Maximizing Instagram Reach

Hey, it's Jeff, it's him for coming at you. I'm back in the chair in front of the microphone, another hot guest episode coming at you fast and furious. I've been away for a moment. So I missed you. Not sure if you missed me, but hey, it's been a couple of weeks since I got one of these out. We're back through the summer and into the fall season and coming at you with a very special episode in just a moment. But before I do, hey, I wanted to share with you a win of the week once again shout out to Ori. Ori's win of the week. He shared in our private community of mortgage loan professionals is he was able to schedule a continuous training of our library of done for you agent classes with a team of about 20 agents in his area. These agents are consistently listed in the top in the state for exp agents shout out to you. Or you've been doing the work. Hey, and that is my question for you, heading into the fall. What is your plan for getting in front of agents at scale, adding value, differentiating yourself, positioning yourself, who attract versus chase and build a personal brand reputation that is one of a partner in a peer versus a vendor and a solicitor. I heard it said a few weeks ago that everything you want is beyond is on the other side, I should say, of your reach and reputation. Everything you want is on the other side of your reach and your reputation. So when it comes to getting referrals from real estate agents, how many agents are you reaching? What is your reputation? How well known are you? You want to level that up? You want to scale your reach? You want to expand and optimize your reputation. You want to become known as the most value added mortgage professional in your backyard. Hey, maybe you want to consider doing what Ori does. Ori leads with educational content and classes and he's building a platform that helps him rise above the noise. Want to learn more about how we do that? You can go to mortgage marketing.pro, mortgage marketing.pro. Okay, my special guest this week is actually related to our private community. I just told you about mortgage marketing.pro. We can go check that out. See what we do is we have a group of mortgage professionals from around the country who every week we gather every Friday and we work on our skill set, our mindset and we also bring a special guest in every single month, not only that, but we also help you, the mortgage originator, do what I just described, do what Ori, I just told you Ori's story. He's a member of our community. He achieved those results because he's been in our community and applying what he's learning. Going through, we're holding him accountable. We've got a community of like-minded professionals who support him and who share best practices and how to actually grow and scale your agent referrals without co-calling, chasing, etc. So one of the things we do is not only do we meet every Friday, but once a month we bring in a very special guest and what I'm going to do is, every once in a while, I release one of these behind the scenes episodes of our monthly special guest call because that I want to look, I mean, you want to get an idea of what we do in this group. Here's your chance to listen into just one example of that. So our special guest that we brought on for this month is renowned Instagram expert, Jen Herman. Jen, if you go to Chatchee PT and you look up best to learn Instagram from, Jen is ranked number one outside of Chatchee PT. She's ranked as one of the top in the world to learn Instagram from and Jen is a part of our community. Jen is sharing Instagram insights, how to grow your reach, how to grow your reputation, and some cool tips and tricks that you probably haven't heard of before. Obviously, you've heard about reels, but did you know that there's a specific length for reels if you actually want to grow your reach, understanding Instagram's new metrics? What is Instagram prioritizing over reach? You hashtag still matter, and is it quality over quantity? And then how do you leverage Instagram for showing up on Google SEO? Jenna impacts all that in more as part of being our special guest in our private community of mortgage professionals where every Friday we meet as I said. So if you want to learn more about that group, you heard me shout it out a moment ago. It's mortgagemarketing.pro schedule a call with me and I'll walk you through the whole thing and see if we are the right fit for each other. Make sure what you do though by listening to this episode is you check the links in the show notes. Go follow Jen on Instagram. There's other episode resources in there for you to check out. And so without further ado, let's get into this week's show. So Jen Herman was on the podcast get this July 2019 episode 130, right? And Jen, I'm about to cross 350 on episodes, so it's been a minute, right? But Jen, it's funny how you connect with people and then you stay connected because you know these people are like the real deal. And I love how I will call Jen one of the truth tellers out there because she's not afraid to call BS on some things that we hear about Instagram, even if it comes from Instagram. And so we're probably going to talk about that. But do a little first of all, I put her link in the chat there. You all should follow her because, hey guys, I'm sure you know this, but Jen is listed as one of the top 20 best Instagram experts to follow in the world. All right? So we're not invested around folks, we're bringing you the high end people here. And so you definitely need to go follow her, subscribe, follow everything that she does to the wealth of knowledge, what's interesting to me though is that you actually have a degree in forensic science. We're going to talk about that, but ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Jen Herman to the call today. And if you guys have a chance, yeah, thank you so much for being here, I know you're busy. Okay, so anything you want to tell our group here today about you to set any context? So ball, if you've asked chat GPT, I always do this because I bring receipts, if you ask chat GPT, it will tell you I am the number one expert to learn Instagram from. So you know, I'm just saying, it's not even top 20. I tried that, my GPT was down this morning, I also wanted to say that. But so yes, this is something that I do, I live, sleep, eat, breathe, all things Instagram to Jeff's point, I'm the first person to call out out of Missouri, the head of Instagram when he says certain things, because what he's saying isn't wrong, it's just what he's saying is for this type of audience, and then there's all these other audiences. And in the real estate space and the brokerage space and mortgages and all these types of things, you all work differently. You are not a B2C company, you don't have a widget to sell. You work differently. And so a lot of the things that impact you on Instagram are different than how they would impact other businesses, they've been working with the real estate industry for years. As Jeff mentioned, you know, at least 2019, and before that, I'm actually speaking in California Association of Realtors next week in Long Beach, California, and I've been at NAR. I've worked for a number of brokerages and mortgage companies and that sort of thing on a private consulting basis as well. So I am familiar with your industry and how things are different. So I'm excited to dive into some of these topics with you. That's awesome. Thank you. And just to give you a little bit more context, obviously, this is all mortgage loan professionals here, and we or they serve two audiences. One is obviously consumer direct, but secondly is what we do here, Jen, is this is a platform where I equip them with content and classes to go teach real estate agents on how to succeed on various things. It includes Instagram, Facebook, chat, TVT, the NAR, settlement, you name it, right? This group here leads with education. So I just want to give you that context. Not people. So I love it. Yeah. Exactly. All right. I wanted to open up the conversation with I think I told you this before today's haul is I wanted to really focus, but you can drive this wherever you want. I think when it comes down to it, you always ask people like, what's your biggest challenge with social media? I know you've heard it. It's like, what do I post and all that. But I think you tell me, it all comes down to reach an engagement, am I right? Yes. And this is where I am mad at Instagram right now, because I have always said reach is the most important metric. And recently, my account flipped over last week, but about a month ago, Instagram has changed the primary metric to be views. This means that now all posts, real speed post stories, all having metric called a view. A view is how many times that post was seen. That is different than reach. Reach is how many people saw the post. Views is how many times it was seen in total. So if I see your post three times, that's three views, one reach, right? So reach is always going to be technically lower than your views. But Instagram has made this switch. So now when you go into your insights on Instagram, you're actually seeing view counts. And it's very misleading because if you look at, and I live in data, I'm to Jeff's point to have two science degrees. So I love it, a data analysis. When I go into my insights two weeks ago, all my reach data shows me that posts, not reals, are my top performing for reach. And I know that because I watched my data. But now that they've switched to views, reals are my quote, top ranking content because I get more views on reals. Obviously, I have reals that are six seconds intentionally so that if you look at it and you try to read the caption, you've watched that real two or three times. There's ways that we're getting more views on reals. So it looks like reals is my top performing content, but it's not. It's actually posts. So I'm navigating this because it's the one that's happened in the last couple of weeks. But yes, reach should be your primary metric. You can still get that out of all your insights. You can still get that out of your overall account insights as well as individual post insights. Reach is your baseline. If you know that on average, your posts reach 1,000 people, that's your baseline. If a post reaches 2,000 people, that is one we want to know more about. Why? Was it the time of day? Was it the time of the week? Was it the content? Was it the title? Was it the colors? Was there a person or not a person? What made that content perform exceptionally well? Similarly, if you have a post that reaches like 200 people, you're like, okay, we missed the goal on that one. What was wrong? All the same questions, but in reverse. And over time, you can start to find these trends, and you start moving that reach from 1,000 to 1,200 to 1,500 to 2,000, and that's how you actually build your reach and distribution over time. Okay. Lots of the impact there, and of course, when you want to chime in and ask the question, you can either put it in a chat or raise your hand on a view of whatever. All right. So for a period of time, I don't know a couple of years or so at least, I've been conditioned on. I don't know my reach. I need to do reels. Yes. What say you to that today? Yes. Yes. And yes. And I say that with exhaustion, because if you've ever heard me speak anywhere, if you've ever watched any of my videos, I hate reels. I hate them. I don't like consuming them. I don't like filming them. I don't like posting them. But go look at my Instagram. Okay. There's a lot of a lot of reels over there. So this is a, you know, remember back in the day when Facebook launched Facebook groups, and like everyone's like, oh, this is a fun new thing. And then Facebook came out and said, you have to have a Facebook group. If you want reach and everybody made a Facebook group, because it was the only way you were going to get reach and distribution. Well, that's how meta Instagram is treating reels. They're telling us we have to be there. And if you want to take advantage of the platform, you kind of have to be there. So you have to be creating reels. The key is to do them. Period. They don't have to be good. I am the queen of a one-taker. I literally, I'm like, if my camera falls, if I make up words, which I do all the time, I don't care. I just keep recording. I'm a one-taker. This is not something where I'm spending three hours editing a video, doing transitions, making all these fun animations. If you or your clients, your real estate just want to do those things, go for it. Go gangbusters on it. But you don't have to. The key is to start doing it, start doing the reels, pro-tip, reels under 30 seconds, get distribution to new audiences. I see Tiffany nodding her head. She already knows this trick. Reels over 30 seconds serve your existing audience. If it's over 30 seconds, it will very rarely go into floor and rock and rock. That's the cutoff. I thought all reels reached new audiences. I had a reel that went out. It was a minute, minute 19 seconds. It went to 9% new audiences, and I was like, screw you in Instagram. They typically will not distribute longer form anything over 30 seconds into explore, search or recommended posts because most of that content, if people are seeing it for the first time, don't have a bandwidth for 90 seconds. They're going to give you about five to seven seconds tops and scroll past if you make it that long on a new cold audience who's never seen your content. We want super short videos for reach and distribution for growth. We want the longer reels 30 seconds and beyond to serve your existing audience. Those are where you give the value. Those are where you give the knowledge. Those are where you give the value ad content that our clients, our customers, our target audience want, but you can't come out to a cold audience with that longer form content with the way the distribution channel they're set up. So do we look at the 30 seconds or less as kind of like the bait or whatever the teaser is, and then we hope that they then go to our whole file, follow us. Yes. Yes, absolutely. So we want those short videos that are like a one tip thing, right? This is not going to be like how to prepare your home for fire season, right? That's a long video. But you know, what does the new NAR rolling mean for you? And it could be something as super simple as like here's two or three really short bullet points. And that video is nine seconds, 12 seconds long. And then that's it. And it's like go to my link and bio for more or follow me for more information. Like you have some sort of simple call to action. And what happens is they come over to your profile. If they're if they consume it and they like it, they go to your profile, they're going to see all your other content, which probably has more information around that. Or here's the advantage to reels. If you watch one of my reels and you don't follow me. So I get a 12 second reel out to you somehow through distribution, whether it's explore recommended posts, whatever it is. And you watch that whole 12 seconds or even like eight of the 12 seconds. Instagram's tracking that behavior and they go, all right, cool. You liked my video. So the next time I post a reel, Instagram's going to show it to you again, the new one. And if you consume that one, Instagram goes, well, now we know you like Jen's content. So it becomes a pseudo follow. They're not actually following you. You don't have the metric that says they're following you, but they start regularly seeing your content in this kind of for you, these recommended posts. And so they start seeing more of your content and then they will start seeing the longer videos. They will start seeing your other posts and their feed recommendations. So it's, it, it works to build towards that, even though you may not see the actual follower account and corrupt. Okay. And this is why it goes back again to reach is the key metric because reach doesn't, you can reach a whole bunch of people who aren't your existing followers. Right. Okay. Question on the short reels 30 seconds or less, that's that's kind of attraction or helping that content gets, gets some views engagement. So send us a signal to Instagram to push this out to more people and reach more people, right? Yes. Then knowing the behavior on Instagram, like you said, you got like a three seconds or less or whatever on those, on reels in general, I don't know if it's different for these specific less than 30 seconds. How important is it to have a caption on that video frame that they see? It depends on the video. So there's kind of like three types of reels. So option one is going to be a super short reel. You're going to put a few bullet points in the text and you're going to have basically no caption. It's going to be something, something, you know, basic like, you know, go to my link and buy or follow me for more or, you know, it's literally just a short video with a couple of things and it's intended to get people to watch that reel on loop two or three times to be able to consume the content that's in that reel, not reading a caption. That can type of video is you do a super short reel with a very long caption. So these ones, someone had posted it up in here that it's like a looping video, right? So your video will only be in two seconds. I think they're for doing a blank video, right? So the idea of being, you put up a title, you put up a text box, something like a question, right? So, you know, what is not a ruling mean for you? And then you write this really long 2000 character caption because you're going to have only 200 characters, but you flood the caption. The idea behind this being, you are going to watch it in the video, you're going to see the video to get your attention, you're going to open the caption while you read those 2000 characters. That video is now played eight times, 12 times in your feed. So it looks like you really like that content, but you're disseminating the information almost as you wouldn't a feed post with a warm caption, you just have a looping video behind it. If you do these, do a dark background for your videos. The last thing you want for the sake of argument, I'm going to throw Dina or Dina under the bus because she's got a very bright background behind her. If you put text on that, it's white text on an Instagram video, you can't see that. So you want something that's more like just video background where it's dark and the white text stands out so people can read it, otherwise they're not reading it. The third video is where you're going to do everything in the video. So you're going to have a very long video where you have all the information, everything they need is in the verbal content that I have throughout you, in which case you have a short caption. Your caption is basically the title. It is basically like what the topic of the video is and maybe a call to action. So it depends on how you want to craft your video in terms of how long your caption will be. Okay. I'm going to have to ask it just to make sure I understand this is self-serving so if you don't want to get in on something please jump in. But I was under the impression that, and maybe we need to clarify, back to the actual headline for the video, if you will, being actually text over the video. Yes. That's how important is that for real. That should always be there. That is critical. And Adam Azari just told us it wasn't and then they released a new test feature that proves it is. So screw him. Here's the thing. Your video, when it shows up in explore, a new feed, you know, recommendation, they go to your profile, whatever it is, if that video starts playing, they don't know who you are. They don't know what you're talking about. They don't know your face. They don't care if it's relevant. They're not going to watch it. But throwing up that text box across the first anywhere from like point one to one second of the video. It just has to be on there long enough that when they're scrolling and you start talking or the music starts playing and the video starts doing whatever it does, that title is a text box on the screen that tells them what that video is. It will drastically increase your retention and the views in front of your target audience. It will also send some people away that aren't going to watch it. That's okay. We don't need their view. They're not your target audience. So having that title as a text box is critical. I've always looked at that as the headline for the video. Yes. Yeah. It's just like a book title. Right? Yep. And it can drop off, like I said, within the first second. It's just there so that when someone's scrolling and the video starts, they know what the video is about. Okay. This might be relevant to the question I was going to ask you. I see Caitlin's question, and let me set this up and answer her question as well, is in regards to, like you mentioned, the white background, the white text, et cetera, to me using platforms, editing platforms like CapCut or other things to package that video to Caitlin's point. She feels the pressure to make Instagram and Twitter, real covers. What do you say about that? So yes, and yes, when it comes to your video, if you want to use something like CapCut or another video editing tool, that's perfectly fine. But the key is that you still edit within Instagram. So if you make this video in its entirety, in CapCut, you upload it to Instagram and say, publish. Instagram goes, no, no, we know you put that video elsewhere. We know it's on TikTok. We know it's on YouTube shorts. We know it's on LinkedIn. We know it's everywhere else. This is not original content to Instagram. It will reduce your reach on average. If you do all you're editing in CapCut, or shit into Instagram, swiping from a filter often, that's an edit, put a music behind it that you didn't do in CapCut. That's an edit. But the text box on that you just mentioned, Jeff, do that in app. That's an edit. The more these little, tiny, almost minuscule edits are enough to tell Instagram, this is original content. That video, as it is formatted in Instagram, does not exist elsewhere. It will increase your reach and distribution. Not exponentially, but these days I will take on reach and distribution I can get. So that matters. We want to make sure that you're not doing 100% design outside and then just putting it into Instagram. Now to go ahead. Yeah, real quick. Just set otherwise. What Instagram wants to see is you're using some of their built-in features. That's like a, that's like a blip, you know, a sign of life that you're doing some editing within the app. And so therefore they assume it's native. Yes. And unique. They're still, they're still this, you know, invisible, non-invisible war with TikTok. So anything they can do to be like, you didn't put this on TikTok, we want original content on Instagram. So any sort of edit will help prevent. All right. What's your thought then about using third party platforms? You might have answered it, but I want to be really clear. Third party platforms for posting dot, dot, dot, because I remember I'm sure you do as well back in the day, social media, marketing world and all these peeps we're like doing these studies, right, of comparing posting within flat versus what do you say about that? In general, we don't see that being an issue on Instagram. I won't talk to the data on Facebook, although everyone tells us it doesn't matter on Facebook anymore, but I still question that reality. There is no data to support it on Instagram specifically. My concern with things like reals, yes, you can't upload it putting a third party tool on publish, but it puts you in that it's been edited outside. There's no editing within app if you do a scheduling tool. So typically what I do, the only content I produce natively on the platform will all do stories, but the only content I produce natively on the platform is reals. So I will take whatever video I have uploaded to Instagram when I have it done. I just save it as a draft. I use a scheduling tool. I use a goal pulse and I have a note on that day. So today I have to get a real out and I have a note that tells me what real to go to. And so I literally just go to my drafts find that real and I just get published. It's already ready to go. I've already done my edits. I've already put my cover on it. I've already put my caption on it. My hashtag is everything is there. I just have to publish on the day that I want that real to go out. So I do keep all my reals native to the platform. I apologize if I am a little slow on the uptake here. You're editing the video in Instagram, but you're publishing it from a goal pulse. No, videos I publish on Instagram, I do everything on Instagram. I just make a note on my scheduling tool to remind me to go publish it on Instagram. You're using a goal pulse to send to to remind you. Yes. Oh, interesting versus publishing. Yes, I use Instagram to publish or goal pulse to publish everything else. So all my feed, my carousel, all of that goes through goal pulse and it's an auto published. But I just use it as a reminder and then I physically go into Instagram to publish. Because you want every maximization opportunity possible. So that's why you're going to do the videos in Instagram. Yes. And John, what have you noticed as far as scheduling reals or Instagram posts through meta-business suite? It is clunky AF and I avoid it at all costs. Yes. I just didn't know if you saw me that or not. I literally avoid meta-platforms at all costs. For that reason, it is one of these things where they try, I don't know how hard they try, they try to give us these tools for free access and keeping everything within the platform. But it is so unreliable, it is clunky, it is difficult to manage. You schedule something and then literally three hours later you're like, where's my post? It doesn't even exist in meta anymore. It's gone. You didn't schedule, your video is gone and you're like, where did it go? And then it pops back up tomorrow and you're like, cool, well, I don't need it now. I honestly avoid the meta-schedule and tools at all costs. Thank you. That's so funny. There are own native tools and just, you know, gosh, you can't get it right. You're possible. I do want to answer because you did ask about Caitlin's question and I know there's more questions popping in the chat. I love it. I'll stay here for three hours, you guys. I really can. I'll stay here all day. On this. I love all your questions. So Caitlin asked about the Reels covers and my opinion on this is you do need a Reels cover. It doesn't have to be fancy. It does not have to be edited in Canva and in Be All Glamrs and perfectly edited to match your grid aesthetic. But you do need a real cover and with that cover it's going to be essentially whatever is in the video. It can be a screenshot from the video and it needs the text, the title of the video. Ideally, if you can add your brand logo, your brand color, something else that helps. But it must be the title of the video because again, what happens is somebody who doesn't know you comes to your profile, whether they go to your grid or they go to the Reels tab, they're going to see all of these videos. They don't know who you are and they're like, which video should I watch? And they watch one and it's totally irrelevant to what they're looking for. By Felicia, they're gone. If they pick the right one, oh, that was good, oh, that was good information. Okay, what's the next one I want to see? They scroll and find a video five videos down as the one they want to watch because they're going off the topic. Additionally, hypothetically, you're already following me. You saw a video from me last week and you were like, oh, Jen shared that video about hashtags. Which video was it? If you go to my profile and it's just all my head everywhere, you don't know which video was talking about the hashtags, but if the caption or the title is on there, on the Reels cover when you're scrolling through, you can be like, oh, great, there's the hashtag video she was talking about. You found it quickly easily and making it as easy as possible on you as the end user. So a lot of times I will literally like, I film right here with my pink background. So I will literally sit here and I take a photo and it is literally just a photo in the exact time I'm going to film the video. If it's a photo, I put the title on it, save it. Then I film my video because again, I do a one-taker, maybe two, upload the video and then I upload my custom cover. So I'm not taking the cover as an actual frame from the video because I don't need that face when it has the exact title I want, right? Like, I want my original looks like I'm spastic over here. So I want to make sure that I have a great angle, have the text where I want it and then that becomes my cover, but it looks identical to what they're going to get in the video. So it stays cohesive. You don't have to do that. That's my choice of aesthetic. But if you have something you have in Canva, I do all my t-tactics and tenacity. It's a live show. I do every Sunday morning, whenever I get my t-ready, I do not have a set time. That is a set cover. It is the same cover every time. I just change the title of what that video topic is. So that is just the same in my grid over and over and over. It's the same photo. It's the same thing because that one, I don't want to change the cover. I want people to know that everyone they see that is that specific video series. So you can choose how you want to mix those in. Real quick. You guys can keep talking. I just wanted to show your reals page here. So this will show what you're talking about with all the titles. Yeah. So you can see I got the t-tactics and tenacity, the titles at the top. So when it crops to the square, you don't see the title. You just see the square of the t-tactics and tenacity, which basically looks like a podcast cover. And then all my other ones, most of those are a photo, not a screenshot from the video. But some of them are screenshots from the videos and you can tell because like the one in the yellow dress, that is a very funny, awkward face and I would not want to make that one in the photo. That is a screenshot from the video because I'm like, yeah, you got 6,500 views, so there you go. That one did really well. I've been doing really well with that video, so that was good. All right. We'll come back to your Instagram at a moment. If it makes sense, I mean, while I'm looking at this, by the way, I do think it's relevant to talk about bios if you want to get on that for a second. And the reason why, which is funny, I did a live stream yesterday with somebody on the livestream, a mortgage person, and I went to his bio. And he was getting advice from someone else, a self-proclaimed coach per se, with social and Instagram, to be more of the friend, to be more of the, hey, this isn't about business or whatever. And I was just looking at a consumer standpoint and going, like, I don't even know you're in mortgage, man, how the hell, why would I even, like, if I come to your page and I see nothing in the bio that I can connect, so what do you say about bios? Yes. So, three things in your bio, who you are, what you do, and what's in it for them. Those are the three key things that should be in every bio. And the what's in it for them can be any variety of things. It could be, I'm going to help you buy your next home. That could be the what's in it for them, right? It doesn't have to be, like, click the link below to read blog posts or whatever it is. But there has to be something that tells them, as the consumer, why they should care about you, why they should follow your account. So, who you are is essentially, some description of you, you know, are you, you know, the top ranks realtor in that region? Are you, do you specialize with first-time home buyers or do you specialize with, you know, people who are empty nesting and downsizing? Like, if you have a specialty that you typically work with or a certain region that you work with, that could be the who you are or it could be the what you do. You get to decide what that looks like, the who you are can also be things related to, like, I have in mind that I'm a single mom, you know, that's something that people connect with. Once they realize I'm an Instagram expert, I'm a speaker, I'm an author, oh, and she's a single mom, that becomes the personalized connection. So we do want some sort of personal component. I always use example, this was years and years ago, but there was a realtor, she was out on the East Coast and she, the one thing she changed in her bio was that she put that she was a marathon runner and that single statement brought her in multiple new clients because people who are marathon runners are a certain parade of people. I am not a marathon runner. Let me just tell you. So that's not going to convince me to work with you, but whether it's a mortgage broker or whether it is somebody who is a real estate agent or a coach in the industry, something, these are very personal things, like just fun fact, I literally go through interviewing broker's brokers right now, turn over my entire life finances to a stranger, to work with a realtor who is going to have to go through my entire life experiences with me. These are very personal decisions. So we do want a personal component in that bio that is relatable. And a lot of it does come down to your vibe, your style, who you relate to and that is why the bio is 30 second elevator pitch, it's your chance to connect with that new person. When somebody is following you, they'll never read your bio again. They don't care. They're already following you. They already know who you are. So your bio is for that first time visitor, who you are, what you do, what's in it for them, and how can you make that a connection that they actually care about from a professional standpoint with a little bit of personalization to it. Love it. Real quick, don't compel to give a shout out to two people, Liz Reese, what's up, Liz Instagram to your main jam, if I'm correct, I'm not, but here's an example of a bio here, right? It's clear who she is, what she does. She's doing a great job. So there's an example of helping you build a clear mortgage plan. So that's the what's in it for you, Liz, I'm giving you high fives. That's great. She's literally telling me what's in it for me. She's going to build my clear mortgage plan. I'm like done. So I need that. That's an immediate connection point. And then she has, you know, the additional things that she does, you can call her schedule free call. Liz, I would put a little bit more personalization in here, just a little bit more. I mean, I love your glasses. I love the vibe just from looking at the screenshots. You seem like a very outgoing, lively person. I'd love to see a little bit more of a personality explained in your bio, but this is already off to a really good start. Yep. And then real quick, here's another one. I know Katie. She's got her, I think, a really well structured bio. Yes. So again, number one, female loan originator. Great. Number one. Great. Female. Great. Do I want to work with a female? Because I'm not telling you. I'm totally different approach than I'm going to. And as a woman, I mean, I'm moving with my boyfriend. So we have two perspectives on life. But this is something that, you know, that is a big stepping point for some people. They're going to want to work only with a woman. So they want to know that top 100 women, loan officers in the US, again, qualifying who she is, what she does. I say buyers time and money. What's in it for me as the consumer, she just told me she's going to save me time and money. And then she's got her personality, right? The late bum, the 90s rap experts in search of the perfect espresso martini girl, I want to be your bestie. So like, already, like, this is a great buy. Literally for all of you, I was going to call a screenshot this. Katie, I want to use this for future examples and upcoming presentations. This is great. You are literally hitting on all three of those things. It's quirky. It's educational. It's valuable. It's fun. It's you. I love it. Does the blue check mark make any difference? In the grand scheme, no. As an average consumer, they don't really care if it's there or not. It's more of your paying for meta verified, which should give you a little additional security and a little additional support. But I know two people right now who pay for meta verified and had their accounts taken down and it's been three months and still haven't got their accounts back. So I don't know what paying $11 a month is really doing for anybody. But it is a little bit of a validation. And what does happen, a lot of us will get mocked, not mocked, and losing words duplicated online. Someone will take a clone your account. They want to look like you and they want to tack all your followers with crypto or some sort of investment. So having the check mark can be a little bit of a validation that it is the right account that this is really you. But how, I mean, most consumers aren't looking for that check mark to say, oh, I know this is the real account. So it's not a significant value in terms of like the end users. Let me jump back into the question feed here. What about times the post and following those, do you look at third party like the metric red metropole? Do you look at your own analytics group best time to post? So in general, I tell people time of day does not matter. The algorithm does not care if you post at 7 a.m. and I log in at 3 p.m. and I'll always see your content. I like your content. I love your content. I'm going to see it at 3 p.m. at the top of my feed. If you post at 7 a.m. and I log in at 7 10 and I never interrupt your content, I'm not going to see it. Time of day does not matter as much as day of the week. So if you're only posting two days a week, when is your audience on lot? If your audience is coming on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, but you're posting Monday, Tuesday, you're not hitting your audience when they are there. So we want to make sure that we're thinking more about the day of the week. If your audience is typically active during the weekdays, post during the weekdays. If your audience is active on the weekends, you want to be posting on the weekends. Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday is your posting schedule or Thursday, Saturday, Sunday or something like that. The day of the week matters much more than the time of day. So you would suggest looking at your Instagram insights to see when your audience is online? Yeah, definitely. I mean, Instagram insights are a good starting point. They're fairly accurate, but literally, I can guarantee that 80% of you on this call are going to go look at them. It's going to say it's the same on every single day. So if that's the case, you just kind of have to wing it and test it. Or if you know your target audience. If you know your target audience is working moms, they're not checking their phone after school hours. Right? So they're probably not doing this as much during the day time. They're going to be an evening and a weekend type consumer because they're working in the day. They got the kids home after school. They got to get the kids to bed, do all the things. And they're maybe checking it at night time, but they're scrolling aimlessly. Right? So they're going to be more prone to taking your content on the weekends. If you are targeting somebody like business people who work in a major city like Chicago or New York, who rely on public transportation Monday through Friday, are your key target areas because they're sitting there on public transportation, scrolling through their phones before and after work. And they're there every Monday through Friday. So that's your target window. So you start to figure out what their behaviors are based on who your target audience is. And to Travis's point are audience's realtor is they're on online all times a day, seven days a week. Exactly. Okay. So what is your in terms of deciding the type of content, you know, I got reals, I got carousels, I just got feed posts, you know, if we're looking to grow stories, yeah, sorry, I forgot about stories. What should we prioritize if we're looking to expand our reach? So what I typically tell people, and this is to recalibrate your baseline. And so if you're posting every single day, it's probably too much. You should not be posting seven days a week on average. Okay, when I saw the go wood, everyone tells you to post every single day. Honestly, no, I'm currently about a five day a week. I sometimes push until like a six, but I'm at about five days a week that I post. And that is for them in a current test phase to test doing more reels. Normally I'm about four times a week for my personal content. I tell most quote small businesses three to five times a week is going to be your sweet spot. You do not need to be creating content seven days a week. And if you are, you're probably hurting yourself because on Instagram, quality matters more than quantity. Now, reels, it's a little bit more balanced and quantity matters more. But for feed posts, carousels, those sorts of things, it's really about the quality because if I put up content to check the box, I posted a piece of content and it's not good. It doesn't resonate with the audience. It's not a good visual. It's not a good value ad. It's not entertaining. It's not whatever it is. If you scroll past my content and don't interact with it in any way, shape or form, you don't stop. You don't watch. You don't swipe. You don't open the caption. Whatever it is. That could have ranking algorithmically. So the next time my content shows up in your feed, Instagram waits to see how you react to it. You scroll past it because it's mediocre content. Instagram goes, okay, you're really not liking Jen urban these days. And I start ranking lower and lower and lower in your feed. However, if every single time I post, you swipe that carousel, you read that caption, you go, you scroll back and read it again because you wanted to take it in. Instagram starts putting me at the top of your feed. They want, they know that you want my content, so they want to put it in front of you. So I would rather you post once a week and have it be epic, amazing content than post seven days a week and have it be mediocre content. It will hurt you more to do worse content. So quantity is not as important as quality. So that being said, would I typically recommend if you want to recalibrate and figure out what's working for you? Go to three times a week, maybe four, but three times a week do one real, one feed, one carousel. You're going to do this for six to eight weeks. So you're doing one real week, one feed post, it means a single photo with a caption and one carousel where they have to, they can swipe through two to twenty slides in the carousel and a caption. Do this for six to eight weeks and you will know what your audience actually wants. You will know what is getting distribution. It takes six to eight weeks for the algorithm and your audience to adjust to your change in content. So if right now you're doing four reals a week and that's all you're doing, you're alienating your feed audience. You don't know if they're even seeing your content. And like fun fact, I would rather be in the feed than in reals, right? So if you're only creating reals, I'm not seeing your content versus somebody who only looks at reals if you're only creating fields or feeds, they're not seeing your feed post because they're always in reals. So this allows you to start figure out what your audience wants, what's driving the views, what's driving the traffic, what's driving those conversions to your website. You may find reals are really, really good for exposure, top of funnel, getting a ton of engagement likes and comments. But when you want someone to actually go check out those MLS listings, when you have someone who wants to actually fill out that intake form, when you have someone who wants to learn more about your business, that may be coming from carousel. So this routine of three posts a week for six to eight weeks will help you calibrate and figure out what works for you, regardless of what me or any other expert in the world tells you you should be doing. Carousel Tony is, if you go into Instagram, there's a bunch of dots under the photo and you can swipe horizontally through a carousel. So you can have, if you go to that one in the scroll down, I haven't done a carousel. Yeah, that one actually is one. So there's multiple slides in the carousel. And so there can be photos and or videos. But it's anywhere from two to 20, what we call slides. So the carousel, you're swiping horizontally through the content. Thank you, that was so great. This has been awesome. This is, I mean, I've taken more notes than I've done a while. Great. Love it. So while I'm here, let's jump into the debate over hashtags, dead, relevant, a lot, what do you, because you have a lot of them. So, and here's the thing, if you really, because I could talk hashtags for the next 48 minutes, if you really want to, I have, if you go to my, either my Instagram account and go to link and buy or go to my website, gentstrends.com, go to the books tab. It's that ebook right there at the top of my feed. It's called hashtags unlocked. So if you scroll down a little bit, you'll see, I have a free ebook on 12 reals ideas. That one right there is a $9 ebook. It's called hashtags unlocked. It's a 20 plus page PDF that walks you through everything you need to know about hashtags, why they matter, dispelling all the myths, how to find the hashtags that actually matter for you, gives you a worksheet in there. So you can actually create your list of hashtags. It even gives you a hypothetical that says, you know, if Instagram was to stop letting us use 30 hashtags because they did that for a little while, it was a glitch that they weren't supposed to roll out, but we all saw it. If that happens, here's how to prepare for that. Here's what to do now if that changes. So that being said, yes, hashtags matter. They are one of the key indicators for keyword search. So if somebody goes to Instagram, now they can do keyword search. You couldn't do this four years ago, this rolled out in 2020. Now I could say, you know, Laguna Beach real estate, and I can type that in as a keyword. And Instagram is going to populate a series of results of content that match that keyword. What Instagram is looking at for those keyword searches is specifically your profile description does your profile description talk about real estate and Laguna Beach. You're just going to look at that individual post caption, does that caption talk about real estate in Laguna Beach? And it's going to look at your hashtags. Do your hashtags talk about real estate and Laguna Beach? The hashtags are where you can keyword stuff. We don't want to keyword stuff like, you know, like it's 2002. Okay, we're not doing that in our captions, but your keywords allow you to put that description in there. So this is not like you don't have to do back in the day where you had to do like hashtag, you know, restaurant hashtag, restaurants, you know, like you back in the day, you back to hashtag, you don't need to go that extreme. But we do want to make sure you're putting things in there for the local geographical areas that you serve that, you know, people looking for mortgages. What are the keywords associated with that people looking for homes or the keywords associated with that? We want those in there. And why this matters? And literally just pulled this example for a presentation last month. I put in a camera, I think it was like real estate, no, it was, it was homes, Newport Beach. The number one post that came up in that search result was a carousel from two years ago. Years ago, that was the number one post because it was the best ranked post between hashtags and then caption and their description of their bio and it was a construction company. It wasn't even a real estate person. It was a construction company and they were the number one top result in a whole list of thousands of search that post was over two years old. So that is why the hashtags are so important. They will rank your content forever. And so we don't want to stop using them, but key to success right now, those hashtags have to stay in the caption. We cannot put them in a comment for keyword search. In a comment, they still work for hashtag search, but the hashtag algorithm will only scrape the data in the caption for ranking for keyword search. So we want to make sure that you are leaving those hashtags in the caption. I'm sorry if I missed it, but did you say there was like a range of number of hashtags to use? You can still use up to 30. I recommend a minimum of 20. So the more, the better. So then that gets to, like, how do I know, you know, hashtag research, right? I think you might have mentioned in the search in your book, but we want to make sure we use your relevant hat. We don't want to be just stuffing for the sake of hitting 20. And you don't want to use hashtag real estate, like that doesn't help because it's too big. It's literally a bajillion posts and it's a global hashtag. It's not going to help you. We want real estate and then the state or the city or the neighborhood or the specific region you serve. We want those related real estate hashtags. We want things again, homes, city, state, community, whatever it is. We don't want to use the big broad, you know, millions and millions and millions of posts associated with the hashtags. We want to keep it narrower because we're especially in the real estate, the mortgage industry. For the most part, you're a geographically centered business, right? I mean, some people will work in various regions, but for the most part, I'm not going to hire a mortgage broker in New York if I live in California, right? Like there's different laws, there's different regulations and we want to focus on those regional components that we are showing up in the searches where our audience is searching. Also think about things that are related to what your audience is looking for in the middle of the night when they have insomnia. They're not looking for homes, they're looking for design ideas, they want to remodel their kitchen. They want to, you know, they want to remodel their, their bathroom, they're looking for home decor ideas, they're looking for, you know, tips on how to decorate for Halloween. So it's not limiting your hashtags just the real estate and mortgage industry. We want to use things and create content and use those related hashtags as it relates to those, like, additional kind of, you know, ancillary things that your target audience is looking for. Okay, so to that point, Glenn asks, should we use location like at Las Vegas, right, in my post? Yes, if possible, when you are writing out your caption, listing it, tagging the location can help as well. And it's up to you how often you want to tag the physical location or, but you want as much as possible, be using the words Las Vegas San Diego, like, even San Diego, I live in a very small little tiny community, San Diego is a big space, right, even Las Vegas. It's a big space. There's little sub communities you'd want to say, you know, sub community in Las Vegas kind of thing. Like, so you'd want to list those things out within there. Um, yes, Caitlin, I'm here, let's get together. So Michael just said, he said, is it being redundant, uh, if we do long captions, do we need the hashtags? If you have a long hat or a long caption, hashtags are less necessary. You still want them. You could use five to 10. If you have a good long descriptive caption, you can use less hashtags. But if you're doing that one sentence, kind of, this is the title of the reel, you want to stuff as many hashtags in there as possible. If you have a little kind of quirky, fun, little statement, dump your hashtags because hypothetically, if I take a photo of me at the beach, and I'm talking about, you know, the fact that this is like work from anywhere. Look at me, San Diego sun, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's great. The video and the content is all about being at the beach. Instagram doesn't know that that's related to work, that it's related to a certain industry that it's related to coaching or, you know, whatever it is. So I want to use those hashtags so it's still ranking in content for those specific keywords because the video and the visuals show nothing in context to what the hashtags would actually relate to. Hey, Jen. I should have a player. Yeah. I was told by someone who's supposed to be a social media expert internally at our company that, not for hashtags, she actually said we'll use a couple hashtags, which maybe is a good precedent for my question here in the person I'm talking about. But more so that, including longer captions with real estate keywords or keywords in general, will help with not just Instagram optimization, but also like SEO search, is that true? And so, yes, fun fact, that video that's doing really well on my Instagram account. It's exactly that topic. There's actually a setting on Instagram. You can go into your settings and you can go into your, I think it's under, maybe under security of privacy, I get remember, because it's done that video a while ago. And there's a setting to toggle on, be found in internet searches. So you want to toggle that setting on. If that setting is turned on, it increases the chances that you'll show up in regular SEO. And yes, that's where the big good descriptive captions are helpful because Google is now trolling Instagram for search results. Just did not happen two years ago. So now we have the additional opportunity at found in search where, yes, if someone's saying, you know, good mortgage brokers in, you know, Anaheim, California. Now Google is going to start being like, well, here's an Instagram post that talks about this exact topic about how to find a mortgage broker in Anaheim, California. So those are things that will help with that long term SEO. We do want to use good descriptive captions that use the relevant keywords, but again, this is not keyword stuffing like, you know, 2002 where we're just literally, like, this is a new trend. Please don't do this. The new trend is instead of putting hashtags at the bottom of your caption, you literally just put a stack of keywords. Don't do this. Please don't. Instagram gets smart to these spammy tactics very quickly. And they will find a way to block that. It will literally be like, if we see a block of keywords, we're not going to scan it. So don't rely on that. It quote unquote works right now, but I'd rather you use the hashtags rather than a block of keywords because the block of keywords looks weird. Hashtags people expect on Instagram. We all know they're going to be there. We expect to see them. So it's not going to like, you know, deter them be like, hey, why is there a bunch of keywords in here? This has been amazing. I've heard anybody who wants to go deeper with Jen. She's obviously ChattyBT, number one person to work with Instagram, and she's a wealth of knowledge. But just to remind you, there are other ways to engage, and I'll allow you to comment on this as well. Jen, but back to her Instagram profile, her link tree link. Right? Of course, there's the hashtag book. There's the ebook of the 12 reals ideas. But she's also available for virtual webinar and in-person conferences. Maybe you guys want to do something in your area. Do something virtually for realtors. She'll do an Instagram audit. She's available for 101 consultations. She's written a bunch of books. So I would definitely encourage you if you, this is just the tip of like the iceberg. If you want to go deeper with her, she's got tons of resources. And we put a link in the chat for that. So Jen, thank you so much. Everybody, happy Friday. Go apply at least one of the things you learned here today and follow, you know, her guidelines that she shared. So if you guys are on the next one, jump to the Facebook group leader and win the week in there.