The Power of Instagram for Real Estate Agents

Hey welcome back to the think bigger real estate show. I am your host and I am fired up today about who I have with me here in studio to teach you all about Instagram. She's dynamic and has done some amazing things in the real estate industry and the body building industry. Do me a favor show us your guns real quick. Check this out. Anyway, so she has built a following both for her business as well as for her bodybuilding career. And so I'll get into introducing her here in just a second but I just want to remind you at thinkbigger.realestate you can sign up to get notified every time there's not only a new episode, but also at the end of the week, I send out a summary of all the key highlights and action steps. So be sure to go to thinkbigger.realestate to get signed up for that so you don't miss out on amazing stuff like we have today...Here...Miss Stacey Dearth. So, Stacy first and foremost, thank you for being on the show today. 

Thank you so much. 

I love Stacy. She's fantastic. We get the great privilege of working together here Old Republic Title and let me tell you a little bit about her: a former top real estate agent in Arizona, where she actually led a team of 13 agents, right? 

Yeah, at one point we were 13 deep.

Goodness. So,Top Producing agent. In addition to that, with all of that going on, she's also a mom of two beautiful children. And she has her IFBB Pro card. If you don't know what that means it's the International Federation of Body Builders and she's a professional, actually training to be back on stage here pretty soon. Hence, I made her do the unsolicited or the solicited, I should say, bicep flex there. So you can actually follow her on Instagram at @thatsassytitlegirl for her title and escrow business and then also @themusclemommy. You'll see more about her bodybuilding career, so you'll be able to see that she knows what she's doing. She's a pro in many areas of life. And we're excited today to bring you tips and tricks that you need to be knowing all about Instagram. 

So I'll just kind of preface it by saying this that more and more eyeballs are on Instagram, less and less eyeballs are on email, if you as a real estate agent are counting on the fact that people are reading your newsletter, either receiving it in the mail, or receiving it in their inbox, and that they're consuming it entirely. I think you're missing out. Would you agree? 

I would absolutely agree.

That there is more and more attention being given to the social mediums in particular Instagram. And it's a place where you need to be not only do you need to be there, present, but you need to be there correctly. Let's talk about what are what is one of the biggest maybe pet peeves or mistakes that you see real estate agents making when it comes to their Instagram account. 

You know, I think we as real estate agents, and I can say we, since I spent 13 years doing that, I think that we are so pushing to market the properties that we have. And so you know, it's like get the property, get the property out. And so we're trying to sell we're trying to sell our properties on Instagram and social media and really I think that what we should all be focusing on is making connections on Instagram. So, you know, instead of instead of putting out, you know, this is the latest and greatest property, which is great, and we need to do that. We also need to be making connections, we need to be letting people in to the real us who we really are because people want to buy from people that they know and they trust them they like, and if they don't know us, trust us like us, then they're not going to buy anything from us, right. 

I love it. You know, I see people I've actually gone to Realtor, not news feeds, it's their tiles or their profile. Is this what you call it? 

And yeah, so they're their profile. So the grid with the grid there. Yep. 

And all you see is houses, houses, houses, houses, and I think maybe real estate agents feel like that they have a following and Instagram and so they're good at like you said sell houses through it. And that's going to end even their clients like great our houseThis feature there, but that house is one of so many. And there's no human connection. I know when I see that I'm not drawn to want to stare at it, right? I'm not drawn to want to, like scroll through it for very long. Whereas when there's people and there's, there's kind of unique circumstances in settings that gets interesting, right? 

Absolutely. I think, you know, you absolutely still need to put your listings out there. I used to like to put my listings kind of on my story and highlight them. Anything that was jaw dropping would go in my in my feed as a permanent tile there but, you know, I think that more importantly,I've sold houses directly from Instagram. I posted a house one time and someone commented, Oh, do you have anything else in that area? Yes, as a matter of fact, you know, I can absolutely didn't know the person hasNever met the person I we connected via direct message, got him hooked up with the lender got him pre qualified sold him a house. Did I sell that house on Instagram to that person? No, I didn't. But what happened was I made a connection with him. He had been following me. He had been following along he felt that he could trust me by what I had put out there and therefore he reached out. I sold him a house. I didn't pay for that marketing was free marketing. 

Yeah, you know, but the key was that your entire profile wasn't filled with houses, right? It was it was occasionally in there. Absolutely. But you were more selling the fact of who you are as a person. The and I think you said it best when you said the miss the biggest mistake that real estate agents make when it comes to Instagram is that they're trying to sell as opposed to connect correct you connect with people then you can you can help them which includes a sale right at times. Absolutely, without the connection, the people aren't drawn to you. And you'll have their attention for that long as opposed to an extended period of time, where you can actually then serve them and help them which is selling. Right. I love it. So, second tip, maybe, that you could give us. And it's something that I've seen a weakness in my Instagram game. Right, right. We just pointed this out, talk to us a little bit about engagement, why that's so important.

You know, I think so many of us were so busy, and we carve out, you know, 30 minutes of time to do our Instagram. But what's happening is we're posting and we're leaving, and we're not engaging with other people. And so many times, people will, you know, reach out and it's happened to me before I've made a comment on someone's page or about their story and they don't respond back. That doesn't feel very good, right. When you respond back to people, when you engage with them, then they feel like they're making a connection. Once again, we're back to that connection again. And now you have this friendship or whatever it is, but you need to engage with people you need to respond to them. You need to if they've written you a question or they've written a response, respond to them, engage with their posts say that's amazing. That's, you know, I saw a post yesterday that was a Portland realtor had put out a little tidbit about what you could have in the Portland city limits, you know, you can have three chickens. If you don't like chickens, you can have dubs or pigeons, or pygmy goats, or whatever it is. And I was like, Yes, I want chickens. And so I responded to that, um, you know, and made a comment on their page, but just trying to engage with them now, I would expect that they respond back, right, we'll see. Right? Not yet, but we'll see. 

But, um, but yeah, that's, you know, those are things that...