Live Event: Mastering Social Media (Propy Web 3 Summit w/ Robert Croak, Maya Vander, Ricky Carruth)

Um, well, hi guys, you know, each of you are obviously here because you guys are fantastic at getting in front of individuals and really kind of getting your word out, um, but you guys doing it in such a different way. You're lifestyle, education, personal experiences, whatever it is. How did you discover your voice? And like what, what's the importance really of being you as an individual person in front of your group? Getting good question. Good to see everybody. Look at this. Um, when I think about my voice, good question, actually, um, people ask similar questions and when I really sit down and think about it, I, I think, well, I didn't really find my voice, my voice kind of found me. And I think the question is, see, I had a, I had a really massive mission, um, which, which is, I'll tell you is, is to reduce the failure rate in the real estate industry one agent at a time and after I became a very successful agent, um, I never used social media to build my real estate business. But when I realized what my next chapter of mission was, then I said, okay, how am I going to execute on this? And that's when I realized I had to use social media to do that. So instead of asking, what are we going to do on social media? It's more so what's my mission and how can I use social media to action appeal on that mission? Right? So think about that when you think about how to find your voice or what you're trying to do on social media. Don't, you're, you, most people kind of do the reverse. And I did Europe with social media and a lot of you guys did, which is kind of a curse because then you're like, I have to build social media. What do I do? And it's more so fine, what your passion is first, what you really care about and then use social media to to pour that. Yeah, I would say Eric, um, I would put it to piggyback on what Rick said is be authentic. When I decided to finally come out and start really taking social media seriously, I noticed a trend. Everyone was following everyone. Every single video two years ago looked the same, whether they lived on East Coast or the West Coast. And so for me, I decided I was going to take all that out of the way and I was just going to do content that resonated with me that I felt the audience needed to hear. I was going to break down really difficult, really state business and financial topics. So the everyday person could absorb it and execute on it. And I stayed 100% true to the authenticity of myself and my message. And I didn't do any of the motion graphics or the crazy videos and high, you know, really highly polished videos. I did it all outside, walking with the road noise, people honking at me, snow, rain, it didn't matter. And that was the secret sauce for me and really catapulted me from at that time. I think I had 75,000 followers on TikTok two years ago and now I have 1.3 million just on TikTok. So to me, I think the key is authenticity, don't follow the herd and just stay really focused to your niche and stay in your lane because too many people try something fail, try something fail. They never give themselves enough time to figure out who their audience is and what their niche is. And I promise you, like you always hear your one video, your one meeting, your one event to weigh from a totally different life and it's absolutely true. And I always know where you are because I live in the same town. So when you're doing your videos, I can see the buildings behind you through that. A lot of people chase me down to be like, there he is. Let's see what videos these doing. So yes. Right. Yeah. Actually, I go with Robert. So my situation, I do this a full time, but because of selling sunset, my audience 95% women and the one is how a woman can balance kids and life and work. So I try to stay authentic, obviously, it's possible to share how do I balance my life? What do I do? But also remind people, hey, I'm not the selling sunset, a city, whatever, called one, called the style celebrities, I sell real estate and I'm actually here to generate business and leads, but that's the boring stuff, my real estate. So I try to mix it and do both. I noticed that why what I share mostly the gets more engagement is my family, my kids, me struggling to lose those last five pounds, basic selfie, selfie that like I didn't even think too much of God, the most engagement versus oh, here it is, like, you know, for sale or will it just list it? So stay true to yourself, don't be shy and just be, just be you. Everybody, first of all, thanks Eric and thanks everybody for, you know, sitting down and just trying to figure out how to build your best brand on social because it's difficult. You get a lot of conflicting advice. And I'll answer the question that you asked about how I sort of found myself through the lens of, I think most people here are trying to build a personal brand. That's what people are trying to accomplish because they're trying to use their social for a business reason. And when you try and build your vote on both personal brand and I put it in hair quotes because I would actually make an argument that most people screw it up and they actually don't build a personal brand, they just build a social account talking about the product or service that they sell. I think that you just over index on business information because it's safe and it's secure. So how I found myself, how I found messaging that resonates with my audience and just for context, I host a large business podcast, but I also put a whole bunch of educational inspirational content on my social is to bring parts of my life in that were unique to me. It's authenticity. I mean, you hear this word again and again and again. What does that actually mean? Bring parts of your life in that may feel at first a little bit uncomfortable sharing, but ultimately it's what differentiates you and creates a true personal brand, not just another billboard about you talking about real estate just with your face on that account. So include hobbies, passions, spiky points of view. You're not getting canceled anymore. It's just don't be an asshole, but include things that really do matter to you because that's what differentiates that's what makes you different than the other 10, 20, 30,000 realtors, investors, mortgage, robbers, individuals that are trying to build their own personal brand. I can get the information about homes and opportunities and all these different items on a ton of different platforms. But why would I go to Maya or Ricky or Robert? It's because they include their own personal life and their own struggles and their own story and their content. That's what I just do again and again and again and again and that's how I found my voice and I find content that resonates with my audience. And I will say one more advice you should definitely post we voted for. I'm kidding. You know that I remember right away like four years ago I was so sweet and I was like thanks strong without a bite. It couldn't be more like 50, 50 and I got so much hate on both. So I will say avoid politics for sure, you don't want to get hate. So socials can feel like a constant content machine. How do you balancing consistent with keeping content fresh and exciting for all your viewers? I think what resonates most of the people are your opinions on things and not just telling people what to do but how to do it. A lot of people say hey buy a house, you should buy a house but everyone's talking about how to buy the house or you should do this, you should do this. But they don't really talk about how to do it. So when I'm thinking about running through like staying consistent with fresh content, the first thing you have to do to really stand out is to voice your opinion. And which means you have to have an opinion. And so in order to have an opinion which means you've got to become educated. So how do you stay educated? So you go down the rabbit hole with this. And you're not paying attention to what's happening in the world, in the industry, trends, et cetera. You kind of lose touch with how to really resonate with people because one of the questions about algorithms that are always changing. If you're not in the game, then you don't really understand what's working and what's not working and how to create different kinds of content with different formats to really resonate with your audience. So the best way to stay fresh is to number one, stay in the game as far as beyond social seeing what's going on, always be posting so they understand what's popping and what's not. It's staying educated. Like, Google your industry and roll through the articles every day and find the ones that stand out and read them. And stay on top of all the not just the clickbait information, but the real data behind whatever it is that you do so that you have your own opinion and then voice that opinion. Your opinion is what's going to make people follow you and make people content to watch your content. And always remember that the algorithms in your content is going to ebb and flow. You might go viral, you get a few videos that get a couple million views, maybe 10 million views, whatever it is. And then it goes away for a while and then you panic and you think, I've got to change up my style. Don't do that. It's always going to change. It's always going to happen flow. And that's one of the biggest things I see people do wrong. But then secondarily, and you touched on it perfectly, don't hand off your personal brand to an assistant or some virtual assistant because I actually called out one of the biggest influencers in our category. And I said, why are you copying all of my videos? You're literally taking them verbatim and even walking now instead of using your fancy studio, he said he didn't even know, I'm like, what do you mean you didn't know? You've done four in a row and these were very viral videos. And he said, well, I have a team of people that write on my content, they do all that for me. So I apologize, do not do that. If you understand the value of your personal brand long term and you look at it as if you are building a business, and it's not a pastime, lose the word influencer, forget about all that. You're building a business to be the top of funnel for all of your other businesses. And that is the most important thing when you stick with that authenticity and you don't farm it all out to virtual assistants or someone that has no idea what your audience thinks of you, of your voice, you're not going to stay in the right lane of what your audience, how they began to know I can trust you. Keep control of the reins. I'm not saying don't get help, I have help, but I still do all of my DMs. I still do all of my video editing and all of my writing. And people don't believe me, they're like, how can you be as big as you are and do that? And it's because I don't want people out in the world, especially in finance and business to get wrecked because my information is not the best that it can possibly be. And when you hand it off and you're just the talent that's just reading it off a script and producing those videos, people are going to get hurt by that. And that's why whenever someone that does finance says, this is the next 200x crypto or this is the next 100x stock, I'll call them out and say, why are you doing that? I know you're doing it for clickbait, you spoke of that. And that is the worst thing because you're not building a business, you're building vanity likes to get reactions that you can't build upon for your future self and your future of financial self. That is the difference that I want all of you to take away today. I'm speechless. That's right. No, I mean, I just want to talk again about the authenticity of that look. I mean, I know that if I'm going to post something about real estate, my engagements, we talk about algorithms, we'll probably be the lowest. I just cannot, if I post just listed just sold, even in the store, I could just see it doesn't get as much as I would like. That said, I'm still, my goal is to still let people know, hey, I'm not a selling sunset. Yeah, it's great. I was there. And it's amazing. But I do so really that I've been doing this for 12 years and my goal is here to get clients. So yes, I post a lot of personal stuff. Maybe sometimes I'll sprinkle a sprinkle selling sunset pictures because it gets a ton of engagement compared to my, oh, here are condos in Saniyes. And then I don't need a million people to watch my story about the condos in Saniyes. All I need is like one by or one sale, oh, my eyes in Miami, she does real estate. So it's okay to post your personal stuff. I should encourage it because people care and they want to see that that's getting engagement. But if you put up a lot of your business, just making myself a mix of the two show you out, but also remind people, hey, this is my business, this is what I do. So the question was how to keep content fresh. I would say that a couple of ideas on this. First of all, if you are putting out a whole bunch of content, you should have some sort of measure as to what's performing and what's not because there's a lot of lessons there. I see a lot of people just publish, publish, publish, and they're not paying attention to the type of content or the topics to get the most engaged, or drive the proper KBI's on just the vanity metrics, but drive the actual top of the final results and eventually end up converting into whatever thing you wanted to convert into. So there's a lot of learnings and just looking at your top performing content and taking that lesson away and then turning that into how you structure your new content or the topics and the content book as you speak on going forward. I also think that if we talk about keeping content fresh, we can look at it from two other angles. The first idea is that sometimes content doesn't have to be fresh. So sometimes the piece that I posted a year ago that really just hit, there's going to be a lot of people in my audience that haven't seen that piece of content. So how can I repurpose that? Maybe it's just a real that I repost or a tweet that I repost. Or maybe I want to turn it into a different format. Maybe I want to turn that reel into a blog or I want to do a full 10 minute YouTube video on that reel. So I think that there's, again, understanding that you take lessons from the top performing content, you can repurpose bold content, doesn't always have to be fresh. You can build a system for repurposing, meaning that I don't want to think of net new content across all of my accounts. So maybe I'll just, this is actually my process. I tweet about five to 10 tweets a day. I look at the top performing tweet and then I'll turn that into a YouTube video, a newsletter, I'll turn that into a reel, I'll turn that into Instagram story, but I want a testing ground so that I don't have to always think about net new content on every single platform. And then I guess I mentioned two ideas. I'll give you one last one. If you want to understand how to play to the algorithm, I don't like that word because ultimately the algorithm is just your audience, but if you want to play to the algorithm as much as you can, look for the new features that a social platform is rolling out. So if a platform is rolling out a new feature, they generally give that new feature more organic reach just to push it into the market. So if you can find a way to take your existing content and repurp or find a way to push it out through that new feature that a social platform is rolling out, you will get a slight boost in organic reach, but that's what I'd recommend. And I want to piggyback for just five seconds on that Scott. One of the most important things and one of the biggest mistakes I see people make when they're building their brand is they find a platform that they're doing well on and they go all in on that. Don't do that. You have to be on me present. You know, I'm not an expert at YouTube, but guess what? We're working on YouTube linked in a lot of people think is just for jobs. It's not. It's a great resource for you. I mean, make sure that you are omnipresent because we never know with any given president or congress or whenever what might happen to a platform. So be omnipresent so then that way you're not all in in one basket and you have the diversity. So how do you convert followers into actual clients? There's a lot of different ways to do that. There's many different ways and I'm glad that he brought up Scott brought up the testing part. I was talking to Jack from ice coffee hour you guys read the ice hop coffee hour of the podcast. They have accounts where they just post massive amounts of short, long form, everything just to test to see what piece of content really pops and then and then what the one that does they use it on their main account and then they take ideas from that. They literally have like accounts on every platform that's just testing accounts. That's that's huge. But as far as converting people and the clients for for me. So there's a lot of different ways you can do it. The way that I do it is I think of email as a social media platform when when you open up your phone and you look at social media, what's the physical motion that you that you take? Right? You're scrolling. When you open up your phone and you go to email, what's the physical motion that you're doing? You're scrolling. Right. You're looking at a basically a news feed to see if something pops out that you click on. It's really the same thing. It's just a different format just like every platform is. The difference is I think email is kind of your platform that you can you have a little more control over what the algorithm is and how many people are actually going to see that piece of content when you want when you want them to see it. So I think it's really big to try to convert people to your email and texts, right? Your email and your texting platforms, new tags. And to get those people over and convert them over into your platform. So then you can market to them forever as opposed to the algorithm, basically hiding you from their fee, you know, in three, four weeks a month, a year, whatever. You don't know what's going to happen there, but if you can convert them to your platform and then market to them from there after you built a trust and built your brand, you have a far better chance to convert them than whatever business you're in. And I would say the best way to look at your personal brand is with patients. When you're building a personal brand, whether you're from start, you're in the middle, you're trying to get to a million followers, whatever your goals are to make it your top of funnel, treat it as a business. If you were to invest in a small business, let's say a pizza shop, I do pizza shops. Let's say a small business, you buy a laundromat, you don't buy it and expect it to be profitable the next day. You don't build it and expect it to give you a paycheck in the first six months. You're looking at it as a long term investment. Too many people don't do that with their personal brands. You look at it and go, wow, I did 10 videos and nothing happened, I quit. It's ridiculous. Put the effort into yourself, treat your personal brand as a business, learn, learn, learn and then you watch it come back to you into to piggyback off of your email, 100%. So many people in the world where we're at don't understand the importance of email. And one of the smartest things we did, this was two years ago, is we built, I was really mad at all the budgeting tools that were out there and I knew mint was going away. So we built a budgeting tool, Elizabeth on my team built it and we were going to sell it for like 599 because I need thousands and thousands of people would buy it. I was like, let's just give it away and make it our top of funnel for our email. And today, I think we've done 180,000 people downloaded the budgeting tool for free, which is way more valuable than me selling it for $5. So just be omnipresent, build your personal brand like any other business you'd be investing in because you can't give up on it that quickly. Yes. And also it's very important to treat it like your business, I time block literally to focus on LinkedIn, IG and Facebook, I'm honestly I'm lacking with Facebook but I will recommend go to Facebook because you can get a lot of leads there. Make your DMs, I miss so many DMs because a lot of them go to spam unfortunately in my case with social media. But those DM people are reaching out to me, they want to buy, they want to sell immediately get their emails and I just move them to my CRM and my email blast so I can stay in touch with them. So really time block time to focus on social media, I mean responding to people on DM engaging with people, it's basically prospecting like I block time to do cold call, it's the same time, it's the same thing that I need to do to block for social media because it's just a great, it's free, it's a great way to prospect people in organic maybe way, maybe you're going to comment on someone's picture as well, don't just be selfish and post your own post and then just forget about it. Look at the engagement but I will recommend check your messages and get their emails to their point and make sure they're in your other platform as well to stay in touch with them because the DMs can get overwhelming and then you forget about it and move them to your email, get the phone for number and focus on that. If you want me to answer, I see that clot going the other way down, that was too hard sir. Alright, so I'll do a couple last very tactical things because you've got like a lot of the theory down about how to convert your audience into clients. So a few things I do, obviously you have to know your funnel, first of all, and social is going to act as your top of funnel. You should just very tactically have Lincoln bio or pinned posts on all of your social with that lead magnet that you want people to die like look the robber was saying about that that widget, what was it, a budgeting tool, great tool for like a free lead magnet. Just have it everywhere you're posting, I mean the common census and comment and this is very basic, except that I don't see a lot of people doing well. Another strategy that I use to convert my audience into, well for me, it's podcast listeners but I also sell products, I sell information products, I ask them what they want. I ask them what kind of content they want, I ask them what kind of education I can give to them for free or for paid, what are they willing to pay for. I'm asking them on Instagram stories, I'm sending out emails with Google tight forms with a survey responses like I'm always asking them what they want. So I'm creating the content, I'm creating the product if I can, I know real estate here on the creative product, your customer, but you can definitely ask them what type of content they want. So I'm always engaging with, I've been making them part of my story, a part of my business because at the end of the day, social is not just a megaphone going one way, it's social is communication. So I'm always surveying my audience and then strategically on Instagram because I know a lot of people focus on Instagram, regardless of whether or not that's the right thing, it's a great tool. There's a software called many chat and what many chat does is it, and you've probably seen it, some of you may use it, it's for me, one of the most useful tools for pulling people from Instagram and getting them into my funnel, you can set up keywords. So if you post something in the description, you can say, hey, comment for me podcast and I'll send you my most recent podcast and what many chat does is it will DM them the most recent podcast episode. So that's a very tactical software tool to get the audience from Instagram onto the podcast or into a funnel or to go subscribe to my newsletter. But ultimately, you just have to have your top of funnel positioned across all your social people. Click it. They subscribe, they download, they engage, they do whatever you want them to do because you don't want to keep building the social account and really when you build a social account, you're building a castle and someone else to sandbox, right? You never know when that social can get taken down. So find a way to take that audience and put them where they're actually yours. Fantastic. I feel like we haven't even touched the surface and we're out of time already. So we're going to have to go in your podcast. We'll just kind of recreate this thing for an hour. So everyone gets something out of this. Is this fantastic? Thank you guys so much. Appreciate you. Thank you. Yeah.