As time passes, a feature walkthrough like the one in this lesson will fall out of date very quickly. For those taking this course who are brand new to engaging with social media for their business, it may still be helpful over time while some of these core features still remain on the different platforms. But that is not the purpose of this lesson. This lesson is here to demonstrate two core concepts:
- Becoming this familiar with several social media platforms is now part of your work! Across industries, social media is becoming a significant, if not primary advertising, inventory showcase, and customer acquisition platform. You will need to know these tools inside and out, and not just the advertising engagement parts. The more you are the face of your company, the more you will need to directly create and post, and you will need to know how to edit your content to stand out and showcase your brand.
- Some of the tools may be labeled as having specific functions, but you can utilize them as you see fit for your business. In the video, you’ll hear an example of how Instagram’s “Close Friends” content filtering tool could be thought of as a newsletter, loyalty program, or similar way to specialize content for a higher engaged subset of your clientele. Do not be afraid to use features in ways they don’t seem to be designed for. Often times, platforms will create new, better suited features when they discover users and businesses using their features in use cases they did not anticipate.
Transcript
Good morning. I just wanted to share how to market on Instagram. I had received a question this morning via Linked In, and someone had asked, you know, they’re having problems with Stories, how to possibly make Stories work. And I’ll kind of go into details of how I do it and some of the tips that I recommend as a commercial real estate agent, or as a real estate agent, just as a content creator in general.
So, Stories, as you can see on Instagram is at the very top. By clicking on my profile photo you can go into my Story, right here. For those that don’t know: on the bottom, “seen by 216,” where it says “Facebook,” that means that it was shared to your Facebook Story, and then “Highlight,” that is actually where it goes back to your main profile and you can see my Highlights there in the middle of the screen where it says “11/29,” “Tik Tok,” “11/14.” So you can basically Highlight all of your Stories if you want to into days, into topics, into just any type of category that you would like.
And so, when I add to my Story, I go to the home screen on the very bottom. And then, from the home screen on the top, you see the camera on the top left hand corner, I click on that. And now I’m in the function of adding to my story. And on the bottom, there’s multiple things you can do. There is Boomerang, which is just like a short video, just like that. There is Super Zoom, which gives you functions such as fire. There’s Hands Free so you can just click record and it will record until it’s done recording. You can tell when it’s done recording when that round red circle stops going around. Nice thing about Hands Free is, it is what it is. It’s so you don’t have to sit there and hold your thumb to the button.
And then there’s Create, where it allows you to do text, or gifs, or questions, or tag somebody. These are people that have mentioned me. There is “1 Year Ago…,” so this is what I was doing one year ago. [Laughs] That’s kind of cool! Ask a question, ask me a question. [Laughs] This is answers, to people that have answered questions. Looks like there’s 12 answers in my saved area, I don’t know exactly where that is. We can put a timer, such as when a listing is going to go live, or when you’re going to have an event, or when you’re going to go Live yourself on Facebook or Instagram. And there’s a Quiz. And then, last but not least, on the far left, there’s Live. So you can actually go Live on Instagram. You can see that there’s 36 of my followers active right now.
So I’m just going to show a normal post. And a normal post, we’re going to start just with a picture. So all you do is click the button – the white button right in the middle. There is the picture. And then up at the top right, there’s several options that you can see with the smiley face and the stars, the link, the sticker – which is the smiley face with the little bend on it, and then the drawing function, and then the text.
I’m going to start off with a Sticker. Whenever I get a new listing, I like to put glasses on my face and show a picture with me with that new listing. I just resize that by taking my two thumbs and squeezing in or squeezing out which allows you to make it bigger or smaller. When you do have a moving picture, it turns it into a video, just so you know. So if you save this video, which you can do in the top left where it has the arrow down to the line, you can keep this video. It goes to your camera roll. You can then repurpose that content for other pieces of content on social media such as Facebook posts, Instagram posts, Twitter… so, you know, view this function within Instagram of creating Stories and creating different pictures and video as a way to build up your pipeline for content on other platforms.
I’m now going to add some text. With the text function, up at the top where it says “Strong,” you can change the text font, as you can see there. You can change the size. You can also, where the “A” is in the top lefthand corner, add a background color, and then the color options down at the bottom, you can change that color. And then if you see that little dropper on the lefthand side you can actually get it to color match something in your existing photo. So let’s say I want it to match my blue shirt. There it is. And so, when you see people that post, and they’re very spot on with their colors, and you like how they, you know, made the different colors, it’s usually by color matching something in their photo.
Just to show you, you can add links to your Instagram TV. I’m not going to do that in this function, but basically it would be a call to action that someone would then click on your Story to go to an Instagram TV post. I can do another tutorial on how to do Instagram TV posts.
And then it has face filters. So those that are familiar with Snapchat, they did add this face filter function in Instagram, and so you can add different filters. So this is like old-school movie filter. And there it is! Now on the bottom left, I can add it to my Story. If you see the Facebook logo, is also going to go to your Facebook Story. My Instagram profile is connected to my Facebook Business profile, so it goes to that portion of my Story. You can share it just with your close friends. You can get people that you mark as Close Friends and share with them different posts that you want to.
I don’t really use this function but I’ve thought of it as – you know, consider it your news letter. If you were to categorize a certain amount of people that are loyal followers or people that are your clients, or people that are, you know, asking for specific information, you could really send it to them as a Close Friend.
What I’m going to do with this one is, I’m not going to send it to my Story. What I’m going to do is save it, and so this is saved, and discard so it’s not on my Story. But then I want to show you where it is. So if I go to my camera roll, as you can see here I have a video in my camera roll, and this is the video I just created. And so, I can just take this, I’m in my iPhone cameral roll, share it to different platforms – I can share it to Vimeo, or YouTube, or my Dropbox, or basically anywhere. I can share it to Snapchat, send it to somebody on Snapchat…
So that is why I consider Instagram Stories as your editing software to share pieces of content to other platforms. I hope this helps. If you have any questions, feel free to ask away. I am Bucky Beeman, commercial real estate agent in Rochester, Minnesota.
