WS1106: Leveraging the Power of Social Media To Grow Your Business | #Highlights

EPISODE 1106

[INTRODUCTION]

[0:00:01.6] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Real Estate Syndication Show. Whether you are a seasoned investor or building a new real estate business, this is the show for you. Whitney Sewell talks to top experts in the business. Our goal is to help you master real estate syndication.

And now your host, Whitney Sewell. 

0:00:24.0

Whitney Sewell: This is your Daily Real Estate Syndication Show. I’m your host, Whitney Sewell. We are introducing a new segment called The Real Estate Syndication Show Highlights, where we’re bringing you a look back at episodes focused on a specific topic that we believe added a lot of value to you in your syndication journey. 

Don’t forget to like, share, and subscribe. Also, hit the notification bell so you can continue to know when new shows come out. Have a blessed day!

[INTERVIEW 1]

00:00:49.0

Whitney Sewell: Our guest is Ellie Perlman. Thanks for being on a show, Ellie.

0:00:52.5 

Ellie Perlman: Absolutely. Absolutely, my pleasure.

0:00:54.5 

WS: Give us a little definition of, just in case the listener hasn’t heard that term before, like thought leadership platform, what is that and why do we need that?

0:01:01.4 

EP: Excellent question. So a thought leadership platform, the way that I see it and I understand it, is to be a leader in a certain dimension in a certain industry and educate others in using multiple verticals of social media. So for instance, being active on LinkedIn, having a website, being active on forms, and I’m gonna talk about it in one of the next steps.

But basically, you’re positioning yourself as a leader and you bring in your thinking and your knowledge and experience into that platform and you share it with the world. And so, after step, which is basic understanding your why you move forward to understand who you are, and because that’s gonna help you determine the avatar of who your audience is. 

So, I actually took a piece of paper and I wrote down who I was. I’m a woman, obviously, I’m an Israeli, I was a lawyer, and I was also a young professional or educated person, and I said, these are my four circles. I know a lot of people from it, a lot of people from my legal background, and I knew people from each of those four circles. And then I started to focus on the circle that I think would bring me the best results. And based on that, I built my avatar. I knew who I was targeting.

And that’s the third step to know who you’re targeting, because everything I created before I started doing anything, the one main thought in my mind was, Is this gonna be appealing to my audience, the specific audience that I chose. I’ve seen other syndicators that they targeted retirees or people who are targeting, and I think that’s for the grade, and I know since syndicators who are raising money from where they are. So I have a fellow syndicator, I have a good friend that lives in Israel, and this is where he’s raising the capital from and he’s positioned there, so it’s easier for him.

So, knowing who you are and then attracting capital from people that are like you, I think that can go a long way. And some of my investors are in fact lawyers, but I chose to focus on the professional and educated part and when I write my content, every content that I create, I basically target these people, I target people who are looking for certain knowledge, they wanna get slightly deeper than other investors, and it has been working great for me.

0:03:39.6 

WS: So, what are some ways you found to maybe help you, I don’t know, if it’s writer’s block or whatever they call it, writing content, it’s just not something I get too excited about. Is it just something that I’m probably making too big a deal about to help me get past that, or maybe the listener says, I just don’t enjoy riding, should I break it down to once a month or once a week, or is it something, maybe a technique I could use to make it easier than I probably think it is?

0:04:03.7 

EP: Yeah, and I’m really glad you asked this question because I was also struggling with the same issue. I have to be honest, I love writing. I used to be a lawyer, we like to write and to talk. And even though it came naturally, for me, English is my second language. So I still had to hire someone to go over and I go over my articles and make sure that grammatically everything was fine. 

Sometimes I would find mistakes on my own and find my safety that they’ve done, but there are two things that I can say about that, the first thing is to batch, and that goe, and I’m sure you do it with the podcast as well, I have a weekly podcast. I don’t record each week. I have one day and I block it only for interviews and I do back-to-back and then I don’t need to touch it for an entire month. 

And the same with writing. When I first started, I wrote everything and I blocked one day, and I just did it because when I started to write and then you get distracted, you have a deal to look at, review the numbers, or talk to invest or whatever it is, and then you can go back, it’s hard to go back and re-focus. And then it drags over the entire week where you work on different paragraphs that drive me crazy. 

So I blocked Saturday and I did only this. They didn’t do anything else besides this. And then as I grew my thought leadership platform and I was writing articles, I had a podcast, I had the website, and I was kind of growing. I didn’t have much time to do that. 

So whether you don’t like writing or you don’t have the time to write, you gotta think about it as a business. A CEO doesn’t do everything right? He hires the best people and attracts the best investors to grow his company. And that’s exactly how I see my syndication business. I think of the tools and the knowledge I gained at MIT, and applied it into this business from day one. I was looking at it as a business, not only, okay, I need to get one deal done and then continue from there. So I build systems. There was a short period of time where I did everything, which was great, ’cause now I know what people I really need to bring on board, and I hired people to help me with that, so I actually have a copywriter that I’ve hired, and he’s helping me write the content. Actually, he writes it now, I review everything, I authorize everything and go over every word, but he’s the one who sits for hours and hours and develops the content. And I have a social media manager and she’s a great cheap post on my behalf, and again, everything I’m going through everything, I guide her, it took me a while to teach her how I think and how they like things to be presented, but she’s helping me with my meet-ups, I have monthly meetups in Santa Monica. She’s helping me post the blog after it’s been written. She’s helping me with social media, with setting up a point, meetings with investors, with everything.

And that has really helped me grow very fast. When you’re trying to do everything, your growth is really slow. And I know some people who think, “Oh, you know, we’re just starting… We don’t have money to start hiring a team,” and as much as we’d love to grow this fast, my answer is look at it as an investment. Before I get to B, people spend thousand in tens of thousands of dollars on programs, and then when it comes to hiring and they don’t wanna pay $10 an hour for someone to help them, so getting the knowledge is one thing, and then taking your company to the next level, sometimes take even less money than initially what people think, so I find my fires in Upwork and yeah, it costs money, but it doesn’t cost as much when you hire contractors, they’re not W2s, you can pay them anywhere between $10 or I think for a decent hire. I know some indicators are hiring people from abroad and that has been working great for them for half the price, so that’s also an option. And that’s basically the thing that helped me really build my presence, and I’m still growing the next stage as an Instagram account, and a YouTube channel.

0:08:21.7 

WS: Nice. So after we start writing some content like that, give us some techniques as far as putting that out on social media, what platforms should I consider and how do I do that?

0:08:31.7 

EP: Yeah, it’s a good question, and we’re actually looking into some of the platforms that are out there, so some platforms, there are some websites that will automate everything, so you upload it in one place and then I just distribute to all the different channels, which could be a good idea for someone who doesn’t have an assistant. So instead of posting manually in each website, you can post it into one website and it sends it out automatically to all the different platforms.

0:09:00.6 

WS: Do you have one that you prefer that you like, or do you try to do it manually on each one?

0:09:04.9 

EP: I prefer that to my assistant, I think that for me, it works for when she does it manually, at this point. You were looking into automating this process as well. And if I were to do it on my own, I would probably have a website to do it because for me, I really want her to post it manually because I want her to actually monitor everything, look at the analytics and also reply to comments. Nobody’s saying that, but this is how all the social media stars out there, and I’m not saying that I am, but I’m just learning from them, for the most part, they don’t write their own content, they’re not the ones who reply to your comment when you go to their home page, their Facebook or LinkedIn account. They’re paying people to do that. And that’s the thing, it looks like they’re everywhere because they are through their team.

[INTERVIEW 2]

0:09:52.8 

WS: Our guest is Christina Daves. Thanks for being on the show today.

0:09:56.0 

Christina Daves: Hey, thank you for having me.

0:09:58.0 

WS: When getting started and trying to put ourself out there, I think it’s pretty overwhelming, all the platforms and where should I start, which one should I be focusing on? Especially if you’re not real tech-savvy, ’cause there’s still platforms that I haven’t even touched yet.

0:10:11.4 

CD: No and don’t. Pick one, pick the one that you like, that you know you’ll do really well, because people are gonna Google you and check you out… Right. Before you work with anybody, What are you gonna do? You’re gonna Google them. That platform is gonna come up. So I have one platform. I recommend Facebook just because you could go back and forth with your business and your personal page and remind people what you do, but if that’s not what you’re comfortable with, Instagram is great, pictures, things like that, Twitter. But just do one really well and engage with your people and do really good posts and grow that following with people who are talking to you and engaging with you. And don’t even worry about… You can add another one later. But you do not have to be on every platform. 

Now, I would recommend for people in your space, have a really strong LinkedIn profile, make sure you’ve got your keywords in there and it really tells people what you do, because in your space, people will find you on LinkedIn.

0:11:10.5 

WS: I wanna come back to having a strong LinkedIn profile, but I wanted to also ask you about a Facebook group as opposed to a business page. Is that something you deal with?

0:11:19.5 

CD: I have both, I am a private group ’cause that’s where I do my coaching program because Facebook is so easy to me, I don’t like technology, let’s just all be on Facebook. But the jury’s out, they changed a lot of the rules on groups, like people finding you so Facebook wants to be a pay-to-play platform now, but there are ways around it. If you have an engaged audience that is commenting and talking to you, Facebook will let people see your posts without having to pay for it. So that’s why that’s so important. That’s that big algorithm change that happened last year.

0:11:50.9 

WS: So like from a business page, if we’re getting lots of comments, Facebook is gonna show it a lot more?

0:11:56.0 

CD: Yes, exactly. And then if you do pay, they’ll let more people see it for a lower amount, that’s why that’s so, so, so important. It’s for somebody I just did a proposal for and they said, “Oh, take the social media piece out, we have a social media manager, we just wanna do the PR piece,” and I said, “We really need to keep that piece in there because your social media manager is actually a detriment to your business, they are killing your business because nobody is seeing your posts.” And they’re doing some Facebook ads and things like that, it doesn’t matter.

And you’ll see that like when you pay, it says, “Oh, 1,000 people will see this or 5,000 people will see this.” That number is gonna get lower and lower for more and more money if you do not have an engagement. 

0:12:40.0 

WS: Nice. So how do we get engagement?

0:12:41.0 

CD: You ask engaging questions. At the end of your posts, what do you think about this? What would you do? This is how we go through, but if somebody asks you a question, you’re more likely to answer it, if you see it. You’ve gotta tell people what you want from them. In your video, you don’t wanna do this in your post, but you can say, share this with somebody who would find this interesting. But you don’t wanna type that because again, Facebook, they don’t like that, they don’t want you telling people to engage. So it’s a really fine line, but you can buck the system a little by doing it in your video.

0:13:12.4 

WS: Wow, so as far as paid advertising on Facebook, is that something you recommend or just like to keep trying to get people to engage? 

0:13:20.1 

CD: Try to get people to engage. At the end of the day, you’re gonna have to. I think we’re all gonna have to. It depends how many people you want to see your stuff. I mean, there’s a billion people on Facebook. So hopefully your people want to see your work, and there are things you can, there’s a see-first button that you can have people push so they’ll see all of your posts before they see other people’s posts. So there’s things you can share with your audience to keep them on your page, and then it’s up to you to get them engaged.

0:13:50.5 

WS: Making that strong LinkedIn profile, could you give us some tips to make sure we’ve got a stronger profile we can have.

0:13:56.0 

CD: Yeah, do that. The picture, nobody’s doing the LinkedIn change, so it’s like that blue kind of outer space that almost looks like confetti kind of thing. Put a picture up there, now know that your profile picture, the circle picture moves depending if you’re on mobile or desktop, so don’t put words in there, you really just want an image that reflects what you do for you guys could be lots of buildings, could be a town center, could be a neighborhood, depending on what your expertise is. So that’s the first thing. 

Don’t put President, CEO, CFO, COO, nobody cares. Except the head hunter. People wanna know, I help people invest in real estate, that’s something people will search for. So obviously, when I say real estate investing there, do some research, look at a competitor, who is using LinkedIn really well. See what keywords they’re using in there. Use Google keyword search, there’s lots of resources out there to find those keywords, have a strong profile, and don’t put your name… Don’t say Christina Daves does, blah, blah, blah. Say “I help people do this. I am passionate about this.” 

What’s your why? Put your why in there. Why do you do what you do? We all do what we do for reasons, and it’s not just to make money. Well, some people have that, but most of us have a reason why we do what we do, and put that in there. And if you have a funnel, if you have an opt-in, get that in there, check out my free guide here. You always wanna drive people to collect their names and email addresses. Because all of this stuff could go away tomorrow. The internet could close down. Mark Zuckerman down Facebook. But if you have those names and email addresses, you still have a business.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

0:15:42.9

Whitney Sewell: We hope that you enjoyed the Highlights show today. You can always listen to the full episodes that were featured today by clicking the links in the show notes page. And in the description box, let us know what you’ve thought of this episode or you can go to lifebreidgecapital.com/podcast and click the feedback button. Let us know how we can add value to you. Thank you and talk to you tomorrow.

[OUTRO]

0:22:25.0 ANNOUNCER: Thank you for listening to the Real Estate Syndication Show, brought to you by Life Bridge Capital. Life Bridge Capital works with investors nationwide to invest in real estate while also donating 50% of its profits to assist parents who are committing to adoption. Life Bridge Capital, making a difference one investor and one child at a time. Connect online at www.LifeBridgeCapital.com for free material and videos to further your success.

[END]