S3 EP6 | What’s Next in Social

Show Notes:

Focus Discussion of the Week:

Social Media Marketing is always changing. Blink a little too long and miss an update. That’s why we have our Social Corner here to keep us educated. From Facebook ad changes to TikTok tips, we drop the details on what builders can do to take advantage of the latest trends.

Chelsey: Hi, and welcome to Building Perspective with Group Two, we are here to bring value to you and your team by exploring all things, new home sales and marketing all from different perspectives. 

Hello everyone, and welcome back to Building Perspective. It’s me again, Chelsey and I am here with the three newest social team members of Group Two.

They are amazing and incredible and intelligent. And one you actually heard from in one of the latest podcasts about bad reviews, but, we’ve got Jane, Maddie and Nikki here with me to talk a little bit about some social updates. We haven’t done one of these in a while, so they all have fun, broad topics to talk about.

 Before we get into it, I wanted to give a quick update about some things happening with Facebook ads. Oh, I know of course things are always happening with Facebook ads, but the latest thing is that they are getting rid of a couple of interests and those includes some that are related to homes, homes.com, luxury real estate. There are a couple more, but again, they’re not the big ones like Zillow and Trulia.

I don’t think this is going into effect until late March. And so we have a couple of weeks to get those out of our audiences interests if your audiences and your ad sets have homes.com or luxury real estate as one of the interests. Just be sure to go in there and click the X out of it. And we should be good.

We haven’t seen a huge, huge difference in the size of our audiences when we take them out, just because they weren’t the big guys like Zillow and Trulia. So just keep that in mind. And without further ado, we’ll start off with Jane. And Jane is going to talk a little bit about our yours and my favorite subject, TikTok.

Take it away. Jane, what updates do you have? 

Jane: Hello, everyone. It’s great to be back. So today I’ll be talking about TikTok and trends, but I wanted to start out by talking about how a lot of people think TikTok is just the same kind of platform as Instagram or Facebook, where I personally feel like you go there mostly for entertainment and updates, but I feel like TikTok is also a place where people go to be educated.

So on TikTok, I’m learning about other topics that I’m not as familiar with. And so that’s why this platform has the potential to reach more than just prospective buyers or interior designers, other home builders and people in the industry. It has the potential to reach people who want to just learn about home building.

I feel like one thing that we hear a lot is like, this is a topic that we should have learned about more in school. Well, here’s the chance for, for builders to teach people about career, design, finances. And if you don’t think that homebuilding can be on TikTok, I think you are wrong because I was just looking and Women in STEM is currently trending right now. 

Chelsey: Oh, my god. 

Jane: Yeah. 

Chelsey: That’s amazing. I didn’t know that. 

Jane: Yeah, pretty cool. 

So that’s kind of the next thing I wanted to talk about was trends and Women in STEM is one of the trends that I did find. 

So one that I wanted to talk about, it’s called #showusyourdrawers. 

Chelsey: That can be taken so many different ways. 

Jane: The gist of it is like you’re supposed to show your drawers that are messy, but I think that it would be cool if someone did #showusyourdrawers, and it was like brand new drawers in a new house. And you could have a fun little spin that way. 

Chelsey: That is brilliant.

Jane: I think that if you’re looking at these hashtags and trends, you’re not copying, you’re just getting inspired and using your own creativity to figure out how you can take a trend and relate it to home building. And the options are endless. 

The next one I wanted to talk about. I think you guys will probably know this one. The love grows where my Rosemary goes. That song has been going 

viral. 

Chelsey: I love that song. 

Jane: And you can literally just take a tour of a house, a walkthrough just with that song. Since that song is going viral, you are more likely to gain more followers and get more views because it’s very popular right now. You don’t have to have every single video relate to the sound or relate to the hashtag. You literally could just take something that’s super popular right now and related to home building where you can just do a tour of the house. Those are two trends that I just found on the discover page, easy as that. 

And again, I just think that the options are endless with TikTok and that the best way to understand TikTok in my opinion is just to keep watching them. And I know it sounds weird because most people, they want to cut down their time on TikTok and they say that scrolling is a problem, but the little things you’ll pick up as you just keep watching, you learn so much. 

Chelsey: Thanks so much, Jane, those were great points. Both of your trends, want to touch on too, and the Women in STEM, obviously. 

First, let’s go with the Women in STEM the first week in March. I think it starts March 7, is Women in Construction Week.

And so that’s incredible that that is already trending on TikTok. I mean, everything that we’ve been talking about with women in the construction agency with The House That She Built. This is a really great time to sit down with your team and think of a strategy to highlight all of the incredible women that work in your home building company, since it’s already trending.

And then Women in Construction Week is coming up in just a couple of weeks. I also love the show me your drawers. That’s amazing. And so funny, I’ve only seen people do it where they have the messy drawers and then they clean them up and they organize them. But to take that and turn it into an actual it’s a home-building term. We built those drawers, not we as in we, but this industry built those drawers. And so take back that trend and make it our own. 

I also love the Rosemary song because sometimes songs that are trending on TikTok are not always the most appropriate to reflect a home building brand. Especially a brand that is geared towards building homes for families.

And so when a song starts trending and comes along on TikTok, and that’s happening a lot with oldies that are coming back and circling around, it’s the best time and opportunity to take those songs and utilize them because it’s not every day that an appropriate song is trending. 

I love TikTok, and Jane just brought it to a whole other level. So thank you, Jane.

Next up, we’ve got Nikki. We’ll filter a little bit and transition over from TikTok to what Nikki presented on at the builder show. She talked about short form videos, so videos that are 60 seconds or less. Obviously, the things that are trending on TikTok and even Instagram reels right now are short form video. So we’re going to have Nikki talk a little bit about that trend and about how to make short form video. 

Nikki: Hi everyone. I’m so excited to be on the podcast today, but like Chelsey said, I did just present on show form video at the builder show, which was so much fun. But today I’m kind of going to piggyback off of what Jane was talking about on TikTok and trends because trends and the sounds that she was talking about are really, really great ways to keep your video short.

Because a lot of what I’m finding is builders are having a tough time keeping their videos short and they want to basically make a movie of everything and it’s going to be five minutes long, but the problem is, is people’s attention spans are shrinking. Right now, human’s attention spans are shorter than a goldfish.

We’re at about eight seconds and goldfish at about nine. So we have to keep our videos short in order to keep people’s attention. So they don’t scroll away from us, especially on platforms like TikTok where you could just scroll and find something else that hooks your interest. 

So I want to talk about how to video smarter and not harder, and really these help you keep your video short and organized.

So the first one I have is to show and not tell. So if you can just show one thing, whether it be a door opening, if you have a really beautiful barn door, somewhere in your house and you can open it, or if you have a very beautiful countertop in a kitchen, instead of just saying you installed the countertops, showing the installation and the countertops, my next one is using numerics.

So for example, three questions to ask at your next design appointment. It’s going to tell the audience how many tips they’re in for and how long they’re going to have to listen. This is also great for blogs, but I’m going to keep it on videos. 

My next one is real people, not robots. People love to see other people on their feed, right?

And this goes off of again at the podcast before on the bad reviews is people aren’t going to want to comment negative things when they see a real person on the video or on the photos. So this is a great way to also combat those maybe bad reviews you’re getting on social media. 

My next one is FOMO or the fear of missing out. I think this one is so powerful, especially for events because people don’t want to miss things, they don’t want to feel like they missed out. So if you are wording and showing how amazing your event was, people are going to want to come to the next one. 

My next one is inciting emotions. Our emotions are so, so powerful in getting people to be interested in watching what you have. So that’s three. I love our curiosity, fear and joy. So curiosity, you could say listen to this, or what if I told you, or here’s the five worst things you could put into your new construction home. People are going to want to watch that. Same thing with fear. Fear is so powerful. You could say, did you know or warning flashing red lights or what’s scarier than losing money?

That’s a big one that we like to use. Then the last one is joy and happiness. I talked about in my presentation, a story I did for a builder where in a 55 plus community, they had two people who had moved into separate homes, ended up getting engaged. And it was a great story, released it on Valentine’s day, but that is going to spark joy and happiness and that post did so, so well because people love happy people. And they also love pets. Pet day just passed, and those posts are doing great. Everyone loves a cute pet. 

My last one is secrets and I think secrets are powerful because, people want to know information they don’t think they’re supposed to. So even just putting on the screen, a secret, other builders don’t want you to know, or like I said earlier, the secret to saving money, people are going to be interested and they’re going to want to continue watching that video on your watch time is going to go up. 

Chelsey: All those tips are so great and I can’t believe you were able to distill your half an hour presentation down to like five minutes for our listeners. Obviously, if you want to see the whole presentation, I do think it will be available on IBS Express. If you want to go check it out.

 I love Nikki’s tips because not only do they apply to TikTok, which is obviously trending right now. They were just rewarding seven second long videos, which is crazy because obviously that is shorter than ours and the goldfish has attention span for purposeful reasons. But if you’re not quite ready to take the plunge into TikTok, you can still use Nikki’s tips on short form video to create videos for the traditional platforms that you’re on right now, like Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram, but just remember, like Nikki said, the days of five minute videos are kind of in the past because they’re a bit too long to hold any sane person’s attention span, but rather take that five minute long video and separate it into five, one minute videos. Super super easy and something that all of us can start doing right now.

I’m sorry to say, but we’re done with video, but we’re jumping on to a topic that I know all of you will love a little bit more because I know video can be a little intimidating at times. I hope these tips help you, but everyone loves a good blog, loves reading a blog, loves writing a good blog. 

 There are some new ways that we’ve been putting out our blogs to the universe. And so Maddie is going to tell us a little bit about blogs and how to make the most out of them. 

Maddie: Thanks Chelsey. Hi everyone.

So I’m going to talk about blogs and blog boosting. So I first want to talk about how when you blog, it helps keep your brand or your company relevant, and it really helps create like user engagement on your site. 

When you want to perform link outreach, say you have a blog on community events happening within your area. You can link to those places and then that helps bring authority and credibility to your website. And then you can also link to the communities that you offer. So this way you’re helping someone else. And then you’re also helping the user find where they can live in your community. Also with blogging and helps provide more material and content for Google to index.

So when you’re creating blogs, you can target specific keywords that you want to rank for and search results and the more content and keywords you’re using, the more google has to index and then they can hopefully take the relevant keywords and provide an answer to the query that the user’s looking for.

When you’re coming up with the blogs, a lot of people, normally they don’t do anything. They just post it to their website and then they don’t do anything with it. But when you’re already going through the effort of creating a topic and creating the blog, you want to be able to get as much exposure that you can.

So once you have posted the blog to your website, there are two ways that you can really get the most amount of use. First, you can create organic social posts. And this is where you take like two to three sentences, a little summary of the blog, and then link it to that blog. Once that post goes out, you can boost this post on Facebook. Say you post it like one week and then two weeks later, it can still show up to people that are interested in your brand and your company. And then this way it’s not just posted and forgotten. 

The second way is blog carousel ads. So this is great. If you’re someone who posts a lot of blogs, you can add up to six, I think. [Facebook Carousel ads support up to 10 slides.] And then they’re all in one post. So it’s like a carousel of these four to six posts and they’re all in one place. So then you can have the most exposure to all of these blogs that you want to put in front of people.

And the great thing about posting blogs and blogging is it really helps to increase time on your website and also decrease bounce rates. And that’s really something you want to focus on. And we have already seen really promising results for our builders. So we really recommend boosting these blogs and making sure you get them out to all the people that you want to target, whether it be for interests or just informational. And we’re excited to continue tracking these results for our builders. 

Chelsey: All of those blogging tips are perfect and you’re so right, Maddie. So many builders go through the effort to write these blogs. And even if they are doing it just for SEO purposes, they’re looking up keywords to put in that blog that are relevant for search terms.

And they’re using all of this time and effort to put together that blog post, but just putting that blog on your website is great, but it’s really not good enough. Take that effort, stretch it further. I know we were just talking about social media on here, but you could even link that in your most recent emails that you send out to your CRM list and then everyone that follows you, even if they don’t go back to your website on a daily basis to see what new blogs you’ve posted. You’re giving them all of the resources that you’ve just created.

 Like Maddie said, with these blog carousel ads or these blog boosts, we’ve also been boosting them to retargeting audiences. And so people that have been to your website before bringing them back to the website, from these carousel ads and showing them, Hey, Hey, look at us. We’ve got new content. Maybe the people that have been to your website have already been through all of the community pages. They know they love your homes. They’re still sitting and waiting for maybe their house to sell or other contingencies. While they’re waiting, give them more content, give them more to read.

Maybe you have an event coming up. A meet the neighbors event that you blogged about. That. Want to come to in the community that they’re interested in, or even maybe they’re having a little bit of trouble with financing and you have a blog about financing that comes out. It’s the perfect opportunity to bring people back to your website and show up where they’re looking the most on social media obviously.

I hope all of these tips that Maddie, Nikki and Jane shared, take your thinking one step further. We know you’ve heard about blogs before. We know you’ve heard about video. We know you’ve heard about TikTok, but all of these ways to boost your blogs to make short form video or, to use trends on your TikTok strategy. Call it a 102 class if you will, in all of these different topics, we always want you to take what you know, and continue to ask what don’t I know about this. What can I do more of? We are always here, the social corner. We are always here to answer your questions. Talk more about all of this. We are social nerds. 

 If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out. We are so, so excited to talk about all of these topics and more. 

Thanks for tuning in. Thanks for listening and let us know too. What do you want to know more about in social media? And maybe you’ll hear some of those tips on the next What’s Next in Social podcast, but for now we’ll sign off and we’ll talk to you later.

Bye everyone.

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