Today I presented a social media marketing course to around 120 members of the Peard Real Estate group. As a group they’re well disciplined and professional and come across as more serious and earnest than some of the other groups in the industry. This was my first social media marketing presentation in over 3 years. In that time I’ve been presenting courses on social media policy so this was a welcome return to where it all began.
Here’s my assessment of my performance.
Tell more stories
Whenever I tell stories I can feel the crowd leaning in. Some smile, others nod. The room is always quite. Sometimes there’s laughter, at other times gasps of fear. That’s when I know the message is getting through. But I don’t do enough of it. Every point I make should be accompanied by a story. My job is to find stories that make a point.
Change the way I explain the content quadrant
I created a quadrant that shows how content affects thought leadership. It’s a great model but it’s far too theoretical. Maybe I could turn it into four different stories that are much more visual. The stories I told to demonstrate the four quadrant positions worked quite well. With more thought that quadrant could make a deep impact.
Add more content
From the outset I was worried that I didn’t have enough content. In the first 1.5 hours I covered 41 of 98 slides. In the final 90 minutes I covered the remaining 57 slides. Toward the end I was pushing to get it all covered but I finished spot on time.
Include a section about Facebook advertising
I made the point that social media should be used to create advocates pretty well but this audience is real estate agents and they’re very pragmatic. It would’ve been helpful to include a section about Facebook ads to show agents how they can use Facebook to build their profile. I should also make the point that advocacy influences the advocate as well as much as those who they influence. Creating advocates has a useful byproduct of producing prospects from those advocates.
Drop the section on Twitter
I started the day with a session designed to get people on Twitter. It came across as disorganised and the fact that so many people tweeted that it was confusing showed that it was. I’ll drop this section for next time.
Be less idealistic
I could’ve shown people ways to make their social media maintenance more efficient by using software such as Hootsuite.
Tighten the group interactions, have less Q&A
Q&A is great in a small group but doesn’t work so well in a big group. I got away with it today but there were times that the room got a bit loose.
Overall I give myself a 6.7/10.