Justin is here to tell us about how top agents use social media to generate their business. We’ll hear a lot of different tips for what to do and what not to do on social media. You might want to have pen and paper ready. If you enjoyed today’s episode remember to subscribe in iTunes and leave us a review!
Best Ever Tweet:
Justin Nassiri Background:
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Chief Revenue Officer at Shotzr, which is like Uber for photographers
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Founder of StoryBox, a social media marketing technology company that works with over 35 Fortune 500 companies
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Host of Beyond the Uniform, the #1 iTunes rated podcast for military veterans’ career transition
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Say hi to him at shotzr.com
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Based in Denver, CO
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Check out their research of how Top Realtors Use Facebook:
https://www.shotzr.com/ebooks-top-realtors-use-facebook/
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TRANSCRIPTION
Joe Fairless: Best Ever listeners, how are you doing? Welcome to the best real estate investing advice ever show. I’m Joe Fairless, and this is the world’s longest-running daily real estate investing podcast. We only talk about the best advice ever, we don’t get into any of that fluffy stuff.
Today, since it’s Sunday, we’ve got a special segment for you called Skillset Sunday. By the end of this conversation you will know how, when and what to post on Facebook as a real estate investor and/or agent. This is grounded in research that our Best Ever guest did on top-performing realtors and how they use Facebook. So it’s not just speculative stuff, it’s actually insightful stuff based on some secondary research.
With us today to talk about that, Justin Nassiri. How are you doing, Justin?
Justin Nassiri: Great, Joe. Thanks so much for having me on.
Joe Fairless: Well, my pleasure and thanks a lot for being on the show. A little bit about Justin – he is the chief revenue officer of Shotzr, which is like Uber for photographers. You can check out their website at, as I mentioned, shotzr.com. Also, are you the host of Beyond the Uniform, number one iTunes rated podcast for military vets?
Justin Nassiri: I am, indeed.
Joe Fairless: There you go, that is very cool. That is a much-needed podcast, too. I know a lot of veterans who have that as a question. It’s a podcast on career transition, so very cool. I’m thinking of a couple people in my life who I know, actually, could use some insight for that… But we’ll stay on task, and the topic today is how, when and what to post on Facebook as a real estate investor or agent.
First off, if you can tell us a little bit more about yourself and your background, that way we get to know you a little bit, and then let’s talk about the research that you did.
Justin Nassiri: Yeah, totally. So I started out at the Naval Academy, and then I served on nuclear submarines for about five years, and both of those experiences got me really loving numbers and really loving analysis, and I went to business school over at Stanford, and have been in startups since then… But I love to dive into these topics; I do that on Beyond the Uniform with information about veterans and what careers they pursue
With Shotzr, we work with a lot of realtors. Like Joe said, we’re Uber for professional photographers, so if you need a photographer to take listing photos or any sort of photos, you can book someone really easily, just like you would with Uber.
Because of our work with realtors, I just started tinkering with some data, and thought “I know that Facebook matters to realtors, but I personally don’t know how to go about doing that”, so I just took the approach of let’s find the top 20 realtors and agencies on Facebook, try to get an assortment of big, small and individual, and then I put all my assumptions on hold and literally just started looking at 12 months of data, thousands and thousands of Facebook posts… My goal was to figure out when should realtors be posting, what should they be posting and what sort of topics should they be talking about.
Everything that I’m gonna cover is also available in an eBook. I think that will be in the show notes.
Joe Fairless: Yup.
Justin Nassiri: But my goal today was just to make this as actionable as possible and just run down the list of what you can put to use today to start getting more engagement on Facebook, start selling more listings through social networks.
Joe Fairless: Excellent. First off, thank you for your service and what you did. My stepdad was on nuclear subs in the navy.
Justin Nassiri: Good man.
Joe Fairless: Yeah… It takes a special individual to go down underwater with a nuclear device.
Justin Nassiri: [laughs] It does.
Joe Fairless: How did you define top realtors?
Justin Nassiri: I just try to be as simple as possible, and I really just type in “best realtors on Facebook” and derivatives on that. If anyone listening does that same Google search, you’re gonna probably arrive at the same people that I was studying. What I liked about — at least the things that came up in the top three searches is the authors of the articles tried to keep that balance between big and small. I wanted to avoid just looking at what a REMAX is doing; instead, let’s look at individuals, let’s look at the small agencies, and national ones… So it’s a pretty big [unintelligible [00:07:17].01] of size and type of real estate agency or realtor, but it’s ones that someone else had identified as the top-performing ones.
Joe Fairless: Okay, cool. How do we wanna approach our conversation?
Justin Nassiri: I’ll just dive in and just kind of stop me as things don’t make sense, or if you have questions or things to add, but basically, the starting point for me is I realized across the board that these top-performing realtors – they’re posting five times per week; that’s mostly Monday through Friday, and that’s a tremendous amount of content if you’re trying to keep that pace consistently, which these top realtors were.
So the first thing that I look at is what type of content are they posting, and by that I mean “Is it a photo, is it an article that someone else has written, is it a video, or is it something else, like a GIF?” and what I found is that about one out of three of the posts across the board is an article.
They’re posting an article about interior design, or home financing, or gardening, or anything that would help out a home buyer or a home seller. That actually works pretty well. That’s good filler content. But I found two things that stood out more to me instead of those articles, and the first one is that video really does well. Only 7% of the content that these realtors are posting is video… Which makes sense. It takes time to put together a video, it takes some extra effort, but what I’ve found is that those videos received twice as much engagement, and by engagement I mean a like, a share, a comment… Videos received twice as much engagement as articles.
The second thing that stood out to me is that photo is kind. Photos got four times more likes, shares and comments than articles, so the more visual you can be, either photo or video, the better. So just to make that actionable, two companies – I have no affiliation with them, but there’s a company called Wochit, and a company called Animoto, both of them make it pretty easy to put together videos. You could take photos and put in overlays… So if you’ve got that extra 30 minutes on a Saturday, it’s pretty easy now to put together for free or near-free these sorts of videos.
The second thing to make it actionable is the company I work at, Shotzr – we have a library of really local (hyperlocal) photos. So if you are looking for photos of local bars, or areas, or parks, or anything to kind of sell a neighborhood, you can get all of those images on Shotzr.
So that was kind of what we found about the type of content to post. The next thing that I started to look at in the research is “What should realtors be talking about?” I found a couple different varieties, and this is probably gonna make sense to anyone listening, but the common topics that people were talking about was about their listing, about the neighborhood surrounding the listing… A lot of inspirational quotes or inspirational pictures. There was decorating, there was advice, there was holidays, and just all sorts of different categories. So what I found when looking at these top realtors is that over 60% of the posts are about either a listing, or about a neighborhood. And if you’re doing that, keep doing it, because listings were the number one performing type of content. Neighborhoods were the number three performing content. That made sense to me. You’re selling a home, you’re selling a neighborhood, you really wanna use Facebook to be talking about that and making people aware of the listings in the neighborhood.
But what was really surprising to me was holidays was the second highest-performing type of post, and to put this in perspective, less than 4% of all posts were about a holiday… But when these realtors talked about a holiday, they’ve got almost as many likes and shares and engagement as a listing. So it seemed to me to be like a pretty easy win to get more interaction, to make things more fun with your audience… And I didn’t realize this until I found this out, but there’s so many holidays; last Friday with National Donut Day… There’s so many different types of holidays to try to make things interesting, and have it not always be about just selling to your audience. And again, just to make this actionable, there’s a lot of great content calendars out there that list these holidays. For Shotzr we have those as well; we’ll actually link at the photos, so if you are using us, we actually have thousands of photos of Donuts for National Donut Day. Little things like that can make it easy to post and engage with your audience.
Just to recap on that – listing and neighborhoods do really well, but maybe consider using a little bit more on the holiday front, because they tend to work really well, which is surprising.
Joe Fairless: The videos that you mentioned earlier – only 7% is videos, but they receive twice as much engagement as articles… Do you have a resource for easily creating videos? Well, you know what, maybe that’s just Facebook Live, or I don’t know… Do you have something else?
Justin Nassiri: You know, Facebook Live is great. There’s a service called Wochit, there’s one called Animoto…
Joe Fairless: Oh, those two. So you mentioned those two.
Justin Nassiri: Yeah.
Joe Fairless: Okay, I thought those were photos, but those are for videos?
Justin Nassiri: Those are for videos. When we classify something as video, I don’t have a number on this, but it wasn’t always a video of a property, it wasn’t always a video of someone talking… It was also the video slideshows. Maybe some music, maybe just photos, maybe some overlays. Don’t think of video as just “I have to get a videographer to go through this neighborhood or this house.” You can take photos and piece them together into a video, and that performs just as effectively as a standard video.
Joe Fairless: Okay, got it.
Justin Nassiri: And the one to me – and I think of everything I’m talking about, this is probably the most actionable, is when to post. I looked at so many different realtors and thousands and thousands of posts… Realtors are very, very consistent. They are posting five times a week, most of that is Monday through Friday, but the majority of their posts – and this is all localized, either the East Coast or West Coast, all of them are posting at 10 in the morning to noon. I don’t know what’s going on… Maybe that’s when they’re getting in, they’re getting all their online work done before going out for the afternoon, but 10 to noon is when every realtor is posting.
But this is the most conclusive one, that if you look at the posts that people are responding to, it is not happening 10 to noon. If you post 10 to noon, it’s not gonna get a response. It was orders of magnitude higher if a realtor made a post on Facebook between 7 PM to 8 PM. It does 3.5 times better than a post made at noon. 350% higher performance. Once I saw that, it started to make sense. The home buyers, the home sellers – that’s probably when they’re at home, they’ve just had dinner, and now they’re starting to look online, maybe talk with their family about this thing… But 7 to 8 PM was the highest-performing time.
In general, if you make a post between 5 to 10 PM, that will still out-perform all the posts made before 5 PM by over two times. So it’s twice as effective to post in the evening.
So just to catch it all for listeners – if you can only post once or twice a week, consider Thursday and Friday night in that 7 to 8 o’clock window. That’s the absolute best. But if you’ve got room to be doing this every day of the week, I would try to experiment to see what works… But if you don’t have time to experiment, do Monday to Friday, 5 to 10 PM.
The great thing about this is that if you’re listening, you don’t have to change your behavior. If posting at 10 to noon works really well for you, just check out — and again, I have no affiliation with these companies… There’s one that’s called Meet Edgar (meetedgar.com), and there’s also HootSuite, which I bet a lot of people are familiar with… What each of these allow you to do is on a Friday afternoon, when it’s quiet, you can go in and you can tee up all your posts for the next week, and you can tell each of these “Hey, I wanna post in these specific times.”
That way, you don’t have to be in front of your computer in the evening. If you’re out showing listings, you can continue to do that, but HootSuite or Meet Edgar will be posting for you at those times.
Joe Fairless: What I use is SmarterQueue. It does the same thing.
Justin Nassiri: Oh, SmarterQuee. Great. This is one too where there’s probably so many of these that if you just googled around and you’re like “social media posting” or “auto-post to Facebook” there’s probably a dozen, and honestly, the functionality in my opinion doesn’t make a big difference… So just go with whatever is free or near free, and maybe that’ll make your life a little bit easier.
Joe Fairless: Something you said earlier – top-performing real estate agents post five times a week, Monday through Friday… Why not the weekend?
Justin Nassiri: It’s a good question, and you may have a better answer to this than me. I’ve been thinking about that… But in the eBook it shows the graph; I’m just pulling them up right now. It’s literally about a third, it drops down. Monday through Friday are pretty consistently for posting volume, and then it drops in a third on the weekend.
I think it’s worth posting on the weekend… I’m guessing that that’s, again, when home buyers and home sellers are maybe at home, looking on their devices… But if you have room to experiment, dabble with that. But if you’re busy and only have time to do 3 to 5 times a week… I’m just a betting man; I’d put my bet on that Monday through Friday, just because the performance drops off on the weekends, too. It’s about a third to a half of what it is during the week.
Joe Fairless: Anything that we haven’t discussed as it relates to how, when and what to post on Facebook as a real estate agent, or that’s applicable to investors that we haven’t talked about already?
Justin Nassiri: Let me just think here… So, I empathize because for my podcast I try to do social media posting; it’s so difficult to make the time to do this. So when I say five times a week, I’m realizing that may sound simple, but it really is a Herculean undertaking; it just takes so much willpower to do that.
I would just say for listeners if you’re not active on Facebook, commit to a two to four-week period. You don’t have to commit to do this a year, but try following this advice, see if it works with your audience. Look at things like your number of followers, look at things like what really matters… People who are inbound, trying to sell their home, or trying to buy a home – see if it makes an impact.
After a month, if you don’t see an increase in your audience, if you don’t see an increase in your activity, it’s not for everyone; you don’t have to do it. But I just have a strong hunch, based on looking at these thousands of posts… I’m gonna go out on a limb and say this is gonna be beneficial to most every realtor. And the other thing is your competition is doing this. You can do it better, you can do it more effectively, and it’s a way to stand out.
Of course, I’d be remiss if I don’t mention the company that funded all this research – the company where I work, Shotzr. We exist to give you quality photos. So whether it’s photos of holidays, or photos of neighborhoods – all of that, it works like Spotify,$10/month. You can use as many photos as you’d like. Then if you do want a professional photographer to come out to your listing and take some photos, it’s about $100 if you’re around the United States. We’re actually around the world, but we can go out and make a professional photoshoot happen for your listing, and that might give you a little core content to post on Facebook, too.
Joe Fairless: That’s excellent. $10/month for unlimited photos to post on Facebook and social media?
Justin Nassiri: Yeah. And there’s so many little things, too… You get your monthly content calendar, so you know a couple days in advance it’s National Day. Maybe you wanna throw out a listing that day, but maybe you wanna throw out a fun photo, just to be engaging with your audience.
We’re trying to make it as simple as possible to find the type of photos that you would post to Instagram or Facebook, and not the type of stock photos you might see on other places.
Joe Fairless: Excellent. It’s quality stuff. I’m grateful that you were on the show, I’m grateful that you shared the study. Very smart from a business standpoint. You or your team – I can’t remember – reached out to me, and usually I disregard the requests, because we like to handpick our guests, but you added so much value, and you approached in such an intelligent way, just from a business point… Your company – you sell photographs, so you thought “Let me proactively add value and [unintelligible [00:20:29].01] add value by doing a study and seeing what comes of it, and it ties in beautifully.
We learned about your company, but also learned about how we can be more successful as real estate investors, so… Props to you on the study, number one; number two, thank you for these useful insights. Video does well, photos get four times more likes, shares and comments than articles. Holidays are the second highest-performing post; maybe tie in some holiday posts or information with the posts that we do… And 7 to 8 PM has 3.5 times more engagement; ideally Thursday and Friday nights are the times and days to do it… And if not, then somewhere between 5 to 10 PM. You gave us some tools to use to help automate the process or create the process.
Thanks again for being on the show. The best way the Best Ever listeners can get in touch with you is how?
Justin Nassiri: E-mail is great. I’m Justin.Nassiri@shotzr.com. LinkedIn – you can send me a message. You can try and find me on Facebook as well. Joe, I really appreciate being on the show.
As a fellow podcaster, to see that you’ve done over 1,300 episodes, it’s really difficult to comprehend that… I just love the sheer volume and the quality of work that you’re putting out. It is a sign that you are hustling and working hard, and really adding a ton of value to this community… So thanks for having me on.
Joe Fairless: Thanks a lot, Justin. I really appreciate it. I hope you have a best ever weekend, and we’ll talk to you soon.
Justin Nassiri: Sounds great, thanks.
