on social media. It's just that there's this invisible wall between where you are now and where you want to get to, to be. And there's a lot of barriers there.
And I think the first barrier that we have to break down a little bit is the mindset. And we have to understand that this is not going to be perfect in the beginning, and you have to be okay with that. You have to be okay with sucking for a little while, and that's hard to accept and that's hard to get. Before I started, I was actually a music teacher and I helped students learn how to play instruments, who students who have come to the instrument for the first time, or maybe they've been planning for a few years. In middle school, I was in charge of teaching them a new thing, getting them from point A to point B. And that was a conversation that we had to have often with the students is to say, listen, in the beginning, it is not going to be easy.
And in the beginning it is not going to be good. But nothing in life, and you've heard this before, I'm sure nothing in life that's worth it is easy. Because if everything was easy, nothing would be worth it. So this is something that I've really focused my time on and I wanna share with you. Focused effort times time, okay? Equals skill focused effort. Times equals skill. So when you have focused effort doing something over and over and over and over and over, you've got that repetition going and you've got that feedback loop going with yourself where it's like you try something, you check it out, you see that you don't like it, you change something, right? That times doing it over an extended period of time is going to be what develops skill. And talking in front of a camera, talking in front of a microphone, being comfortable just being in front of people on camera, it is a hundred percent a skill. Just because you don't feel comfortable doing it now doesn't mean that you couldn't be comfortable doing it in 90 days. It just kind of depends on how much does it matter to you? How much effort do you wanna put behind it? Okay? So that's the first thing. The mindset is it's not going to be perfect in the beginning, and you have to accept that, and you have to be okay with that. You have to be okay with things getting better with time.
And after you kind of accept this and you kind of get this concept and you become okay with it. The second part is you have to be strategic with the content creation itself. Now, this sounds easy and this sounds very free, free cuz it's like, of course I wanna be strategic. To me, there's two things that I would point to here and I would really talk about before we get into the statistics, and I'll talk about what we've been doing and how we've been doing it and all that kind of stuff. The first thing is and guys, this is a Gary thing, I think this is where I heard this first, but the idea here is document over create. Okay? Document over create. There's probably things going on in your day-to-day life that you could document what you're doing, document what you're learning, document the experiences that you're having with people.
Here's a good, for instance, if you were to go to my Instagram account go to the BTS highlights, okay? Because by the time this podcast comes out, you're probably not going to see this, but go to the BTS highlights. Just this morning I was walking down downtown Greenville. I had an interesting conversation with an agent. Her name is Meredith and she is crushing it. She is growing so fast, but we're working together on building her YouTube channel. Now, sitting there really quickly, we just started, we're on the third video of her content creation series, and she said the first video that we did was, it was a neighborhood highlight video that we had created for, and she said that she's already gotten a lead from that video on YouTube. Now, this is one of the first videos she's ever posted on YouTube, one of the first videos, and she says she's already gotten a lead from it.
I honestly, I was shocked because most of the time my mindset is always we go into this understanding it's going to take time to produce a result. I mean, she basically got one off the bat, which is really cool. The lead that came in from that YouTube video has a budget of about 350 k. And Meredith was excited because that 350,000 is going to cover her entire creation budget. Her budget with us to spend with us to get her YouTube channel started is covering the expense of all of it. That one lead that came in covers her expense to get the entire YouTube channel up and going and started. That's how it's done. So anyway, that's really cool. That happened. As we were walking away from that conversation, this is the reason I want you to go to the BTS in Instagram. As we were walking away from that conversation this morning, I pulled out my phone, I started shooting myself, just talking about what just happened, the experience I just had.
The thing I just learned minutes before with Meredith in that conversation, again, go to the Instagram, go to the highlights, you'll see it double chins and all right? Cause I wasn't even holding the phone up high but just sharing what I just found out and what I just learned, which is amazing. I'm so excited for Meredith. She, she's taken the leap. She's invested not only the money, but the time, effort, and energy into starting this YouTube channel. And I was sharing with everybody what she had just told me. The reason I'm saying all this is because I simply documented what I just experienced. I didn't feel the need to have to create something magical. I didn't need to pull out lights in a $7,000 camera and get professional audio and professional sound with the perfect backdrop and the perfect, none of that mattered. I was just documenting what was going on and documenting what I was learning and documenting what I was experiencing.
You can do that too, because every day you are seeing new things, you are learning new things, and you are going through a transformation as well. You just basically share that with everybody. Now, I'm not saying go to a restaurant and take a picture of your salad and post that. Not necessarily that you want the things that you're sharing to be valuable to people, but what I've discovered is that oftentimes the things that you don't feel like are valuable actually very much are because you are uniquely positioned to help your former self. Okay, I'll say that one more time. You are most uniquely positioned to help your former self. There is somebody in their journey that is just two steps behind you, one step behind you. And when you post something, even if you feel like, or maybe five or 10 steps, when you post something you feel like it might not be important, it might be kind of dumb, it might be something that just because it feels monotonous to you in your life right now because you've done it so many times, you've experienced so many times, you've seen it so many times, you think that it's irrelevant.
And there are people out there on the other side of that megaphone which is social media that would be very interested to see what you're doing and to learn what you're doing. That's why I'm behind the scenes. Things have really blown up. They have, because it's amazing to see what's behind the scenes. That's almost way more interesting most people than seeing the highly produced stuff that they see on TV and on social media. So I'm saying all that to say the first side of being strategic in your content creation is document what you're doing. Document over creation. That was a very much a Gary V thing and I found it to work really, really well. Okay? Because honestly, I'm a creator and it is a lot of pressure for me to have to create something new all the time. It's pressure for me. I can't do it.
And I'm a creator. This is what I do for a living. And I can't create stuff off the top of my head all the time number one, because I mean, that's a lot of pressure. But then number two, to constantly, how do I wanna say this? I just don't have the time, right? That's the other side of it. That's the other problem. I just don't have the time to be able to sit down, think about what I want to create, because then there's the pressure of it being good and you feel like you gotta get this one hit wonder you posted on social media, and if it's not blowing up and it's not getting 10,000 likes, then you failed. That's a lot of pressure. Just go around all that. Just simply document what you're doing. Okay? So it's thing number two. This is the second part.
Number one is document what you're doing. Number two, and this is also a thing that I learned from Gary V. So I'm giving him total credit for all this stuff. Create media that provides value. Now, this is where I want to go into how we're doing it, which is very similar to what he has done with his content creation strategy but it works guys. It works. Okay. So we created a podcast called Elevate. That's what you're listening to right now. This is a relatively new young podcast. I'm excited for the direction, I'm excited for its future. This is actually a model that I've used, a content creation model that I've used in other businesses, and it was wild successful. So I brought it here to Crossgate Realty Media. So we're taking the podcast, I'm not doing a lot of these videos where it's just me and you.
I'm not doing a ton of them right now. Maybe I'll do more of 'em in the future if you feel like it's helpful. But for the most part, what I'm doing is I'm bringing in agents and I'm bringing in realtors who have spent a considerable amount of time doing their thing, honing their craft, and they're basically just sharing with me on the podcast through and interview what they've learned, okay? We're taking that 30 minute conversation, 45 minute conversation, hour long conversation, and we are chopping that up into small bite size, one minute pieces. And then we're distributing that on social media. And so we're able to basically sit down, have a couple of conversations, batch that work Jonathan, who's here in our studio manager, who's here in the studio, takes that content, splits it up into five or 10, 10. If we could get 10 which is always great, but 10 bite size pieces of content that are valuable for our intended audience or interesting for a variety of people.
And then we get those things scheduled and posted out social media. So this is where it gets kind of interesting, because that's kind of a tactic that other people have heard before. But this is where it gets interesting. So in the past 90 days on our Instagram, and again, we do not have a large Instagram, but it's really only been about 90 days that we've worked at the Instagram to start to build that into something that we're proud of. So in the last 90 days, we've had a 50% increase in followers in the last 90 days. I want to give a little addendum to this cause I think it's very important. Followers aren't everything. Most people can run a highly successful business without having hundreds or tens of thousands of followers even, right? Having the right followers is way more important than having many followers, but I digress.
So we've had a 50% increase in followers in that same 90 days. What else do you think we were doing that just happened to coincide with that 50% increase? We started producing reels. Now we haven't done anything crazy. It wasn't like a reel a day. Actually, in the last 90 days, we've done 34 reels, okay? So if you were to think about it, like 90 divided by, I actually have the numbers cuz I don't do math in my head. So 90 divided, 90 divided by 34 is 2.64. So let's just round up and let's say about three A, we have about a new reel every three days. Now, we didn't actually publish on time, a new reel every three days, but I'm just saying on average is about a new reel every three days, and it resulted in a 50% increase or 56% increase in followers.
Okay? Now here's what I think is the golden idea here, and it is by having the podcast, by having the long format interview and the long format content creation that honestly, I'm not having to really create much. I mean, I'm not creating anything now. We're doing the work behind the scenes to get it all chopped up and to make the thing look nice and to get it out there and to publish it and all that stuff. And even that, we still have a long way to go. We're learning when we publish things that are getting us more reach and things that are getting us less reach. But that's not what this video is about. I think the idea here is that what I'm constantly trying to do is buy lottery tickets. The thing that's the idea here, okay, will every soundbite be a high quality soundbite, a high value soundbite for my intended audience?
No. Not every single one of 'em will, right? Boy, what's interesting is that I get to test, right? I get to test when I publish a reel with a sound bite. It's interesting to see which ones pop and which ones don't. And guys, I know that there's a lot of people out there that feels like it's the algorithms out to get you and that it's kind of by chance. Oh, well, it was like you were lucky. It was luck to get it out there. And that's not what I mean by buying lottery tickets. What I mean by buying lottery tickets is when I have that interview every once in a while, there's a thing that's said that is said in the right way with the right tone and the right inflection, and it's an amazing, valuable point that resonates with people. That's what I'm looking for.
I'm buying lottery tickets. I'm looking for that. I'm looking for that one or two reels. Let's just say that out of 34 reels, five of them are good. And when I say good, I just mean are categorically more interesting to listen to or have a better point. Or maybe it's an idea that people hasn't heard before, or maybe it's an idea that people have heard before, but just said in a different way. It could be any of those things. But what I'm doing is I'm trying to buy lottery tickets. I have the long form interview that we cut up into short form content, which are the reels. That's the only way that I can manage my time well because I don't have the time to just sit down and create. I know a lot of people who will sit down and they'll try to create randomly.
They'll say, I'm going to sit down once a day and I'm going to create one reel a day. That's kind of a common thing. And you think that that's going to work because you think that that doesn't sound like a whole lot and it shouldn't take a lot of time, but it does. Because if you are working to try to create something that's going to be impactful, it does take a little bit of time. That's why there's a lot of reels now on Instagram that aren't getting a lot of reach, that aren't getting a lot of feedback. And even, I'm not trying to say every single one of our reels that we have on ours are doing that either cuz they're not. Right? But what I'm doing is I'm constantly working to buy lottery tickets, and that's what I'm putting the effort behind, and that's what I'm putting strategically creating here.
When we do the podcast, we interview people who have found success in their industry, and then we take that and we chop it up in a short form content. That short form content hopefully leads people back to the long form content which hopefully leads people back to understanding that this is something that Crossgate Realty Media does. This is what we're interested in. We're interested in helping agents and realtors build their own business. Okay? All right. So if you're not wanting to go through all of the effort, what you see here to do the interview, to chop up the content, if all that stuff isn't stuff that you're comfortable with, and I totally understand if it's not, then I would highly encourage you to be strategic with the reels that you are creating, that you are creating. What I mean by that is instead of saying to yourself, well, let me create one reel a day with the idea here that you're going to kind of halfway halfheartedly create something that may or may not get some reach.
Sit down and be strategic about the topics you're going to talk about, the things that you're going to cover in your reels, and then try to batch 'em. That's by far the best way to do it. Sit down. Instead of trying to do one a day, try to do 10 in one day, right? Or 10 in one morning, get them all done back to back. It's ready to go so that you can just post it when it's time. You can get, go and get them scheduled on Instagram so that they release when they're supposed to. That's the best way to have a higher quality product go out into Instagram land. I'm going to say this and then I'm going to come back to an earlier point if you need help with that, if you're like, but I don't know what to create a reel about, I'm going to help you out.
Okay? I've put together a list of 365 short form video ideas, 300 or 65. This is one real for every day of the year guys. Okay? So 365 real ideas that we've put together into a pdf. if you'll go to Crossgate Realty Media the Instagram, Crossgate Realty Media at Crossgate Realty Media, then in the link in the bio, I've got that there. So if you wanted to go check that out, I encourage you to go, it's free. Go download it. 365 real ideas. I wanna go back to the quality of the product though. So you've got one side, which is documenting, but you've got the other side, which is content creation. Now, if you have to choose one or the other document, that's better than doing nothing for sure. But if you're trying to get into the content creation side, which is worth doing for sure, I want you to understand something just as an agent and a realtor, you understand supply and demand in real estate.
There is also that same dynamic that plays out in social media online. Okay? Now let's talk about this. Y a few years ago when Instagram was in its infancy, okay, you could post almost anything, get pretty massive reach, build a quick following, very fast. Now, why is that, right? You're like, well, the algorithm's like helping me out or whatever, but that's not really the issue is there is not enough quality content on that platform to serve the supply of people that it's going to. So that means that the limited amount of content that you have, the limited amount of I'm sorry, supply that you have on the platform isn't enough to serve the demand. There is more people who's looking for content on that platform than there is good quality content. So that means that you could create something that was kind of crappy and it wouldn't be very good, and that content that's crappy is going to get tons of reach, is going to get tons of engagement because there's nothing else on the platform. We're not in that era anymore. We're not in that era. Another reason for how reels in the early days of reels, there were so few quality short form content reels, there was a lot of demand there. People just didn't know at the time that there was demand because they didn't know how many people would catch on so quickly, and how many people would really love the idea of short form content that's vertical. So you've got tons and tons and tons of demand and very, very, very little supply.
Again, it's not that way anymore. So at this point on pretty much every mature platform that you can think of, there's now an overabundance of supply, okay? That's actually meeting demand. Now, do I have the actual numbers? No, I don't, but this is just hang with me here. It's very theoretical. We have an overabundance of good quality content that's actually meeting the demand, and in my head, it's probably pretty even now, does that mean that you've lost? Of course not. That doesn't mean that it's too late, but what it does mean is you have to focus on a higher quality product. Now, do I necessarily mean that it has to be professional video, professional lighting, professional sound, professional care, like not necessarily content is king, right? A quality product will rise above the noise, but it has to be quality product. That's the key. Okay?
And this is an Alex Hermo thing, but quality over quantity, okay? Quality over quantity. But if you can do quantity quality, that's the best setup. If you wanna find success, if you've can figure out a way to pump out high quality content consistently, right, and in a high quantity, then those are the people who win. Those are the people who are able to amass larger followings. Those are the people who are able to move the needle forward on social media. Okay, that's it. I could talk forever. I could talk all day about this stuff. Hopefully a few things that I've talked about today has been helpful for you. Again, I want to encourage you go to the Instagram account@crossgaterealtymedia.com, Lincoln Bio. There is a PDF there. If you're looking for content ideas and you're trying to figure out what should I be creating reels on?
I've got 365 real ideas there that you can just go in snatch for free and I hope it serves you. I hope this helps, and hopefully you took a little bit away from this conversation today, guys. I hope you have an amazing week. Go out there and crush it. I'll see you next time. Hey everyone, thanks for listening. Hopefully this was really helpful to you in your journey of building a business. If you like what you heard, please click subscribe and go to iTunes and give us a rating that helps us out tremendously when we are producing hopefully content of huge value to you. I can't tell you how much I appreciate it, and I hope that you have an amazing week. Go out there and crush it. I'll see you soon.
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