Social Media for Real Estate: YouTube Best Practices and the Google Local Contributor Strategy

Preview for real estate group coaching: Social Media and YouTube Best Practice Tips

Live Group Coaching #21: How to Recruit Domestic ISAs; Tips For Maximizing YouTube Reach; and Creative Ways to Get Hyperlocal with your Real Estate Marketing. 

Episode #21 of Estate Professionals Mastermind Podcast

Join the Estate Professionals Mastermind group for weekly group challenges, high-energy community support, and bite-sized content.

What’s In This Episode:

Katt, Jen, and the Masterminds brainstorm tips, strategies, and tools for working less, earning more, and doing good.  Katt kicks off the call by sharing the story of Cedar Hollow Woodworking, a business run by one guy who very subtly established his brand as a community centerpiece.  Katt and Steve discuss where to find good ISAs and how to structure a work-life balance that will increase their tenure and excitement about your company.  Jonathan, Katt, Dan, and Michele break apart YouTube marketing and why even unpolished content can be incredibly powerful in launching both your channel in general and your brand in local search results.  Katt and Jen tease a 16 Probate FAQs Challenge they will roll out for the next Mastermind call with Chad’s return.  The Masterminds discuss the importance of just letting the camera roll, no excuses and no stopping, and taking solace in the fact you can trim down your content after the fact.

THIS WEEK’S CHALLENGE: Probate Mastery’s top performers are challenged to create a Google profile with their BUSINESS NAME and leave a review for any local business they visit (Yes, even if it’s just for a coffee!). Next week, we will work together to kick off our Probate FAQs challenge.

Podcast Streams and Download: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1763298/9123717-social-media-for-real-estate-youtube-best-practices-and-the-google-local-contributor-strategy

Video (YouTube): https://youtu.be/HKsYspz83Ic

Episode Time Stamps (YouTube Links):

0:00 The Google Local Contributor Strategy
2:49 Where Did You Recruit Your Call Center Employees?
4:51 Training Your ISA to Call Probates
6:12 How Did You Compensate Your Real Estate ISAs?
10:15 How to Find and Hire Real Estate ISAs Near You
12:42 Posting More Than Just Houses and Sold Signs
13:38 The FAQs Challenge: Jumpstart Your YouTube Journey
15:03 Channel Name, Structure, and Copywriting For YouTube SEO
16:40 Understanding Search Intent
17:57 SEO Trends and the Dominance of Video Content
19:18 YouTube Thumbnails and Video Length: Best Practices
22:47 Repurposing Videos on Multiple Platforms
23:50 Tools and Tips for YouTube Video Tags
26:36 How to Approach the Video Content Creation Process

Resources:

  1. Join Estate Professionals Mastermind Group (Facebook)  
  2. Check out Estate Professionals Mastermind and More on YouTube
  3. 18 Prompts for YouTube Videos that will Jumpstart your Probate Real Estate Marketing
  4. Google My Business tips: 4 competitive advantages into Google My Business for real estate
  5. Recommended Marketing Books: Probate Mastery Reading List
  6. Social Media Examples Mentioned in This Episode:
    1. A business built through Google Local Contributions: Cedar Hollow Woodworking, LLC
    2. Dan’s Real Estate Channel
    3. Dan’s recommendation for informational probate content inspiration: LegaLees YouTube Channel
    4. Dan’s suggestion for Real Estate YouTube inspiration: Mike Sherrard – YouTube
    5. Johnathan and Dan’s suggestion: Karin Carr’s YouTube for Real Estate Agents (facebook.com)

SEGMENT TRANSCRIPTS: (Download PDF of Full Transcript)

The Google Local Contributor Strategy

Welcome to Probate Mastery group coaching, everybody. I’m not Chad Corbett. I am Katt. Most of you probably know me well. For anyone that’s not familiar with my background and expertise, both with marketing promotions and real estate, I ran a real estate iSA call center for about five years. Our company, The Right Agency, was the original vendor for all the leads. So if you used all the leads for ISA up until the end of 2018, that was the company I started and I might’ve made some of your appointments for you.
In the last three or four calls, we’ve focused heavily on video marketing, content marketing, YouTube, and Facebook.

I thought of this company near me called Cedar hollow woodworking. Now I don’t even remember the guy’s name, but I know his brand names so well because he did one thing that I think is the most incredible strategy. And that’s just that he’s become a super top-level google contributor. I’ve only lived in Cocoa, Florida since right before the pandemic started. So looking at restaurants to go to I’m from New York and I don’t want soggy wings. I’m looking on Google for the best reviews.
Well, I look at three or four different restaurants reading through the reviews. And I keep seeing the same reviewer come up. Cedar Hollow woodworking. Every time. There’s a review from this guy and he’s posting pictures of the place. He’s giving us feedback. He’s talking about his experience with the owners, I clicked into his Google profile, and this guy is giving honest, genuine wholehearted reviews about every place he goes to. Now, I know some places are still shut down, but a lot of us are starting to go places again
now what, if you could use that opportunity to give someone feedback on their business that’s exactly what this guy did. I’m going to link in the chat and the show notes to his Facebook page, he’s got 6,000 likes.
It’s beautiful cedar woodwork. You know, You got to think that’s a pretty niche product to try to be marketing. And this guy has mastered it. I’ve watched some of the same places that he’s reviewed. He’ll turn around and post his progress, doing work within their businesses.
So now he’s become a contractor. For a lot of these places, you simply gone to Google and left a review and posted some pictures. 
So if you guys aren’t doing Google reviews, helping people learn the neighborhood they live in knowing your market well. This is your challenge this week, get out in your local community, provide value, give other business owners your feedback and help other people find their businesses. And that reciprocity will come back and help you twofold. The last tip for that is just making sure you set up a Google profile for your business, with your business name in it. That way you’re leaving that brand impression every time you leave a review. 

Where Did You Recruit Your Call Center Employees?

Hey, Katt could you discuss a little bit about finding VAs national or American VAs. Sure so our call center was all domestic. We. We ran in the offices. This was based in Rochester, New York which did have its advantages, Florida. For example, you have to have consent from both parties to record the conversations; in New York, we didn’t. For our agent clients, we did work with, I would say 95% agents, or agents that also invested. It wasn’t as frequently investors without a license that they hung somewhere. So, you know, That compliance was really important. All the brokerage information was really important.
But we worked, we had two physical offices based in Rochester, New York, all of our employees are people that we knew face-to-face. My favorite place to hire was people that came from this third-party call center company called Sutherland global services. They’re a huge company. If you’ve ever called your AT&T, Verizon, your car rentals, home Depot customer service. You’ve probably reached someone from one of their three call centers globally. One’s based in Georgia. One’s based in New York and the others in the Philippines. I came from AT&T B2B sales, which is how I knew so many people from that call center group.
People that were already familiar with managing a computer system while they spoke with people general customer service, a lot of them had the sales experience as well. They weren’t afraid or necessarily uncomfortable knowing that the goal of the call was to. Not necessarily sell something, but at least set up a warm intro to a listing appointment for someone to sell them on their real estate services.
As far as recruiting, if you’ve ever gone to a Walmart or target and seen one of those display tables set up where you see someone selling the direct TV special AT&T packages, just for the shoppers here today. Those people go through vigorous training, $6,000 or more per trainee, three months or more of intensive sales training.
And I’m talking Tony Robbin’s mantra. Those are some places to look to get someone that’s not afraid to be on the phone

Training Your ISA to Call Probates

We didn’t always work probate leads. One agent said she had a probate list and wanted us to call it. And we’re like, all right, what’s probate? We didn’t know this is before we started doing the calls for All The leaves. We called her list for her. As far as the rest of it, shifting them away from that hard sell and kind of molding more towards the Chad approach. Set them loose in our Facebook group, let them watch our content.
We set appointments and Chad reached out to us. How has your conversion been so damn high? So he started working with our business partner, Brandon to set up a white label agreement. And honestly, probate lists became a primary. A piece in our business. We had our clients get lists from RedX, Vulcan7, Landvoice, Expressoagent, all these popular places, some had lists of their own.
But it felt like overnight we shifted towards probate leads and we started referring a lot of our clients to purchase probate leads themselves so we could call those lists too. So training someone to shift from, you know, that bulldog type of sales approach that you might get. If you recruit someone who’s worked for a heavy sales company, like AT&T it’s not hard to, take all their sales knowledge, and just give them a tweak towards that value-first approach. You could just let them loose in content that Chad’s got out there on YouTube and say, Hey, watch this. Let’s do some role play and they’ll get it.

How Did You Compensate Your Real Estate ISAs?

What would you expect to do for compensation costs?
We handed over operations of the call center at the end of, really the end of 2018 officially, but for new hires, we started at $14 an hour. Most of them were full-time, the flexibility, I think, was more important than the starting wage in New York at the time, I believe the minimum wage was $8 and 50 cents. So we were paying them, 70% markup on the minimum wage there. We did offer performance, incentive bonuses. you know, A lot of the time when you’re calling on behalf of somebody.
You can’t always get a physical appointment, but we tried. If they landed a physical appointment, we would pay them $40 for a physical appointment. After the agent was able to make it, if the agent changed their mind and they had a scheduling conflict, we still honor that for the ISA appointment setter. For phone appointments, we would pay a $15 incentive, but it had to be a solid appointment.
Now again, remember we were able to do quality control or we could go back and listen to these calls since we’re in New York. And we were able to record the calls there. If you’re in another state, you don’t necessarily have that. Without qualifying to everyone present on the phone call that you might be recording this for quality assurance purposes.
So I do think the incentives were important. I think the flexible schedule was important The $14 was great, but I’m not going to lie. I do think a lot of the applicants we had that did well would have accepted the job for a lower starting pay, but they did well. And I think part of their performance was just, Their bills were in order.
They weren’t coming into work, stressed out if they needed to leave to get something done during the Workday. You know, we make these calls between business hours, eight to four, eight to five sometimes that’s the time where you need to go to a dentist appointment or go fix a flat tire. you know, Just being open to letting people do things that they need to do to keep their life rolling was probably the core value, in our recruiting.
And how we manage our relations with our employees.
Do you have any experience with the uh, say the Philippine call centers? So not exactly. Not as far as recruiting myself or vetting anyone to work with. I did help oversee with all the leads an integration process where they did bring two ISAs on as a vendor contractor.
It didn’t last that long, but it was more because of the system we were switching to the five, nine dialer. It wasn’t what they were already familiar with. And we hadn’t learned five, nine, enough to be able to teach it to someone else over the phone ourselves. So I have a high opinion of hiring international ISAs and virtual assistants.
I do think it is just as big of a role on you to make sure your systems and processes are outlined properly, that the delegation is in place and that you’re just there and make yourself present, whether it’s once a week, 30-minute refresher call. So you might save money, but I don’t think that you can put in any less dedication and commitment to recruiting and hiring someone, whether they’re working in your office, working in your neighborhood, or working overseas.
Great. Thank you. Yeah, no problem.
So Lynette is asking, where can she find the kindergarten version of this conversation, honestly, and, get to know Jen well here, both of us are working to produce written content that’s structured Step-by-step where we can walk you through where you should start. What’s probably your best bet to focus on first.
Even if you want to do all of these things eventually, how can you implement this pathway and do it well, get it right to the point where you can streamline it, manage your insights, make sure that everything is still giving you a good return week after week or month after month, and then delegate it somewhere else.
So you can scale or start the next branch of your business. And I know Lynette, I do believe you’re already in the estate professionals mastermind group on Facebook.
Every time we post new content, we’re going to be syndicating a post that shows you, Hey, we’ve got this guide this week. We’ve got these five tips. Go visit that group. See what’s in there and see what gets your brain going. And if you’re stuck post a comment it’s always really helpful for us to know what to create content around.
When someone asks that question.

How to Find and Hire Real Estate ISAs Near You

Oh, if we were to use a cost, you know, an ISA, who would you recommend? You said Sutherland global services.
Is that what you said? They’re hired by major firms like Forbes, fortune 500 companies. I wouldn’t want to go that far cause I’m not sure what exactly your scale would have to be to hire someone there. If you recruit people that are already comfortable selling but are looking for a change.
And what their daily work schedule looks like. I know Chad mentioned a couple of calls ago and it was genius. Someone having a kid, he was speaking about a woman, but it could be a dad to someone having kids that want to be at home a little bit more often. Doesn’t want to have to spend an hour commuting wants the ability to say, Hey, I can work from my home office, eat my lunches at home and save $30 because I’m not buying Starbucks twice a day and overpriced pizza somewhere.
People that are trained and are happy with the work, want to do something that’s either more fulfilling or more amenable to their daily lifestyle, those are your perfect candidates. Just because you’re a person hiring for a small business, doesn’t mean you can’t go post a listing on indeed on Craigslist on Facebook.
Even on your website, if you put up a careers tab and create a careers page, you’d be surprised who will apply, And you can go through their resume, see if they’ve got the similar experience to where I’m pointing you. And give them an interview, throw them in the group, send them a video, have them, check it out and say would you like calling an appointment setting in this space and see what feedback they give you. It’s not necessarily the pay it’s the lifestyle of being able to work from home and not feel like you’re doing something like chasing someone for debt collection calls.
A lot of people want to get out of that space. They’ll feel more like they’re helping people rather than hounding them down.
Same thing if we go back to the beginning of the conversation that we opened with, being a local contributor, providing value, just think about how many people you can find just from having a 30-minute conversation with your barber or your hairdresser.
Like you don’t always have to go in there and say, oh, the kids are great. School’s going great. My husband just got a new job. You could go in there and say, Hey, I’m working on this business project it’s awesome. Do you know anyone?? One of those 20-year-olds about to go to college, and if they’re comfortable enough making Tik TOK videos, you think they can have a phone conversation? I think they can. So your hairdresser might have a teenager, an entrepreneurial teenager. Eager to be mentored, building their skill set, and doing something before they go off to college in eight to 12 months.
You could find people anywhere, ask people for who they’d recommend doing something like this, and they’ll tell you. Thank you. No problem.

Posting More Than Just Houses and Sold Signs

Johnathan. I’m glad you made it. Thank you so very much. I love this. I love it. I love structure. It just speaks to my soul and I’m just enjoying this, but I’m enjoying it. So, please. Over the years, trying to get used to making content that fits in a square picture for Instagram.
You got to break down an hour’s long conversation into a bullet point list with five items that you can fit into a little social graphic. As a takeaway for you guys that are trying to figure out what can I create for Instagram that isn’t just a picture of a house I just listed or just sold, sometimes things that you think are valuable even just something that another small business owner in your community could use. You don’t have to make it centered around this idea that you can help someone buy or sell a home. You could list five tips about, ways to network with other professionals in your community. You could offer the same value that you take away from here.
Put it in your branding, your little five bullet point list, post an Instagram picture, in start doing that community building.

The FAQs Challenge: Jumpstart Your YouTube Journey

I’m assuming almost everybody here has a Facebook unless they just don’t want to have a Facebook, I feel like in real estate feels like Facebook’s the place to be at, but there’s so much opportunity in so many of these other places if you know how to create content for that platform and know who you can reach on those platforms, a lot of people are on YouTube. Yup. And I’m actually, I’m working on FAQs that I want to challenge everyone. That’s part of our community. To create I’m up to 16 questions and I think that’ll round it out.
You guys aren’t going to have to do all of them, but you should do at least six of them FAQs that you guys should record your videos, answering common probate questions. That way you guys don’t get stuck in this analysis paralysis of I want to start my YouTube channel, but what the heck do I write about what the heck do I talk about?
I’m going to give you these 16 questions we can brainstorm the possible answers for the questions together. Obviously, anything that’s specific to your market, you’ll have your video where you share your local expertise, but those 10 or so core questions a personal representative would want to know when they’re visiting your probate website or checking out your cute little square, Instagram posts might want to know like, what is probate?
How do I know if I’m in the will? Like how many people do you think to want to know if they’re in somebody’s will? That’s a question I click and watch your video on if you posted it, it’s like when people post those found money.com, when you left a paycheck with a previous employer, people love clicking that stuff.

Channel Name, Structure, and Copywriting For YouTube SEO

So I will be getting those out to you. And if you guys commit to it and make 16 videos, you’re going to get a bite off of it. Is there anyone here making videos now on YouTube,
I’ve made some I’ve slacked up recently, and that was going to be my question.
If we already have a YouTube channel. It’s fledgling. I don’t have hundreds of subs yet, but do, would you recommend starting another one just for probate or just use the existing real estate? YouTube channel that we have. So there are several ways you can go about that. I am 100% for making your face, the name of the brand.
I had to have this conversation with Chad. I’m assuming a lot of you are on this call. If you’re attracted to the value first approach, it might seem weird to walk around like Jonathan Hawkins, Jonathan Hawkins. But the point is when you have you know, An aspect of your business, a pillar in your business.
When you’re talking about one thing specifically say it’s probate and other parts of your business, you talk about, we’re going to do, we’re going to house hack. We’re going to teach you how to do the BRRRR method. These are distinct topics that people might want to consume in chunks at a time and stay within that specific topic.
But at the same time, you don’t want to lose yourself, your brand, how people will remember that you’re the one that got all this valuable information for, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having a YouTube channel that’s just based on your name or a brand name that you might have already established based around your name.
I think the best way to segment your content. Hyper-focus in a specific niche is to create a playlist.

Understanding Search Intent

But I would say do a Johnathan Hawkins YouTube channel. If you want to, you can make it Johnathan Hawkins, property services, whatever your brand name is, you can put two words at the end of your YouTube name to give you that kind of impression of what exactly you focus on.
But I’d keep it broad. Don’t limit yourself to something that’s too focused and will box out, potential audience members. And don’t forget to it’s your videos themselves that will get the organic traffic when people are searching for help with probate in cocoa, Florida. It’s your video titles, your video descriptions your video tags, and any webpage that you host that video on -that’s what’s going to contribute to your SEO and how people will be able to find your content.
We want your YouTube name to be something that people can say, Hey man, where do you go to learn about this stuff? And someone goes, Johnathan Hawkins. I learned everything from him. He’s great. And they can just type Johnathan Hawkins and your YouTube channel will come up. So you’ve got to look at those, the way people will intend to find you.
Are they looking for you? Which are you want your channels to be named that way. And if they’re looking for an answer to that, to a question and don’t know you yet, or don’t know that you talk about this, you want to word your content, title, your content in a way that answers their questions that they’re looking for.
Sounds good.

SEO Trends and the Dominance of Video Content

I started to do some YouTube videos and they’re horrible, but it’s a start. And I am getting you’d be surprised. Google owns YouTube.
So if you’re looking for something and you’re, and you have your tags right in your description on target, you get picked up. It’s crazy. You can spend a fortune trying to get your website to get picked up, forget about it, just do it through YouTube. It’s free. It’s incredible. And if you look at it, I love market trends.
I love news insights, tech trends. If you look at the insights and the predictions on how people will be consuming content, it’s all heavily weighted towards videos that people can consume on the go, right? Who’s already established, I would say the number one, hold on. That’s YouTube.
And of course, Google is going to want to, if you use, if you like YouTube and you use Google, Google is going to want to send you to their channels. So you keep using Google to keep searching bang. So it’s a positive feedback loop. As long as you put yourself. Google will help you market your content because it wants people on its platform.
I have a trick for that too. Katt. Oh yeah, I’m ready for it. Yeah, probably a lot of you already know this, but you just embed the video on your website. If you can. If you can do that, you just embed it there, and then that pops yours. Rankings up just a little bit, but and I know Kat, you have so much more experience with YouTube than I do.

YouTube Thumbnails and Video Length: Best Practices

And thumbnails anybody that can give us some help, but my thumbnails are horrible. Make them on Canva. It’s a, there’s a lot of templates there. You can just modify them quickly. They’re really easy to do. I am a strong believer that you should always have your face in the YouTube thumbnail. I believe the same. Even blog and article content, as long as you’re speaking from experience like if you’re getting general information, it doesn’t need to have your face plastered all over the blog featured image.
I have a ton of experience in the search world, but it’s very difficult to start a YouTube channel that is going to get a ton of traffic. If you’re a solopreneur, small team. It’s going to be more difficult for you. But that’s why I agree with everything that you said Kat about making sure you put it under your brand.
And my thing is, and this is what I always tell entrepreneurs is don’t spread yourself so thin. It’s like putting too little butter on too much toast. If you’re doing, if you’re trying to do too many things even learning Canva like I love Canva it’s one of my favorites and I highly recommend it for everybody as well. But even just learning something new, sometimes it’s good to just stick with a few things that you know, that you’re going to do well.
Yeah, absolutely. So Jonathan, the recipe there is get your face in there because people, I don’t know if you’ve ever looked at a YouTube feed when it recommends things to you, like how often do you click on the weird, Legalese sounding like this is probate with wills and trusts and it’s got the little courtroom [ Scales of Justice!] maybe John can tell me what that thing’s called, but I don’t click on those videos. They look boring. But when I see a video with Chad’s face and John’s face on it and it’s like probate attorney tells all heck yeah, I’m going to watch that. I want to know what John Fraker is going to drop on us today.
So, I mean, Having that face in there shows you that it’s not some static infographic, the 1980s, job training video and that texts we’ll put those keywords that I might be interested in. So if you’re talking about probate mention probate, if you’re talking about something specific to a location, throw that location in there.
If you’re talking about something cool, like how to build generational wealth through house-hacking. That’s all you got to say, people that want that content will click it and don’t necessarily be bummed out. If you don’t get a lot of views. One of YouTube’s highest weighted metrics is, the duration of a video that’s viewed.
So how long somebody pays attention to your video. You don’t want to get a lot of views that drop off in three seconds, it looks bad. You want people to watch your video because they want to hear what you have to say, the video for video length. Yeah. All these trends are these less than 62nd Instagram reels and Tik TOK videos.
My. Grasp over this strategy is with YouTube. You want to aim for anywhere between five minutes. YouTube seems like they’re shifting where they want videos to be 15 minutes to an hour. They love this, long-form webinar, live chat, things that get people to stay on the platform right now. And also because they can insert more ads in people’s videos, the longer your video is, and the longer people are watching.
So YouTube’s changing that up. I think you should aim for at least three minutes. It’s not going to kill you to put a short video on YouTube, So there is no definitive answer on how long your content should be, but.
Answer the question. You need to answer whatever your goal of this piece of this video, explaining to somebody, get that video recorded, get it done. You can edit out some of the parts where you mess up to shorten it up a bit and keep it pertinent.

Repurposing Videos on Multiple Platforms

but you should have A well-rounded approach.
So if you’re making something that you can break down and like these probate FAQs if you heard earlier, It’s 16 different questions.
So say, for example, I record a video on each. I’m going to put all of those videos in one playlist. Each of those videos might be anywhere between two minutes and 15 minutes, depending on what the question is and how long it takes me to give a satisfactory answer to those questions. I get all those videos uploaded as individual videos, but they’re set in a playlist.
So if somebody wants to watch all the details, they can. And if they find one offhand, like how do I find out if I’m in a will, YouTube will recommend the next video and it’ll recommend related videos because it knows all of those videos in that playlist are similar in content. So just by creating a playlist, you’re also educating the algorithms on what your content is actually about and how it might relate to what it’s grouped with versus what else might be on your channel. After you get the YouTube set up, you can pull sound bites, right from your video clips and create those 30-second Tik TOK videos for those, 60 seconds.

Tools and Tips for YouTube Video Tags

And also on, On YouTube, you can use some tagging tools to get yourself found easier. I throw up a video that has nothing to do with any of this stuff last night.
And I used a tool called vid IQ and I searched for the most found tags and I put it up less than a day ago. I have 24 views on it. Because it’s tagged properly and for people who are looking for that content YouTube is its free advertising, so yeah. And then don’t forget with YouTube tags, they’re going to give you a field where you can input tags.
I think they give you up to 500 characters, so you can get two or three dozen tags in there, depending on how long your tags are. These are things that kind of do more to educate. Google and tell you to, the general, what your content might be about, but you can also include three. They only want you to do three hashtags within the description of your YouTube videos.
And those are hashtags that will become clickable. They’ll be hyperlinked when someone’s looking at your video now. When we do probate, it’s great. We pretty much own the probate space. And so you guys all start doing your probate videos and then you’ll start taking some of that space.
But those three hashtags are really for user navigation. Those are things that people can click. So you want to make those three hashtags, something that seems relevant to the content, but make them unique enough that if somebody clicks those, any of those three hashtags, they circle back to more of your content.
So for example, if we all start making all these probate videos and we use probate is one of our three clickable hashtags and the description of our YouTube videos. Think if we get a hundred people to make 10 probate videos and all of them tag it, probate will, when we’re clicking that we’re all just going to swarm to each other’s channels.
But if you do it like JHawkinsprobate, as your hashtag people are inclined to click, and that will funnel them. To more of your things that you’ve used that hashtag for. So a good strategy is to treat those three clickable hashtags that you get with YouTube as a way, to create a mini directory within YouTube, that you’ve tagged all of these other videos with that.
It’s a subtle way to create a playlist indirectly. And that’s a feature if you haven’t tried it all you have to do is. Add a hashtag with the number sign and the word or phrase directly after it. Just like you would on Instagram and add it in the description of your YouTube video. And then when you publish your video and you look at it, you’ll see, you’ll be able to click it and it’ll show you anything else that’s tagged with that same hashtag.
But again, you don’t want to use those hashtags that pull away other people’s content. So if your content is very much flooded, it gets competitive. How can you make it more unique and treat it as directory navigation for other content on your channel? And you can update these. You can just go to the copy of any video update at any time, so you can change these hashtags over time.

How to Approach the Video Content Creation Process

But as far as you know, what about the people that only like watching things in 30 seconds or less? Find a sound bite from that video and highlight it, crop it.
And just repurpose it, put it on your Instagram reels. Your tik-to, you can even do it on Snapchat. I think they let you load like 10 seconds at a time, but if you put one 30-second video file, it’ll automatically create three successive snaps for you. Snapchat is a really good way to get hyper-local.
We don’t use it too much within, what we do with probate mastery, just because, I’m not able to put probate mastery on a local map and say, Hey, if you’re an agent that wants to learn about this, I’d only get 10 realtors in the same place. And they’d all be stepping on each other’s toes in one niche.
But Snapchat’s a very good place for anyone to do any hyper-local marketing.
You know, there’s a lot of there’s a couple of guys on YouTube who’re attorneys and they talk about probate. Most of those videos are, three to four or five minutes longer to get to the point there. The guy’s not in the guy.
He’s an old man. He’s not super interesting. There’s nothing like crazy about it, but there’s a lot of information in that and all the social media, all the social media guys that I’ve talked to who do that for a living, you have to have a value add that video has to be valuable to somebody. And I don’t know about you guys.
Nobody pays attention for long anymore. So you have to, get right to the content right away and make it valuable. It’s not easy, but you got to start somewhere.
And yes, John, go ahead. Okay. One of the things I was going to say is you were talking about attorney videos where the guy’s standing in front of a bookcase or attorneys are just terrible at marketing in general. They’re maybe they’re getting better at law school, but maybe you guys could write.
And that’s what I’m saying is for people who are struggling with an idea, why not kill two birds with one stone and build a good idea. Probate lawyers in your region and ask them the questions. And when you talk about how many, how long should my videos be, have a conversation, make it fun and interactive and dynamic, help them not be so wooden and stiff.
And then, maybe in one conversation with them on a video, on a YouTube video, you have five classes. And then you can chop up each one into its separate videos. So you have one long-form and then you can have, local, Dallas attorney, breaks the secret, open on whatever topic people want to know about, out here it’s the the auction process for probates that are limited authority things.
Yeah, I would say pretty much any topic around how fast can I get my money or how long do I have to wait to get this through the court is going to be pretty popular content, no matter what your market is.
I was just going to say, John, those like interview videos are popular. They bring in a lot of people. They’re very good. I dropped the link to that attorney who does answers all these probate questions. And if you take a look at all of his videos, Unbelievably boring, but there are a million videos there and there’s content for you to take from those, grab that idea and do it on yours. Yep. I think I just, yeah, and I go over and just make a pretty little checklist of the 16 questions, but I do think probably next week when Chad’s back in the picture, it would be a great time for us to, even though we all know what probate is, it could help for us all to brainstorm on how can we.
Make concise and clear-to-understand videos for the average person to understand what probate is. Someone that’d be looking up probate in my zip code. How can I describe probate in a way that answers what they want to know about probate? Things that are common sense to us working with each other and figuring out the best way to.
To word it and record it and publish it in a way that is sufficiently explanatory for what a regular consumer is looking for is a lot of value there. Sometimes knowing too much is, our own Achilles heel, because we can’t convey it properly to someone who is looking for the 101 level.
And that’s exactly the strategy. Dan, we just want to outline these 16 questions and give people the template to work off of, but it’s. The same thing that you see these attorneys doing, they’ve broken down their commonly asked questions and it’s great because their assistant, their secretary is probably getting a lot fewer calls with general questions to their office, and a lot more, I’m ready for an actual consultation.
I need to take care of this. And it’ll help you in the same way as a real estate professional, eliminating some of these questions: Can I sell this house? Do I need to go to court first? And again, you can use these facts as great marketing tools. If one of the questions I included is do I have to have an attorney?
So you’ll learn two things from anyone that clicks anything you put in this answer. If they opt-in, they probably don’t have an attorney. So boom, that this person might become a referral that you can bring and create a relationship with someone in your area. If they don’t have an attorney, if you reach out to them, you’re not going to get hit with those objections.
Like my attorney’s handling everything. Cause they don’t have one yet. So frequently asked questions are such a powerful piece of content. They just seem like this little accordion that’s, pretty concise and basic, but they’re really powerful and there’s a lot of ways to write them.
Add in links. Incorporate videos, use them in your SEO to bring in inbound traffic and to convert people, to opt in leads. They’re just, they’re so powerful. I’m saying this 16 question frequently asked questions that you guys need to make videos around. It’s going to end up being a lot more substantial.
You guys getting these videos done, getting the raw footage recorded, editing it a little bit, and putting it on YouTube in a playlist, right? You can repurpose it in so many ways that it could become a robust piece of content for you to give them all the answers, to give them enough, to whet their appetite.
And then they may ping you for more help. And then you can forward them to your attorney or, some of the attorneys that you recommend, this guy also has a trust estate planning, LLCs, taxings all kinds of stuff. And there’s just a ton of stuff. And that’s the other thing like you might have someone coming to look up the probate that they might have questions they’re left out of the will.
They’re, frustrated because they’re, their sibling is responsible and I got named the executor and they know that they’re not gonna get anything from this, but they might be doing the research to find out like how do I structure this right next time? So if you have a frequently asked question listed on your site, or as a YouTube video in your market You could catch that inbound traffic and create an estate planning lead.
So again, these are probate FAQs. You can use these as content to generate leads for multiple vendor partners, as well as generate leads and know a lot more about them before you have your first conversation with them.
The YouTube stuff. It’s a commitment, it’s tough to make those videos every, every week or a couple every week or whatever, you should try to make a few at once batch them, and then release them over time. So it’s not so time-consuming because it is time-consuming.
It’s you got to commit to it, but everybody I know who does. Yeah. There’s a ton of people crushing it from YouTube. Yeah. And I guarantee if you look at some of your favorite channels that you got, and it doesn’t have to be real estate, it could be like your favorite cooking channel, whatever it is that you have saved on your subscribe to on YouTube.
If you go back to two, three years ago, Produced intentionally produced content probably looks the same quality as all of us on zoom. Like your favorite YouTube channels all started somewhere. So you have to get over that. Know, this is what I look like on video. I only, like when I take pictures of myself or the sound is bad, the is bad.
Your favorite YouTube channels. You’ve watched their content, even when there was static or someone was mowing the lawn outside, or they had a crappy camera to start with you, follow them through that journey and you probably are more endeared to them all because of that. Yeah. The video quality does not have to be fabulous.
Any iPhone or Android phone now is plenty. It’s, I have nice equipment. I use my phone. The time, because it’s just quick and simple. Doesn’t have to be fantastic quality, but the content has to be interesting. You have to add, give them something of value.
Was that attorney. His name is Lee R Phillips. I put the link in the chat
and I’ll get both of those in the show notes. Dan, if you want me to post your YouTube channel and the notes, I will get you some traffic.
Oh, I think I’ve seen LegalEes it’s got, I remember laughing at the name. Yeah, she’s super, super dry, super boring, but he’s got good content. He seems to know what he’s talking about. I throw up some videos a long time ago, five years ago on some repair videos. It was just a little channel I threw together.
I have six or seven videos on there. I have 126,000 subscribers. And I haven’t been on that channel in three years. So if the content is something that someone wants to see, they’ll see it. And if you search YouTube, I find my videos on there. What are you putting in your YouTube descriptions?
Like what if people want to your video? What can they do next? It depends on what the video is. So some of mine are just descriptions of things to look for in a new house, things to think of when you plan a new house the house, my channel, and then there’s a video of me like an intro video for the realtor stuff.
Like who I am. A lot of times people just like to see who you are because. Like you, or they may not like, yeah. That’s good too. That gets engagement.
I had, FHA versus conventional mortgage on some property that I sold an open house.
I did some interior design tips. That’s it, it’s I’ve been trying to. Produce videos a couple of months, but I’ve just been so busy that’s why I keep saying you have to commit to it, but boy, everybody, I don’t, I know that’s committed to it. There is. They’re getting tons of work from them.
Did you feel relieved after you finally got your first video done and just did it? No, I still don’t feel relieved. So listen, if I was 25, I’d feel relieved. But I’m not, you’re never going to be happy with what you look like unless you’re a Brad Pitt, so get over it. And you’re always looking at yourself on video.
You look very different, but everybody who meets you see you and you just gotta get past it. Just forget about it. Just put the damn thing up and move on. Get some content up there and get found. It’s free business. A couple of rules that I’ve picked up over time, actually one’s from Chad. Chad always says to never script it, like never, ever script your videos.
And then the other one though, is never to allow yourself to do a retake or to start over again, just know that the first take is it and you’ll get through it and, it’ll be great. Yeah, that’s true. I found I did a video on FHA versus conventional. I look like I’m high on crystal meth because I had to script it because I just didn’t know the content well enough, but if you look at my small engine repair, video things it’s only I did this and this because I know the content well, so it helps to know what you’re talking about. And when you don’t and you’re doing it blindly, it’s hard, but you should just use, an outline, never script just bullet point.
A hundred percent. It doesn’t mean that you just start talking because then you might lose your way. There’ll be embarrassment. Let me drop this. In here too guys, this guy, this Sherard guy. He’s 25, 28.
I dunno. Sputter or Lamborghini. He’s like the best realtor in Calgary or something. No doubt. He’s up at four o’clock and he’s one of these types of guys, but he started from nothing and he just does social media all the time. He’s crushing it. And you can go to his channel and look at all of his videos.
Explain everything. You don’t have to take this class, his videos, explain everything. It’s all like free training. If you decide to go the social media route I would look at those videos and there are other guys on there who do the same thing, but now it’s a free training and this is Jay Hawk. This is Jonathan.
Can I add something in right quick? That would, and that would be the name, Karin Carr. I don’t know if that’s the name of his rung out before, but she has a group called YouTube for real estate agents. She used to be with foul mouth still could be with Keller Williams or whatever, but it’s Karin K-a-r-i-n.
Karin Carr. And she’s done a really good job in helping me when I’ve started as far as, as far as how to put them, how to get together, SEO things that next day I just did it. I had not a clue. So if you got a dream thing like me and all that, like a foreign language to you, like Greek, which was for me.
Yeah. I A whole lot. So I just want to drop that name in there. Hey, I just dropped her Facebook group in the chat.
Yeah, so that Karin Carr has a book called YouTube for real estate agents and the books like seven bucks on Amazon. It takes any moron, could read it, and in a couple of hours and I’m proof of that, get the book so you can read it and highlight it. She also does a class. Everything she does is in the book.
You don’t need the class, you have to implement it, or it’s not going to help you. The book is seven bucks on Amazon. Get it.
Yep. Awesome. All right. So next week, everyone, we’re going to come back. You guys are going to have full-fledged, YouTube channels. You’re going to be sharing it in our group so we can help you grow and evolve. Is that what we’re going to do?
Okay.
All right. Awesome. So we’re going to keep popping up. I think Karen car.com. If you just type her name, she’s not she’s got everything on her website, but really, you should join the Facebook group. If you’re like me. I have to, I check my emails, like in succession, I go back and read through the last few pages of new emails.
If you know that you’re not attentive, unless you’re following someone on the platform, you prefer to follow her YouTube channel. I know she has a YouTube channel as well. Follow go in her Facebook group. Check out the website when you’re ready, but obviously, you won’t forget to do it. If you connect with someone on one of those platforms that you use every day.
That’s why Jonathan, I say you always put your face in the YouTube video because the same way that we’re speaking about Karin and Dan knew exactly who Karin is. That’s why your YouTube channel, there’s nothing wrong with making it:
Jonathan Hawkins, Chad Corbett. I don’t have one yet, but when I do, it’s going to be KATT! Your social media handles all of that. Like as much as you’re creating content, you’re the person speaking. You should always be speaking as yourself, shake that elementary, middle high school notion that everything needs to be written in the third person.
You can’t ever say the word I in a paper, shake that because social media marketing is the exact opposite. Like people learn to trust you, trust your expertise, tune into you, even when they disagree with you or think that they know something better than you do. They’re happy to communicate with you because they like you as a person.
And now you’ve got engagement. So that’s the social media is exactly social, which puts your face on there because that’s how people will recognize you out and about town. I, one of the guys in my group, he, somebody knew him on a walk with his dog saying, aren’t you Kevin Walsh. Oh yeah. You’re that real estate guy.
He’s only five foot one. And they still recognized him. It happens. And that could be, you could make five figures off someone recognizing you off one video. Put that face up there. All right I think everyone here is on our Facebook group or YouTube channel at this point, but if you’re not make sure you go to Estate Professionals Mastermind on Facebook; our YouTube channels under Chad Corbett’s name.
And it’ll be all of the estate professionals mastermind content as a playlist, as well as any other tips from the trainer he does.
And other than that, I’m going to issue this challenge that everyone at least creates their YouTube profile. Get it ready to go. Cause we’re going to hit you with challenges and you’re going to be producing content. And so then we will be back with Chad next week on Tuesday at 3:00 PM. Eastern.
Thanks for coming. Thanks Katt. Thanks Katt.

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2 Comments on “Social Media for Real Estate: YouTube Best Practices and the Google Local Contributor Strategy”

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