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I am excited to kick off our afternoon and our topic today is how create and use your content calendar and Instagram is a big part of that. But we’re also going to weave in some other things, because if you’ve ever heard me talk about content, I get a little geeky, when it comes to content and I’m excited to share with you some tips and tools and strategies that you can implement immediately into your business. Sound good? Social media is rented ground. And so that’s going to be kind of the theme on what I’m going to talk to you about the next 20 minutes or so. As much as I love Instagram and social media, we don’t own it, right? So it’s really important when we think about our content that we think about content that we own no matter what, no matter what platform, no matter what situation goes with us, wherever we go.
So the first thing I wanna talk about is time blocking. I can tell you right now if social media and content creation is not on your calendar, it’s not gonna happen. And so I recommend time blocking daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly. On a daily basis, set aside 10 or 15 minutes a day to like, comment, and engage. I’m a big believer in focus five. Take five minutes, connect with at least five people a day. Don’t be a drive by liker. Don’t just jump in like a bunch of things and leave. Don’t be creepy. Don’t be that person, but leave meaningful comments. Real estate is a relationship business, right? And so super important. We take time to engage on a weekly basis, set aside 10, 15, 20 minutes a week to schedule some of your content for the week ahead. Not set it and forget it. We don’t wanna automate everything, but thinking ahead, and then monthly set aside a couple hours once a month to batch create content.
Now I know some of you have heard me talk about this before I started batching content probably five or six years ago, because I said to myself, if I’m gonna sit down and do my hair and makeup and record one video, I’m gonna record like four or five. And so I can tell you from experience, that doesn’t happen unless you plan it, unless you put it on your schedule and then yearly, if you haven’t had a chance yet set aside time on your schedule to look back at your marketing from the past 12 months, what worked, what didn’t work. We have so many great free tools out there like Facebook insights, Instagram analytics, YouTube analytics, to see what worked and what didn’t work. The reason why we’re talking about all this today, by the way, is that the leads you get from great content are so much better, right?
When you put out regular content, that’s in your voice, that has your opinion, that has your personality. What tends to happen is people will start to say things like I see you everywhere. I feel like I know you. I feel like you’re in my head. And those kind of people, when they’re ready to work with you, they’re ready to work with you. So when we think about content and this is something we’re gonna talk all about today is the best type of content is content. You create, especially video content, right? We know this. If you’ve been to any Inman conference in the last 20 years, there have been a lot of people talking about video, right? Most people retain 95% of the message in a video compared to only 10% of what they read in text evergreen content, timeless who pays for what? Moving tips, relocating tips, right?
That type of content is how we’re talking about building a content library. So guess what? When people are Googling and, and looking for a realtor in, in their local area, she’s more likely to pop up, not just on Facebook, of course, but YouTube and other platforms. So that pillar content, again, it gives, gives people a sense of what it feels like to work with you. What do you sound like? What do you stand for? What are you all about? And that’s the power video. So a big part of this is sometimes a little scary. It’s this idea of leaning into who you are and who you’re not. So one thing to think about when we think about our content plan of talked about time, blocking finding your voice, creating pillar content. But my time with you today, I want to give you some tips in terms of like laying it out, because you could sit down and batch creative videos all day long, but if they don’t get posted, if you don’t have a plan, then it’s, it’s kind of a moot point, right?
So I’m gonna show you two slides here. The first is a kind of a simple distribution plan. What you’re looking at here across the top is a simple schedule. Monday through Friday, uh, on the left hand side, we have Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Now you may be on all three platforms. You may or may not. It’s all good. So maybe you decide in 2022, you’re gonna sit down once a month and you’re gonna record four or five videos every month that you’re gonna then parse out once a week, right. Going. So what does that actually look like? Well, you could take that video and upload it to Facebook, upload it to Instagram, upload it to YouTube. A couple days later, you can share it to your story on Instagram or Facebook. You can share it to your email database, taking that video and turning it into like a graphic post, a carrot cell post for Instagram.
Now you’ve got one video and you’ve turned it in to eight or nine things. And then what we do is we layer in everything else. So if you’ve got a listing coming up, you have an open house coming up, other content you wanna share, you wanna do a Monday market update. You wanna do Monday motivation, Wednesday wisdom featured Friday, new listings throw back Thursday. So we start with that pillar content, right? That goes with you wherever go. And we distribute that. And guess what the good news is. If you get into the rhythm of creating evergreen content, timeless content, you can follow this plan this week and you can repeat it again in three months. And you can share that same video again in six months, 12 months, et cetera, et cetera. Part of content, when you think of your content plan has gotta be repurposing.
And so I just would encourage you for those of you already creating content. Are you repurposing it or is it like one and done now repurposing is not spray and pray. It’s not just, I got a video. It’s gonna go everywhere. right. It’s just thinking strategically about, okay, I’ve got a video I’m gonna put on Facebook today and YouTube tomorrow and Instagram in three days. And then I could share it to my story. And you know, that’s a really good piece of content. So maybe I’ll make that into a real in three weeks. And we repurpose it in a lot of different ways. So you might be wondering, okay, well, you’re talking about video, we’re talking about content. What are some ideas? So got kind of five big buckets of ideas that I encourage you to think about. So the first being community, I think one of the things I have loved so much seeing from this community in the last year and a half is how much all of you love your communities, right?
Your favorite coffee shops and pizza places, and hair salons. They need our love and support. So if you’re new to real estate or you’re looking for a great piece of content, or you’re not sure what to post shine, the light on somebody else, process, what’s the process for buying. What’s the process for selling? What’s the process for relocating? What’s the process. If you wanna buy a vacation home, what’s the process for finding a realtor? What’s the process for finding a lender myths. All right. There’s a lot of myths in real real estate, right? What are some of the biggest myths around buying, selling around the market? Um, around moving there’s so many different myths when it comes to real estate stories, stories are really powerful if you’re already creating video content, but you feel like not a lot of people are engaging with you. The next time you share something, instead of sharing the facts, share a story.
And then of course, mistakes, right? Mistakes that every first time home buyer makes mistakes. That everyone who moves makes mistakes, that every new realtor makes every, you know, et cetera, et cetera, evaluate what’s worked so often. We spend time working in our business. We don’t always have time to work on our business. Take some time to look at your analytics. What’s worked what hasn’t on our look at your marketing, uh, to make those decisions. Here’s the thing. If you’re sharing anything to Instagram or social media, this is a good one to share. It’s not about getting thousands of followers. It’s about getting the right followers. The right connections done is better than perfect. So if you’re listening this going, that all sounds great, but I’m gonna do it next week, cuz I’m really busy this week. I’m an Inman pick one or two things that I talked about today. Pick one or two things that you hear in this session and implement them immediately. Sound good? Yes. All right. Thank you my friends.
