Most real estate and mortgage professionals agree that creating content and using social media is vital to reaching customers and referral partners in today’s market.
As important as it is, many of them still find it overwhelming. Social media is often romanticized as a magic bullet, and when the luster wears off and the work begins, many are left frustrated.
I get a lot of feedback about the frustration that comes from not knowing what kind of content to create, finding the time to create it, and deciding what or where to post it. All of these obstacles can be overcome by first creating one larger piece of content called pillar content.
Pillar content is simply one larger piece of content, typically about something you’re interested in or has a main message you are trying to share, that can be broken down or re-purposed into smaller pieces of micro content that can be shared across many social platforms.
The example I share most often is my own podcast. Last year I started the Mortgage Marketing Expert podcast with the main message of helping mortgage and real estate professionals build an effective and efficient mortgage business.
I interview industry experts who share marketing and lead generation tips, as well as insights on where the industry is going. I record these 30-45 minute interviews in a video conference, and this becomes my pillar content.
A recording like this can be used in a number of different ways. The audio can be made into a podcast, smaller audio clips can be used as flash briefings, the video can be chopped up into a highlight reel, quotes can be used to create text graphics, the transcript could be a blog post, and frames can be used as pictures.
But you don’t need to know how to do all this to make this strategy work for you.
Simply find a great piece of content: A news article that speaks directly to issues affecting your audience, an interview with someone knowledgeable about the market, a roundup of stats that paint a compelling picture. Look at your trade groups and industry news outlets for ideas.
Take this one great piece of pillar content and break it down. Pull it apart and post those tidbits across various social media sites – Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn – whatever it is that you use. Find a way to illustrate the facts using online infographic tools to make it visually captivating.
There are infinite ways to generate things to share from the one original pillar, and time becomes less of an issue. You simply generate one pillar at a time and post the different variations on different social platforms.
It’s important to remember that social media marketing is meant to be just that: social. When two people are having a conversation, one of them doesn’t start off by saying everything they have on their mind, the conversation goes back and forth depending on each other’s response.
Marketing on social media should be very much the same. Start lots of conversations by posting a lot of pieces of content, listen to the responses when you get engagement, and use those as feedback to decide what to say next.
