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In this video, I’m going to share with you a few tips on how you can plan, organize, and schedule your social media strategy.
Hey everybody, Katie Lance here, founder and CEO of Katie Lance Consulting, the Get Social Smart Academy and author of the book, Get Social Smart. It’s episode 245 of the Get Social Smart Show. And today I want to share with you three simple tips for getting your social media plan in order once and for all. Also stay tuned towards the end, I have a couple bonus apps that I can’t wait to share with you that I absolutely love that are going to help you save time, money, and energy as well.
Tip number one, brainstorm your topics. So if you want to get your plan in order once and for all with social media, it’s not just what you’re going to post. And when I want you to kind of take a step back and I want you to brainstorm topics of content that you could create.
Now, I know this is going to take you a little bit more time, money, energy. I get that. But remember, social media is rented. Ground social media is rented ground. We don’t own it. So one of the best piece of advice I could give you is to invest a little bit of time, money and energy in creating some content, especially video content, like what we’re doing right here. So you might wonder, well, what type of topics are good for content good for social media? Some of the best types of content that we’ve seen is content that you are answering a question. You get asked all the time, right? So things like who pays for what, and one of the biggest mistakes, first time home buyers make, and, you know, tips for investors, tips for buyers, tips for sellers. What’s great about that type of content.
It’s a lot of that content is evergreen. It’s timeless. So if you can sit down and brainstorm and just think about all the different types of clients you have worked with in the last six to 12 months, the last six to 12 months, take out a piece of paper. You can even write down all the names of the people you you’ve worked with. If you remember all their names and then write down topics that came up, questions that came up, you can also look in your, um, in your email, looking at your sent email, what are questions that you are getting asked time and time again, you can also look at your website to see some of the links that you already have for visitors to your website. I bet you have buyer links, seller links, community links, all of those could be great topics.
So take 15, 20 minutes brainstorm a list of topics. And then I like to take those topics and then put them onto, uh, something like a Google sheet or maybe an Excel spreadsheet. It doesn’t have to be fancy, but I like to put them in one long list and that will help you tremendously. When we get to the next few steps, which is creating and posting and where do those go. But it first starts with just having a nice along the list of what it is that you could talk about. A lot of these topics by the way, are things that you don’t necessarily need to do. A lot of research on. These are things that if you were asked at a, at a cocktail party, you could easily talk about, right? So we’re not talking about necessarily things that you don’t know, but things that you’re really about when it comes to real estate and the industry and your community tip number two time, block your schedule.
If you want to put together a smart social media plan and once, and for all, it’s not going to happen by accident. And, you know, I can just tell you from experience. If, if something’s not on my calendar, it’s usually not going to happen. And social media for a lot of folks, especially in real estate, it becomes kind of this bolt-on where you bolted on your business when you have time. And that’s why we see a lot of peaks and valleys, right? Where you post one day and then nothing for two weeks and then three times on a Saturday and nothing for a couple of days. And so you’ve got to get consistent and the way that you can do that in terms of content creation, right? And then actually posting or scheduling your content. And then also taking time to engage with people is get it on your calendar.
So a couple of quick tips when it comes to time blocking, I recommend setting aside at least five or 10 minutes a day, just to take a few minutes, to respond to your notifications, to leave a few comments to meaningfully connect with a few people, wish people happy birthday, don’t be a drive-by liker, as I often say, but take a few times to engage. Remember real estate is a relationship business. So this isn’t the time to outsource that to somebody else, right? It would be like, you know, having a dinner party with your 10 most important clients. But instead of you there, you have your assistant there running the whole thing, right? We don’t want to do that. You could certainly have other people who help with pieces of your social media. Maybe you do have an assistant who helps you schedule some of your content, or maybe you have an awesome video editor like we do, who helps with some of the video editing, right?
Nothing wrong with that. As you grow with, uh, you know, your business with your team, so on and so forth, but you want to time block at least five or 10 minutes a day to engage with people Timelock 20 or 30 minutes a week to think ahead, to schedule some of your content for the week ahead and then time block a couple of hours once a month, where you can create a lot of content all in one batch. If you, if you’re not familiar with the idea of batching content, I’m a big believer that, you know, if I’m going to do my hair and makeup, like I did today and record one video, I might as well record four or five as I’m doing right now. It’s this idea of batching your content all in one sitting. So tip number one was brainstorm a list.
So you, you may have come up with a list of 20, 30, 40 topics. Why not? Over the next few months, set aside a couple hours where you’re going to record four or five and one time, four or five at one time, four or five at one time. That doesn’t mean you’re going to publish them all in one shot, but now you’ve got content at least one video a week. And then guess what? You can repurpose that video. You can cross promote it. If you’ve got a great video, it can go up on Facebook today. And you reshared on Facebook and a few months, right? Especially if it’s evergreen or timeless, like we talked about, you could put it on YouTube, you could get it transcribed and get it turned into a blog post. You could do an Instagram story about it or share it on LinkedIn.
And again, it’s about working smarter, not harder. So brainstorm your topics, time block. Those are two huge things. The third tip is you have to make social media a priority, right? You have to make it a priority. And I find that again, when it becomes, when it becomes like a bolt-on, it just becomes something that doesn’t seem as important. And when we look at the agents and brokers that get a lot of business from social media, and a lot of the agents we work with in the academy get 50, 60, even up to 80% of their business from social media. It’s not that they’re on Facebook all day long. Believe me. Don’t do that. Don’t be that agent who’s only on social media all day long, right? It’s that they’re taking the time to make it a priority. You know, they’re not posting and running.
They’re putting together a plan. They are sharing relevant, helpful information. They’re being consistent. Remember consistency builds trust, right? And I would imagine there’s a lot of agents in your market who are doing some of these things. Some of them are probably creating videos here and there, but what happens when we get busy, if we don’t have a plan in place, it all goes out the window, right? So now is the time we get your plan in place, get some, you know, get your things time, block on your schedule, start to brainstorm what your content could be. All it could be all about. And like I said, make it a priority. Now I did promise a bonus tip at the end. I want to share a couple of my favorite apps for creating content and just making this process a little bit easier. Okay. I’ve got three apps I want to share with you real quick video shop.
I absolutely love this is a free app you can use for iPhone or Android. And I will say when you first start doing video, if you’re new to video, don’t worry about editing, just get on camera and get it done. Done is better than perfect. But at some point you might want to speed up your video or add your logo or kind of trim it a little bit or crop it a little bit Videoshop super easy, by the way, I’m not affiliated with any of these apps I’m mentioning. I just think they’re great. I use them and it’s a super easy app. Okay. The second one I want to mention is canvas CAMBA is awesome. And we have seen so many agents and brokers, uh, achieve so many great things with Canva. There’s a free version of Canva. There’s a pro version of canvas. Uh, in fact, we have a great video.
We did recently on canvas basics for real estate. So if you’re, if you feel a little overwhelmed with CAMBA, which it’s easy to do, because there are like tens of thousands of templates, I’m going to drop the link to that video below. So check out that one. That’s really, really helpful. One of the things I love about canvas is not only can you create graphics and you can resize things, but you can record video or write within canvas, which is awesome. So you can open up canvas, you can record video, you can edit video and it makes it super easy to batch, create content quickly and easily. I’ll give you one other quick tip with Canva. We see a lot of agents when they are creating. They’re just listed, just sold that type of marketing. You know, one of the things, things I’ve said to our academies, if you’re going to go into Canva and create like a nice little just listed, think about all the different pieces that that’s, that that is going to happen.
All the different steps that’s going to happen with that property. You’ve got to coming soon. If that’s allowed in your area coming soon, adjust, listed, and open house and under contract, then just sold. That’s five pieces of content. Why not create those all in one batch and then distribute those and post those as it’s appropriate. Right? So canvas is a great tool for batching. The last one I want to mention real quick is bead.io v.io is a platform that I discovered, um, probably earlier this past year. And it’s a great video editing platform. If you want to edit video on your computer. So I know there’s lots of apps. I mentioned. Videoshop is great if you’re editing video on your phone, but sometimes we just want to be on a computer. Sometimes it’s a little tough to do everything on our phone. So v.io, it’s great.
There is a paid version of it. I use it. I think it’s a great tool. You can resize your videos. You can add captions and it’s super user-friendly. So those are some of my bonus bonus apps and bonus tools. I would love to hear from you. If there is a tool that you love that helps you with social media marketing. Let me know in the comments below, what is your favorite tool? And if you’re listening to this going, you know, I really need to get my arms around my social media strategy. Katie, I would invite you to check out our, get social smart academy. You know, our academy just celebrated our five-year anniversary and it is our membership site. This is where agents and brokers can sign up monthly or yearly, and they have access to me, our team and all of our training resources, um, recorded on demand as well as so many of our live online events.
So if you’re looking for some consulting, some coaching and you have considered working with me, I would love for you to check out the Academy. So go to KatieLance.com/Academy. You can get more information about that. And if you’re watching this over on YouTube, you guys know we have new videos that come out each and every week. And if you like my style, if you’ve learned something hit that subscribe button and the bell button. So you get notified when we have new videos that come out each and every week. All right, my friends let’s rock it. Let’s make this one of your best years ever until next time. We’ll see you soon. Bye for now.
