1 Million Followers in Commercial Real Estate - Now What?

Aviva Sonenreich (00:26.726)
This week's listener of the week is CRE on a Sunday. CRE on a Sunday. Thank you for leaving us a five star review. And for those of you listening, if you leave us a five star review below, you might be next week's listener of the week, week, week. Now, I want to talk about this phenomenon I have experienced over the last year or two.

about commercial real estate and social media and really any industry and every industry and how social media and posting on social media pertains to it, if you will. So I get probably five to 10 messages, DMs, emails a week asking me to go to coffee.

And I have done these coffees dozens of times. And this is a professional. It might be a title rep. It might be a broker. It might be a financial advisor or a syndicator. And the question is always the same thing, right? We sit down to coffee and it's, so I see you're really active on social media. Does it get you business?

And the immediate answer to my question is yes, of course it does. Now, I'm flattered. I'm really, really flattered. And I want to preface this by saying, if I send you this podcast episode, it's likely because you sent me one of these DMs. But if not, I think the listeners will get some value out of this as well. So do you get business out of social media? And the answer is yes, of course.

Um, and then it's how, and this is such a big topic, but it's, what I always say is it's like they used to say in residential real estate, I'm sure in commercial real estate, you want to become the mayor of your town. You want to become the authority of your town. And you used to have to do that by putting your face on the bus stop or putting your face on a billboard or putting your face on.

Aviva Sonenreich (02:54.926)
store pamphlets or the grocery store thing or whatever. Well, just like our banking, just like our food ordering, just like our media consumption and marketing, everything has gone digital. So now it would be crazy to think that every, all these other things that we do in our life literally have gone digital.

that the way that we market ourselves as professionals wouldn't be the same way. Just to be honest with you, I noticed I am a extroverted introvert. And sometimes after a long day of work, it's hard for me to go network. I have noticed that posting on social media works as networking for me.

and it's really effective and it's like my networking hack because when I'm emotionally drained or socially drained it's working overtime when I don't have to right the videos are airing while I'm sleeping compound interest baby anyway so when you talk about becoming the mayor of your own town how do you do so well the crazy thing about social media is that a

It's way more targeted, right? Your followers follow you, you post, they see it. B, it's free. No more ocean bound leaf pamphlets. And C, you can do it at scale. It can take no time at all. Look, I'm in my basement right now. Yes, I have a setup, but ultimately,

you as the producer, advertiser, personality, broker, whomever, you are your own content studio and it's a hell of a lot cheaper than a billboard. So I have noticed the result of my posting about warehouses on social media for the last...

Aviva Sonenreich (05:05.326)
we'll say four years is that within my social circles, within my communities and within my town, I have become the, uh, the warehouse girl. These, uh, sites, apps, Instagram, Facebook, Tik Tok, they're geo local, which means they come out and they push to your immediate city. And if your immediate city likes them,

they keep pushing to the rest of the country. So when I was in the height of my posting on TikTok and Instagram, and that was a funny time because it was during the pandemic and the phone wasn't ringing. So it was all I had to do. I noticed this really strong geo local impact because I could, I could establish myself as the warehouse girl of Denver. And what that did was it created an environment where the leads started coming in.

like crazy. So, um, do, does social media get you leads? Yes, of course it does. Now, then this is the next question. Which social media platforms work the best? Tell me too. Right. Because people generally don't want to do the work. Right. The answer to that question is,

every you need to be on every single app, right? You don't get to choose where your consumer is. You get to be humble, learn where the consumption is, and then meet the viewers where they're at with the appropriate content. So when people say, if you had to pick two, what would they be? I have no answer there. Twitter's really fun to meet, you know, to like.

to this broad commercial real estate community in the country. LinkedIn is on fire to talk to local professionals. Instagram is killer to communicate with your community, but they all cross breed and you never really know who's actually watching. And there's different strategies to posting on every one. Facebook.

Aviva Sonenreich (07:31.598)
is crushing it. YouTube is amazingly effective. TikTok, everybody's still secretly on TikTok. Podcasting. So everybody wants like this, like, does it work? Tell me the fastest way to get leads. And unfortunately, that's just not the strategy that's effective. This is a long game. Commercial real estate is a long game.

Posting content online is a long game. I can't tell you how many people I've seen post four.

pieces of content and then quit because they weren't famous or viral or they didn't get a lead. You know, it took me hundreds, if not thousands of pieces of content to establish myself and then start getting transactions as a result. But...

It's marketing. This is, you know, I see it as like, because I am a lifer in commercial real estate, this is what I will do my entire life. I love it. I figure posting about it on the internet, that compound interest we were talking about, I'm marketing myself. I'm helping people who want to learn about an industry that was previously heavily gate -kept and...

I'm building a brand within the industry that over time is going to be ironclad, right? We, as brokers, we start out by chasing people. And then ultimately what happens is once you establish yourself, once you become an authority and a figure in the industry, those same people start chasing you. And that doesn't happen overnight.

Aviva Sonenreich (09:26.926)
It doesn't happen in a year or two years or four posts or 10 posts or a hundred posts. This is every day, day in, day out. Okay, not every day. I take weekends off. I travel aggressively, but it's a concerted long -term effort that is worth it. So.

Maybe you've asked me to go to coffee and I sent you this. Thank you for listening. I am going to tell you one more thing about this that I'm hesitating to talk about, but I'm going to be honest about it. I've done these coffees, right? I've sat, I did the beer, I did the coffee, I did the lunch where we, I did this spewed information about the longterm.

effects of becoming an authority figure in commercial real estate and the person on the other side of the table is really hyped and sold and then they never do anything about it. That happens about 98 % of the time. That's okay.

If you don't know, okay, I don't want to say anything. Look, that's fine. It's not for everybody. Video content isn't for everybody, but there are a lot of different ways to get your content across. And quite frankly, if you're a commercial real estate broker and you don't want to put content out like this, you're just going to get crushed in time by those who are willing to do so. So.

And this goes for the financial advisors, the title reps, the rest. It's everyone, right? Because this, this is connection, right? I follow people online that I feel like I know because I've watched them. People follow me online, they feel like they know me and we can create a bond even though maybe we've never even met. So I challenge you,

Aviva Sonenreich (11:36.11)
If you want to, if you're asking the question, are you getting leads from posting online? What are the platforms to be posting on? I challenge you to start and to be consistent. That is the hardest part, but you can do it. So what questions can I answer for you? DM me on all the social media platforms of @AvivaRealEstate. If you want to learn how to get started in commercial real estate,

I have a free guide below, free guide in the show notes. And next week, I think I'm doing an interview with my dad, the OG who taught me it all. He wrote the playbook. See you next week.