Cody Martens- How to get unstuck when it comes to social media content

My fellow agents, our clients struggle with social media and online marketing. And the biggest thing that they struggle with is often, knowing what to say and what to do and then the consistency of doing that repeatedly. The premise of our company is pretty simple. It's just to take as much of that off of the Realtor’s plate as possible. So, we do a lot of the online marketing for them, email, social media, our websites, blogging. We also coach them and lead them to the water for the things that we can't do for them. Social media obviously is social and so you need to be your best representative of yourself on social media.

It’s not something that you can hire out. But what you can hire out is the coaching and the accountability and the knowing what you should be doing so that it is as easy as possible. 

I hear people spending money. In fact I just heard, of an agent on Friday who had, outsourced his social media to other companies. Wouldn't that be the equivalent of sending somebody else instead to your best friend's birthday party and expecting them to like be okay with that?

Once we get our heads around what social media is really about, it's about, relationships, we won’t do that anymore.  It's about enhancing relationships that it gets really hard to outsource to like a loved one. It's hard to delegate that to somebody else and have it go well.  What you embody is that people need to own it and people need to do it. But you also realize that most people out there aren't doing it at all.  Either they're overthinking it or they're spending too much time thinking about it as opposed to just being an action, getting it done. 

I think for most of us, social media is not our business. It is a tool of our business. I like to stay in touch with people, but it is not our business. And oftentimes when I see people saying, I'm going to do social media, every other part of their business starts to really struggle and suffer because they spend so much time in their thinking about, ‘Should I post this? Should I post that? 

Luminary Agent’s 14 day challenge takes away the, “what should I post, how should I post it, how do I make it sound this way”. Or “should I do it this way or should I do it that way?” All the what if’s.  Because those are all the stumbling blocks. So if I can remove all of those stumbling blocks and make it as easy as possible without doing it for you. 

With social media, it's meant to build relationships and then those relationships lead to transactions. But social media is not meant to be transactional in and of itself. That's where a lot of people get social media mixed up is because they want to, they want to hire out being themselves on social media thinking that it's a marketing sales transaction tactic and it's really not. It's not a selling tool, if you use it that way, you'll quickly lose all the hours and credibility with people. 

If all you're ever doing is selling, for your friends, your followers, your fans, what value are you providing them? If all you're ever doing is posting your listings, your solds, your awards and accolades? What's in it for me? That's the question you should always ask.

Too often, especially this time a year, all of my counterparts in the industry are putting out, “I sold X number of homes. The entire newsfeed is filled with people talking about how many homes they've sold. I don't see anybody else doing that in other industries. My insurance agent isn't doing that. My doctor isn’t doing that. I get that it's been taught that there's this evidence of success concept, where you want people to know you're actually a successful agent. So maybe there's some truth in that and I think it's working for some people, but maybe there's a different way to do it. 

I think there's a time and a place for proving your success.  I don't think that it is randomly on social media to a bunch of people who may or may not know you very well. That's the thing you have to remember with social media is that it's a huge mix of, your mom, plus somebody that you met at an open house. And so you need to be careful and mindful that those bragging pieces, those experiences pieces, there's a place for those. And it might not be to everybody on social media to share those with. It might be in the middle of an email campaign or a Facebook marketing campaign when you're targeting an actual potential client.  With that information, it becomes relevant to that person.

There is a way of telling your success. If you say, “I had a goal of helping this many people last year and I reached that goal,” or “I exceeded it” or “I almost made it, but it was still an amazing year and thank you all so much, you helped me get there.” That's a different post. Then when somebody's just flat out bragging and saying, I sold X number of homes last year, you know, great. I know what's in it for me as the person seeing it.

You might think how that's being received on the other end? And even ask yourself, is there someway for me to say that differently, to get the same information across, but through the right context. If you were at a party and just randomly brought that up, like I sold X number of homes this past year to everybody in the room,it might be odd. Especially if that’s all you said.  

I think intent and authenticity have a lot to do with how it’s received. If you are angry, intent is true. If you're saying it in a way that's authentic for you, then I think that makes obviously a huge difference as well. So you just have to go with your gut on that.

Going back to the point of this broadcast of why I've invited you to come on and you graciously accepted that is to let people know about this 14 day challenge, which will help a lot of people that are stuck in social media. They're either not doing it all and, or they're doing it and it's taking up way too much time to do it. How do they find your challenge?

So you can get to the challenge by just going to luminaryagent.com/14day. And that will redirect you to the landing page for the challenge.You can either sign up using Facebook messenger or there is an option to sign up for email. Then, every morning you will be fed a new challenge  for the day. Just click on the link and you'll get a video of me explaining that post in a challenge for the day, you'll get tips on how to make the posts, you know, the best that it can be. You'll get examples of other people's posts that have done these types of posts before so that you can actually see them. And then you'll also get your engagement tip for the day as well. 

I promise you that you will start to think differently. How quick social media can be, how authentic it can be and how helpful it can be to have a true expert in your corner that is helping guide you along the way.