PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:

Ian R

Welcome back to Inspector Toolbelt everybody. We have on with us today again, Daniel King from Inspector Media. How are you, Daniel?

 

Daniel King

Good, how you doing, Ian?

 

Ian R

Hey, not bad, not bad. So I really appreciate having you on because Inspector Media is your company with Nick, Nick Gromicko. So you guys have a big name in the industry when it comes to social media. So today, we’re going to be talking about 2024 social media trends. Because we don’t want to be the guys out there working really hard on MySpace, while everybody is off..

 

Daniel King

Or the Googles.

 

Ian R

Or the Googles. And everybody’s off doing the newest and latest, greatest thing. So we’re going to talk about the latest social media trends, and how we as home inspectors can utilize them, because that’s what you guys do day in and day out. You know me, I’m an SEO and social media wonk. And that’s what I do. So I think we’re gonna have a great discussion. But tell us a little bit just to remind the audience about you and Inspector Media there, Daniel.

 

Daniel King

Yeah. So, again, I’m Daniel. For I guess, just the start of it. So I’ve been in this, you know, the home buying space since about 2007. And I worked for a company called Housevalues.com. I’m not really sure, they said that they were the, the original to come up with that first commercial where it says, you know, do you want to know how much your home is worth? Go to housevalues.com, you know, and then they, you know, it was a really good system to generate leads, and then with all the follow up platforms, and just the whole from A to Z, getting the business and then getting the repeat business, looking the part, staying in front of your book of business. So housevalues.com in Kirkland, Washington sold out to Just Listed which then sold out to Trulia, which is Zillow today. So I was part of some of those transitions. And then yeah, went and moved on. But yeah, in 2007, and I always say this because it’s so, it’s crazy how history repeats itself. 2007 I remember constantly, I mean the battle was talking to agents, real estate agents, about shifting their focus and their marketing budget over to the internet. And in 2007, some were doing it, not all were, and even NAR had statistics talking about, you know, 13% if your, your marketing budget, you know, your overall resources that you’re putting into gaining exposure and building your business is in paper advertisement, you’re targeting that 13%. And that has always stuck with me. And again, obviously, those statistics are different now. But that’s always stuck with me, because it kind of gave me a visual, I’m a visual guy, I tried to keep things really, really simple. That’s how I learned, you know, if it gets too far out of left field, you got to bring it back in. But every single dollar that you put into marketing, or the four pillars of marketing, or your branding, or whatever it may be, you’re targeting someone whether you know it or not, you know, depending on the platform and whatnot. So in 2007, those conversations are relatively tough. It was always just about educating agents about how to move and transition because that 13% was typically low income and senior citizens. Now fast forwarding, it’s you know, it’s funny, I met Eric, in Flagstaff, Arizona, Erik Gromicko, that’s Nick’s son. You know, we became really, really good friends. 2015, 16, 17 said he wanted to start a marketing company. And I didn’t know who the Gromickos…I had no idea. You know, he told me who his dad was. And I was like, okay, you know, I didn’t even know what a home inspector was really. So, but anyways, we went at it and, you know, Eric told me there was a huge need for, you know, home inspectors. And I didn’t really realize that, how big that need was. And, you know, so we started putting this thing together. And, you know, now here we are, Eric, obviously passed away in 2022, in March 2022, in March, yep. And that just kind of came out of nowhere. And, you know, there’s nine, nine people on staff, we didn’t really know what was, what was going to come of it. And then, you know, Nick, has just, he’s been, man, he’s been really good. He’s really, really good to us. You know, said, well, let’s see what you can do. And so we ran it. And Mikayla was on here last time with me. And, and then yeah, the turn of this, this last year, I called Nick and I said, I think it’d be a great idea to make me a partner. And he said, absolutely. And so he brought me on and 50%. Said just keep doing what you’re doing. So now you know, the focus is everything has been changing. The focus is still the same. It is the same conversation that we’re having. But seems that most home inspectors know they need social media. And then others don’t really, they’re not really sure because they’re not using it, but they think there could be an opportunity there. So the education is what we really focus on. And, and, and yeah, I think I think there’s a huge need. And, you know, I’ll just say it right now, like, I force the staff here to listen to your podcast..

 

Ian R

Hey!

 

Daniel King

Because you get so much..

 

Ian R

You sit down, and you listen to this podcast right now. I don’t care how much it stinks.

 

Daniel King

It’s training. It’s training. No, it’s great. It’s great, man, we talk again, so Zach Newman’s my COO, we handle the BizVelop forums through InterNACHI. So we, we probably, I don’t even know, we probably talked to, I’d say at least a few thousand home inspectors a year and hearing what works, what doesn’t work, what the struggles are, you know, a lot of them are new, that are doing those BizVelop forums. And there’s a lot of multi inspector firms that are trying to figure out, you know, how to scale or, you know, get more efficient. So Nick trusts us with that. And yeah, so we hear a lot, we hear a lot. And we know that there’s, and it’s funny that the topic is trends, you know, and I was thinking to myself trends, okay, trends, trends. And I think the trend in the home inspection industry is that most inspectors aren’t doing it. That seems to be the trend, is most inspectors are not doing social media, but I see some that are, that are looking for that. And, you know, again, in 2016, this is when Facebook ads were just hitting, you know, on all cylinders. And, you know, obviously, things have started to change. But I see more and more, I see younger inspectors, to be honest, younger inspectors get certified, get on board and still reach out for help looking for, hey, how do I do this? How do I get followers, you know, what kind of content and I think, honestly, just to, not to sum up the whole topic, but the trend that I see that’s working, and again, I have some analytics I can show you, is just being authentic, you know, being authentic and persuasive and talking about what, what your customer needs to hear, you know, what, what are they, what are they lacking? What do they need to know? And then connecting that. So, and the great thing is about social media, you don’t need anyone, you don’t need anyone to do it, it’s free, you just got to figure out how to do it. And if you can’t, you don’t have the time, then you gotta gotta find someone that does, because it’s, it’s really nuts. So there’s a lot of stuff that’s being left on the table, just simply because they’re, it’s just one of those. It’s like pulling teeth sometimes, right. And I understand that, I say this all the time, I’m not a fan of social media, I’m really not, you know, I don’t, I don’t care what people are dressing their dogs up, you know, or eating for lunch, or whatever it might be. But in business, it is, it is the best tool, there’s never been a tool like it.

 

Ian R

Yeah. And so we want to kind of get into it. Because even though it is a tool, and it’s free, and I would agree with you to an extent, I would say most home inspectors aren’t using social media or aren’t using it enough because even our clients, it’s integrated into SEO so much like, it’s what Google looks at. And we can get into that a little bit later. So how you appear online is directly related to what you post and how much you post and how relevant your posts are. But without getting overly technical, if we want to be a contractor, we want to know what the best drill is and the best tablesaw, we don’t want to go out and start buying tools that we don’t need. So I made the joke about using MySpace, I make that joke because I actually have clients that have come to me, oh, I have a MySpace account. And like, I have not seen a MySpace account since like, 2002, man, that’s like 20 years old. I don’t, is that still used? But it is, it is kind of funny. But you know, I’m not a huge fan of social media, too. I’m on it all the time. Because it is one of the most effective ways to market. So in your opinion, let’s give maybe the audience a couple of quick hits on this. What are the trending social media platforms or modes for 2024? In your opinion, maybe, maybe if you can give us one or two of them?

 

Daniel King

Yeah, so I follow some bigger names that aren’t afraid to dance around the topic. And you know, so Facebook fan, the Facebook fan page is coming back and that’s what we’re seeing. And then I think you and I talked about it, shorts, you know, YouTube. Yep. TikTok is obviously important. We, we as a company, we don’t do much with TikTok just because it’s something that you really have, the inspector really has to be more engaged, you know, but yeah, and then going, like diving a little bit deeper, I’m pretty sure I think it was you that I heard one time talking about hashtags and how important they are and to keep it simple. That’s, that’s huge. You know, just posting a video, I mean, and I think keeping it simple is really important because if you have a Facebook, we talked, we talked about this a lot if you have a Facebook page, let’s just say you have 100 people following your Facebook page and you’re posting regularly, you spent a bunch of time you know, maybe you’re even doing some graphics, maybe you’re doing some video editing. And it is a great looking piece of art, let’s just say, if nobody, if all your, you put that out and you have that attachment to it, it’s not necessary. I mean, people aren’t going to look at it and say, oh, my gosh, there’s the value I’m looking for if that’s not what, if they’re not looking for a great piece of art, you know, you have to be persuasive and know, okay, who am I targeting? And every, every single piece of context that you put out, has to have a specific purpose and a destination. But if you’re only posting it on your own page, then you’re just staying in front of the same people. So knowing how to get in front of your area, right, your community is huge. And one of the ways to get, and I don’t see very many inspectors doing this, although there’s, there’s a ton of inspectors that are doing big things man on social media I actually learned from and they’re the home inspector, you know, but is reaction videos, and I haven’t seen, I looked at, I was looking for, you know, when before doing this, I was looking through yours, and I was thinking that maybe I would see a reaction video. I don’t know, I didn’t maybe go down far enough, but…

 

Ian R

YouTube shorts. No, no, you know, it’s funny that you mentioned that, reaction videos are big. So if you don’t know what a reaction video is, what Daniel’s talking about is basically there’s a video playing in your background, or in a split screen. And you’re, it shows a video of you watching the video for the first time. And sometimes you’re reacting and sometimes you’re going oh my gosh, or no he didn’t just nail that, you know, toenail that improperly, or all. That’s the wrong insulation. And those are trending right now. They’re fun to do, though.

 

Daniel King

Oh, they’re huge.

 

Ian R

Oh, but they’re kind of fun to do. I haven’t done them. But I just picture myself watching videos, because I do that anyways, I’m sitting there watching videos going, this guy’s an idiot. What is he doing? I watched a guy remove all his ventilation in his attic to insulate it better. And he was doing it as a DIY thing. I’m like, there’s no insulation in the attic. I’m like, man, I should have done that as a reaction video. So if we’re doing videos, now, that’s a great thing to add to our repertoire. And Daniel talked about being authentic. There’s, there’s a personal touch that’s going to social media now that people not only want but expect. So for instance, we used to post an article maybe, and that still works well. But now you post a video talking about that same subject, that’s going to do a lot better than a written article. Driving head videos, we call them talking head videos. They do okay. Those, that’s where you sit there and you talk about a subject but the attention span on them is less than 15 seconds, you do a driving head video and for some reason, you talk about that same subject with your phone mounted safely folks, I say this very importantly, safely mounted on your dashboard, and you’re just driving and you’re talking about your last inspection or something. All of a sudden, the view rate quadruples, and the retention time goes from less than 15 seconds to up to a minute or more. So that’s where authenticity comes from. It didn’t take a whole lot of time. But those kinds of videos, seeing your face, watching you in the field. Anything that’s real, nothing that’s fake, like, oh, here’s a picture of me in a perfect setting on a roof. It’s like, okay, that’s great. And that actually…

 

Daniel King

A luxury house, the $4.5 million home.

 

Ian R

Luxury house. Yeah, exactly. That’s a great picture for your website, statistically, that’ll help conversions on our website. But if you’re going to post on social media, a little bit dirty and raw, like you just come out of a crawlspace and you’re covered in cobwebs, get that camera out. You know, we’re like, look at my look at my beard, look at my hair, it’s all covered in cobwebs. And then they show them the spot that you got out of or have the agent video you climbing out. That’s the kind of stuff that’s trending for 2024. People don’t want fake, they want raw, and I think a lot of that has to do with AI, don’t you think Daniel?

 

Daniel King

Oh yeah, like I said, it’s nuts where we’re at today because Eric was talking, you know about a lot of this stuff before, I mean, because again, you know, chatGPT 3, right? Everybody’s coming on board. Everyone’s hearing about it. It’s three, there was two others. You know, there was two other versions. Like there’s, this has been around for a while, AI has been around for a while. I mean freelancers using it, man. It’s been around for a while. It’s just obviously a lot better and it’s getting progressively better. We use it for a lot of things throughout the day. You know, something I wanted to touch on though, that was a really good point that you said because we, you know we, if it’s one of the, so guys will say you know, I want to do do more business or I want to do social media, or I want the benefits of social media, but I don’t actually want to do it. I mean, there’s so many different, it’s knowing how to connect some of those dots. And what you just said is usually what we will ask guys to do to get out of their comfort zone. Because again, it’s always gonna be like me, me even being on this podcast, it’s nerve racking, you know, it’s not something I do every day.

 

Ian R

You’re doing good, man.

 

Daniel King

But, but yeah, we will tell guys, you know, go next door, go find a crawlspace, go get dirty, and take a video, find something, take that video and keep it short. It doesn’t need to be super long, keep it short, don’t go over, you know, if you don’t, again, just starting out, you don’t want to go over a certain amount of time, you want to stay under. And if you were to just type in home inspectors, which, you know, leads us into the next thing here for search. But home inspectors on like Instagram or whatever platform you’re using, you’re going to see the guys that are posting these, these shorts or these reels are these, you know, are small, they’re not very big at all, at all. You know, even doing a podcast, even if it’s your first one, let’s just say like, this was my podcast, and this is the first podcast I’ve ever done, putting this out there, but then chopping it up, you know, on key talking points. Well, now you have content for a month, two months to come back around to but again, having those, I thought that was just really good point. Because, yeah, I think that breaks the ice if you’re not doing it, and I bet you anything, a lot of inspectors listening to this podcast, listen to you. And they have it in the back of the mind. Like I know, I need to do more on my social media. So you know, that would be one of the best suggestions right there.

 

Ian R

Yeah, and I totally agree with you. And I want to just say if I were to sum up from my personal opinion, and I think what you’re saying too, is if I were just starting out saying, where do I start with my social media? Or where do I change what I’m doing now into 2024, I would say, start, start making short videos where people can see your face, do driving head videos, and get real, get dirty, start talking, take a one minute video. And if I were to upload it anywhere, it would be in this order, YouTube shorts, Facebook reels, yes, Facebook is still relevant, it is probably one of if not the most still relevant for our demographics of who we’re going after. And then I put it on TikTok, if you’re going to do anything for 2024, that’s what I would recommend. It sounds like you’re in agreement too. But one of the reasons that that is so effective right now is because of the glut of posts from AI. So I follow, I don’t know, maybe 1000s of different home inspectors, I have never seen so many half, and forgive me for saying it this way, half crappy posts in my life. Guys who have never posted before are posting, some of them, this one guy watched post 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 times a day. And they were all just, you could tell he was sitting there with Dall-E, which is an image generator, just generating all sorts of images for home inspections. And then putting a little thing out there or have chatGPT generate a short little blurb or a long article and put it out there. All these blogs. It was uncomfortable at a point to the point where I’m like I can’t even follow you. But this is what people are seeing. And it’s unauthentic. And even Google, even Google has said that, it’s the helpful content algorithm that they introduced actually before, even before chatGPT came out. And it was basically saying we want authenticity, we’re not going to tell you how to measure that, just be real, give people something that’s helpful. So grab your phone, take a minute in your vehicle after an inspection. If I were to sum up everything, that’s definitely what I would do. But I mean, we were talking about on the uncanny valley earlier today weren’t we, Daniel?

 

Daniel King

Oh my gosh. I know, that was, that’s so fun. I’m so glad that you brought that up. I was asking my wife and Zack I’m like, what, the candy, he was selling candy candy, you know? And they, they they ran away. And I’m like, oh, that’s I guess that’s something that’s a term. And that’s yeah, I have never even heard that term before.

 

Ian R

Yeah, so the technical way to say it is basically as the human brain anthropomorphizes an object and specifically artificial intelligence or an image, the farther away from reality you get. If you look at a chart, it goes up and people’s brains react well to it. For some reason, when you get like 80 to 95% of the way to looking really human. The brain’s enjoyment level drops into the what is a valley on a chart. So basically, our brains are very uncomfortable with things that look almost real, but not quite. And that’s what AI produces. We can’t specify why. But if you put 1000 images in front of a person, they would be uncomfortable 95% of the time with the AI images, AI used to look better, but they’re running into copyright issues. And so there’s lots of reasons why basically, they’re dumbing down the images to look almost real, but not quite. And it’s created an uncanny valley. So it’s weird. Like, have you ever seen the..

 

Daniel King

Uncanny Valley.

 

Ian R

Uncanny valley. Have you ever looked at like a, like a movie or something, and a character on the movie looks almost real, but not quite. And it creeped you out?

 

Daniel King

Oh, my gosh. Yeah.

 

Ian R

Yeah, that’s, that’s actually on purpose.

 

Daniel King

That’s why I’m laughing. Yeah. Really. I immediately when you said that, I started thinking about all these, you know, horror films that I’ve, you know, seen in the past, or, you know, even even like, oh, geez, there was something on Netflix not too long ago, my wife and I were looking at, this lady that had this huge smile, and she looked human in it. But you could tell obviously, it was, you know, computer generated, and it actually really creeped me out.

 

Ian R

And that’s the uncanny valley. Movie producers have used it for a long period of time to create the creepy effect. Like, I think about the labyrinth, watching that as a kid. Man, some of those things creeped me out because they looked, and I’m talking about David Bowie, looked almost human, but not quite. Yeah, I digress. But we can do that with our own social media marketing. People are so glutted with a, like I was looking at an ad for tacos. And I’m like, this is an AI generated image. And I was scrolling by, and I was just uncomfortable with it. It made me not want tacos, oddly enough. And I love tacos. So we don’t want to do that to our brand. We don’t want to overload people. AI is a very great tool. But we don’t want to take everything as is. Use the generated images, but add some authenticity to it if that’s what you have to do. The videos are going to be the best. And you can’t hire people to do that. Daniel’s not going to come to your house and say, hey, I’m gonna ride with you today and every day and just do short videos. But they’re not that hard to do. There’s a buddy of mine in our area, I’ll send a shout out to John, he’s probably listening. But he’s doing those videos. And funny enough, he was doing two types of different authentic, very authentic videos. Now I’m watching other inspectors in his market, imitate his videos. And I meant to tell him the other day, I’m like, people are imitating your videos. Because they resonate. I don’t see anybody trying to imitate another inspector in my market who has all these AI generated images because they’re uncomfortable with it. They imitate what’s authentic. And that’s what people are looking for in 2024. Because that’s what’s rare right now. So I agree, I agree wholeheartedly with you.

 

Daniel King

So we were looking at our analytics, we do right around, just our, you know, what we post, like the volume of posts and stuff like that. And we’re proud to say we, and you just summed it up. It’s funny, sometimes you just, things connect, we haven’t used a single AI generated image for any of our clients. It just doesn’t, just doesn’t I mean, if there is, if there is it’s like infographic or something like that, and nothing that’s like, you know, but even at that, even at that you’re, you know, it can’t spell something about misspelling is like, you know, third grade level or something. But they are over 100,000 pieces of content, and yeah, we’ve never we’ve never, and we, we use it a lot. We use chatGPT a lot and I mean half of my day is looking at and seeing what else is out there. Like I was telling you before. I don’t know like a month ago. I recently found out what FOMO means, you know.

 

Ian R

Yeah, fear, it’s fear of missing out. Yeah, I always thought it was a bad word when somebody sent it to me, I’m just like, what the heck, man!

 

Daniel King

Yeah, exactly. What did you, what did you call me? That’s how, that’s how fast things are changing. I think this is just my own opinion. I think that people just having access to being able to create you know with that you know, Dall-E, they’re gonna use it for whatever is, whatever they have their mind on. Right? So if your mind is on I want to build my business or I want you know, then you’re going to try to use that, I’ve seen it used on a number of occasions that I think are really, really cool. I think it does a lot of cool stuff. But I think the the prompting and that’s where, that’s where we are today is prompting you know, learning how to prompt, prompt engineering, and asking because I, from when we first started using chatGPT and we use them, we use them for captions. We use them for blogs, we use them for articles, we use them to educate ourselves, you know, we use, we use a bunch. I mean, and, and we’ve noticed that it is much harder, much harder to get the type of caption that you want from chatGPT than, it’s harder to get that today than it was when we first started using it. And so when we’re going through, we’re wondering, well, why and so again, you know, gotta figure it out. And what we’re learning is the fact that if, if let’s just say you want a blog, and I want a blog, and we want a blog about the same thing, we say, okay, I’m going to type in, I want to blog about mold, and the dangers of it. Okay, if that’s, if that’s the the extent of it, we both do it, we’re gonna get the same one. But I can come back and I can change it. The problem is, is that and correct me if I’m wrong, Ian, because I have, if I am wrong, I know you probably are gonna know. But if 1000s and 1000s of people are asking, and not coming back and actually having it change or prompt into something better or more personal or specific, then AI is learning that that is what it’s, you know, it had the right answer, correct?

 

Ian R

Yeah, that is actually part of the learning process. So it’s a sort of language models what they use. So basically, yes, so if I go and go copy and paste, yep, that looks good. So cool, this is the right answer. They’ve actually caught a lot of the AI, just making things up. Because if it doesn’t have it knows, if I send this out there, somebody’s going to let me know if it’s not right. And that’s how it learns, and if enough people, but that’s also a problem. So you’re, you’re right, that is part of the learning process of chatGPT, and other large language models.

 

Daniel King

Personas, they’ve helped us, personas, they’ve helped us, what we do, if we’re using AI for a client, man, we have the website, we have, I mean, just a to z, like our whole file, pictures, everything, goes in there, building personas, and we, you know, market, like everything that’s going on in the market, all the way to how many homes were sold, how many inspectors are, you know, how many inspectors are doing mold in my area, like all of that, and that that was like the overhead I was talking about, you know, it’s all upfront overhead for us. But in order to actually use these platforms, and I have guys that are much smarter than me, you know, doing most of this stuff here. And in order to get the kind of like, what you were just talking about the you know, staying from that eerie that AI eerie, you know, because, again, if you have followers, and you’re just coming up with captions, and just oh, hey, make me a caption for this, make me a caption for that, you know, the people following you are gonna see like, okay, there’s no personality, there’s no, you know what I mean?

 

Ian R

Yeah, not authentic.

 

Daniel King

So having all of that is, is super important. And people can actually do that with their own, you know, if they have that premium account, they can go to chatGPT. And they can get all the personal instructions, they can tell it everything about themselves. You know, but the prompting aspect of it is, is going to be huge. And I think it’s going to continue to keep going that way. And it will and it already has, it’s impacting social media, it is a social media trend. Everybody’s seems to be using it, especially for business. I think it’s again, this is just me seeing, you know, from the outside looking in, because I’m not the inspector, but we get to talk to a lot of inspectors and, and yeah, the, you know, I just can’t stress enough like how important, how important it is to know and you don’t, you don’t have to use chatGPT, you know, you can, you can be authentic. You can be yourself. And I’m not saying that you have to have it in order to be successful. But if, if it’s either I’m not going to do anything versus using chatGPT, I would say yeah…

 

Ian R

Better than nothing.

 

Daniel King

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Especially right now because you can, the early bird gets the worm, literally, we are in that type of a market right now, the early bird gets the worm, technology can be your best friend in this type of a market, or it’s going to be the employee that you should have, you should have hired.

 

Ian R

Yeah. And so this podcast isn’t necessarily what Daniel are saying, is not about AI. But we’re trying to explain why authenticity is so important right now. Who would have thought two years ago that we would be sitting here saying, there’s so much fake, weird, uncanny valley posts out there, that if you can just be a real person for once you’re going to have people following you and reacting well to your videos. And people worry too much sometimes, they think about, well, how many people saw this post or how many people saw that post? Personally, when I check a business out, I go and look, I don’t necessarily watch their videos. I’m like, oh, wow, he’s posted stuff. He looks active. There he is on his job if they haven’t posted anything in two years, I just move on, because I’m like, are they still in business? I don’t know. So there’s a benefit to a lot of different ways. One social media trend that we wanted to touch on, though, was social media search is on the rise. So I work in SEO. So I watch this very closely. The vast majority of search, which is like 80 to 90%, still happens on search engines, like Google, it’s still the primary one. But recently, they found that Gen Z, which isn’t our biggest buyers market yet, does up to 40% of their searching on social media, they don’t even go to Google. So as they come up to be the next buyer range, which is the next, what’s that, Daniel, like, five to eight years?

 

Daniel King

Yeah, they’re in the market.

 

Ian R

They’re in the market, just not as heavy as like millennials still are. But they’re gonna, they’re gonna move in, and then all of a sudden now 20% of the market is searching online. Right now it’s, I think it represents overall like four to 5%. And then it’s going to increase for the overall market up to 20% and 30, than 40. And then if we’re not keeping up with that. So how do we keep up with social media searching, Daniel?

 

Daniel King

You know what, I’m gonna, I’m gonna pass to you and what you think, you’re the SEO guy, you’re watching this, this is going to be something that, so my wife, my wife was telling me, this, man, at the beginning of the year last year, and, and it’s crazy to even hear, hear that be something and I’ve done some research. And, and I just get mixed reviews on, on exactly what that is, or how to how to get in front of that. Obviously, as a local business, you’d want to know all your hashtags and things like that. But you know, I’d rather pass to you on that one in here and then see if I can kind of understand where you’re going with it.

 

Ian R

You actually, you actually basically said the answer, basically, the content being there. So if you’re going to post a video, put the transcript of the video if you have it in there or write a brief description. This is me talking about wood destroying insect damage, after my Columbus, Ohio home inspection, or this is me in Myrtle Beach talking about this, wherever we are, first of all, talk about the service we’re talking about, be specific to the video and the subject, and then mention our location. We don’t want to just stuff in keywords, Myrtle Beach home inspections, home inspector Myrtle Beach, that’s garbage, nobody cares. Say, this is me talking in Myrtle Beach about, you know, pure construction, why it’s so important in this particular area. And then say we perform home inspections throughout Myrtle Beach, and then leave it at that. And then that way as they’re searching within a platform, and again, this is, this is still emerging, this is not, 40% of a small demographic are searching. But in a few years, this could become a lot bigger. It also does help your current SEO. So, and then hashtags. Are you in Myrtle Beach? Cool. #MyrtleBeach, #homeinspection. Keep it simple. Are you talking about wood destroying insect in Dayton, Ohio? #DaytonOhio, #wooddestroyinginsectinspections or whatever hashtags we can find. That’s going to give people a little bit of meat when they have search intent. So you nailed it.

 

Daniel King

We have, yeah, well, and that’s the reason why I asked is because I wanted to hear what you had to say before actually, you know, I have, I have a resource that, you know, I’ll give you or send you or whatever in you know, feel free to share it. But one of the ways of doing that, if you’re not sure is, you know, put yourself in the seat of the consumer. I mean, again, who are you trying to target, and then think, go to Google, go wherever, go on Instagram, go on Facebook, wherever it is, right, I would do all of it, you know, think of five different ways to you know, sum up that video and search for it in all these search engines and, you know, just like what you were saying and see what pops up before even actually naming that video or putting your hashtags in, or the captions or the titles, because then you can actually have, and we have a worksheet that we go through when we actually do these marketing campaigns or, you know, we’re building people’s pages, because everyone’s areas a little bit different. You know, everyone, everyone’s areas a little bit different. Same method, though, same approach and going through and, you know, having your title, your caption, who you’re going after, and then making sure that it matches. So maybe, you know, maybe your maybe that what you’re trying to accomplish with your video would actually do its job and educate the consumer. But maybe that consumer doesn’t actually see it because it wasn’t properly. So the hashtags, I know is definitely a huge thing. And as far as the search, as far as the search goes, I have a sheet and I was thinking zoom for some reason. Yeah, I was going to show, I was going to show the sheet and all. I’ll send it to you so that you can, you know, if guys are interested to see kind of how we go about things.

 

Ian R

Yeah, and I appreciate that, especially if our listeners want to see how some of that works on the detailed end of things. But I think if there’s something else I wanted to mention, but before we get get into that, as maybe our last point here, I want to emphasize that variety is important on our social media. So if we’re like, cool, I’m going to do a driving head video, and we end up doing three driving head videos a day, cool, you still need to mix it up a little bit, have a link to your website, have a graphic or two. Like okay, here’s a maintenance tip reminder about, you know, cleaning out your gutters, those are still, those are still important, have a good mix. But do the things that, like if you hire Inspector Media or you hire, you know, Inspector Toolbelt. And we do, we don’t, we’ve said this before, we don’t do anything on the level you do, we do for SEO reasons. But whoever you hire, they’re going to be supplemental to what you can do. We can’t go and record you saying things and being authentic with your own videos. So always supplement. Daniel’s going to put out some great content, intermix videos of yourself, those driving heads and talking head videos, having a variety is important. Have links, have graphics, and then have authentic videos, that makes great soup, man, that’s great social media soup right there.

 

Daniel King

The best example is, you know, my wife and I, we got three boys, I can post the picture, let’s just say it’s three boys in front of the Christmas tree, I can post that picture. And 10 days before her. And we have, let’s just say we do, the same amount of friends, same people, right, minus a few here and there from high school, and she posts hers and she’s on it all the time. No, you know, she’s actually unplugged recently, you know, it was time, it was time. And you know, we’re happy for that. But she was on her pages. And she was engaging, and this is one topic, when I looked at the talking points, this was the one that I was gonna want to add, because it is the need, it’s one of the things that we hear the most is I don’t know how to get followers. And if we’re posting, you know, and we’re posting, kind of going back to what I was saying before, all that’s fine and dandy, but you know, we got to get people following our business, we got to own the rights to our marketing, and essentially, you don’t actually own your business page, that’s a false, you know, you know, Facebook owns it, or Instagram owns it. But essentially, you know, in theory, owning the rights to your marketing, you know, you can literally build these pages, put them in a position where you hold the key, you know, and again, it’s equity, you know, it’s equity in your business, it builds your brand. So doing the content, that’s awesome. Because obviously, that would come first, no one’s gonna follow something that’s just an empty page. But being active on that is, it’s so important, because again, going back to the picture, and my kids, you know, I posted 10 days before her, she posted it, I get maybe 10 people that like it, and it’s gonna be my mom, my grandma, you know, the close friends, you know, a few comments. She posted and within maybe 20 minutes, she’s got 50 to 60 people that are not only liking the post, engaging. And the reason why is because she spends time and she talks. That’s why it’s called social. So our biggest focus is getting guys uncomfortable. And what I’ve noticed in business is, the more uncomfortable you are, the better your business grows. And so with going into social media, having content is great, and having trending content, and the hashtags and all of that, but we got to get on our pages, and we got to, we got to be known, you know, we got to be engaging with agents and you know, even just a simple sentence on a post, you know, will get you in front of more people, you know, and then they’re looking because people read those, people read those, you know, comments, people read comments, like my son, you know, every time I catch him looking through, you know, something on social media or something, you know, he’s reading the comments. My wife is reading the comments. I never read the comments when I was doing social media and coming up. And again, I’m an older millennial. So maybe that’s the reason why, but that just goes to show like reviews back in the day. I didn’t read reviews, you know, now I read reviews on everything, you know, and I make my decision from that. People are reading those comments. So you know, and inspectors have a wealth of knowledge that not a lot of people do, you guys see things differently. And so if I’m looking for a house and I’m following an agent, or I have an agent friend, or whatever the situation may be, by you commenting, you’re putting your business in another spot, and it took you 10 seconds.

 

Ian R

Social media is a conversation. If we’re, if we’re just doing the one doing all the talking. People aren’t going to listen, now if we’re engaged and listening with them, they’re going to be more apt to listen to what we post. I think that’s a great point. I did want to mention, we’re running low on time here. But I did want to mention to keep an eye out for a service that you guys are going to be offering soon. Something that I’ve said for a long time that we need in our industry is a good CRM. There’s always CRMs out there. But our industry is in need of a good CRM, and you guys are working on that. And anything that comes from, you know, you guys and a Nick Gromicko company is usually going to be something that we’re going to want to keep an eye on. But that, that’s coming, that’s coming here soon, right?

 

Daniel King

Yeah, absolutely. So we’re really close. So, you know, we’ve gotten far a couple of different times, and it just wasn’t where we wanted it to be. And, and yeah, we’re so excited about it. Yeah, and that’s a CRM is, you know, what, that’s a year’s worth of podcast there talking about a CRM and its capabilities. You know, I would just say this if contact management system is, you know, you just take inspector, A inspector B, Inspector. A and B are doing the exact same thing, going out, you wear the same clothes, you sound the same, you look the same, whatever it may be. If one has a contact management system that’s doing a lot of the data management, and the other one, isn’t. It’s real simple. I mean, the one is going to get ahead. I mean, I ask guys all the time. Have you ever had or done an inspection where you know that the agent referred you, referred the client to you, and then you never heard from again? They’re like, well, yeah, of course. Okay. And judging by the, you know, the way it sounds like, okay, maybe it’s happened a few times, well how do we know the only reason why that happened is because we didn’t follow up, or maybe someone else looked a little bit better. And they didn’t have to do anything besides put them on an email campaign, or, and we talked about that. Things, it sounds like, you know, in your opinion, things are changing, as far as you know, the amount of emails, but just following up, you know, I mean, you’re not going to always remember, you know, you take three or four years. I mean, how do you go after the 11th month warranties? How do you go after your annual inspections? You know, I mean, there’s so many, there’s so many different ways a CRM can, you know, if there’s a lot of data, a lot of data to manage, by hands and Google Sheets and you know, your contact list and your cell phones.

 

Ian R

Yeah, so we’re, everybody keep an eye out for that. I’ve heard whispers of it for a while now. And I’m looking forward to see how it happens. But we’ll have to do a podcast when it comes down. We’ll talk about the importance of a CRM, every business owner should have one. But for social media trends, thank you so much, Daniel, for being on. This was helpful. We’re looking forward to what comes in 2024. And some nice opportunities for us in the social media realm. So thank you so much for being on.

 

Daniel King

Yeah, thanks, Ian, for what you do, man. You know, keep keep it up, man. We educate ourselves. So you’re like a distant mentor to us. So…

 

Ian R

Oh, well, thank you, after you force your people to listen to me. Thanks a lot, Danny. Always great to have on.

 

Daniel King

Yeah, yeah. No, no. All right. See you.

 

Ian R

Have a good one.