We recently attended the RISMedia's 38th Annual CEO & Leadership Exchange in Washington, D.C. We particuarly enjoyed “The New Social Media Master Plan: How to Modernize Strategies for Real Results," moderated by Kevin Van Eck, and wanted to share our take.
The panel started off with Keegan Shivers, who, early in his career, kept hearing the same question in listing appointments: how old are you? So he set out to give sellers something better to focus on.
He started filming his work, got good at it, and now tells every seller, "nobody's going to get your property seen by more people than me." A year in, that pitch has helped him win multiple million-dollar listings.
His story opened the conversation, that paired him with other successful brokers and team leaders, including Louise Phillips Forbes, who has 35 years in New York City real estate and $6 billion in sales.
They agreed on the big idea. Social media works when it shows people who you are and proves what you can do.
Here is what stood out and where it lines up with what we hear from agents at Luxury Presence.
Your feed is the first meeting
Forbes described her social presence as a portal. People should get a feel for who she is before they ever shake her hand, and she puts in about an hour a month to make that happen.
Fellow panelist Omer Reshid, founder and managing partner of Capital Corner Group, put the stakes plainly. "Having a brand, having a social presence is one of the greatest assets that you can have," he said.
Panelist Debra Beagle, CEO, managing broker, and owner of RE/MAX Advantage, described the effect from the referral side. Clients she has referred to other agents have gone straight to those agents' social pages, then come back to her saying no because of what content they saw.
A strong referral pipeline feels like permission to ignore social and let your feed wither and go stale.
Meanwhile, the referral has already looked you up on Instagram. BAM (Become A Media Co.) found that 44% of prospective buyers are more likely to hire an agent based on social media activity, including 51% of millennials and 18% of Baby Boomers.
This reflects what we’re hearing from our own network. Perspectives are looking to social media to understand the person who would be representing them.
Haley Ingram, founder of Coffee and Contracts, recently said in a Talent Network interview that "people don't want to follow a real estate textbook. They want to follow a local person in their area, sharing beautiful listings and sharing things to do."
Pick one audience per video
Moderator, Kevin Van Eck, named a problem broker-owners know well. Their content has to reach consumers, current agents, and recruits, so it ends up scattered across all three.
Reshid's answer was to get narrower. "The more targeted, the more niche you are in your content, the better the chances you reach the people that you want," he said.
When he wants to recruit, he makes a video for agents doing $10 to $20 million in volume on the top two things his best agents do to win in this market. Agents who watch it see a team that does well on social media.
Shivers applies the same rule to listings. He decides who would buy this particular property and builds the video for that person.
Beagle's office keeps three audiences in view (consumers, agents, and recruits) under one slogan: "Don't sell without the intel."
Luxury Presence client and Talent Network member, Ricardo Rodriguez, agrees. He told us recently that it’s critical, in social media especially, to "identify who your audience is and then tailor that to your audience."
Four video types, repeated
Reshid's Instagram runs on four formats: educational videos, property tours, business spotlights, and closing testimonials. He calls his own feed "pretty boring" and wins business with it.
A day-in-the-life video led to a developer relationship that produced 32 transactions last year.
His property tours are the easiest to copy. He films with a $36 gimbal, adds trending audio, and overlays the square footage, bed and bath count, and neighborhood, with no price or address.
Those videos work as lead sources. A young agent on his team landed a $1.2 million buyer, a diplomat relocating to D.C., who commented on a tour. A ManyChat automation sent the first text, the team took over, and the buyer moved through a portal search, a call, virtual tours, and pre-approval.
Beagle shared the format with her agents at a company meeting, and many tried it the following week. They added community details and walkable-distance notes, plus questions in the captions to draw comments.
Shivers took a different route with iPhone-only content that tells the story of a house, including before-and-after renovation photos on a recent listing.
Consistency has to fit the calendar
Every panelist kept the production bar low. Beagle tells her agents to answer the question they heard most that day. "A 30-second short video. It doesn't have to be perfect. It's answering questions. It's giving intel," she said.
Shivers pushed the same idea from the other side. "Sometimes it's thinking about making it easier rather than trying to go to the 10th level right off the bat," he said.
Forbes added the human side. "We always compare our insides to other people's outsides," she said, and her advice to the room was to be exactly who you are, because you will find your people.
This is where we see the most overlap with our own work. Agents tend to post in bursts and then go silent when deals take over. Our Social Media Management tool exists for that gap. Each week it drafts up to three posts from an agent's own listings and brand, including carousels and 10 to 18 second Reels built from listing photos, and nothing publishes until the agent approves it. The weekly review takes about 15 minutes. In our beta, 97% of posts were published with two or fewer edits and 87% with one edit or none.
The measurement gap
The session conversation delivered strong systems for creating content and for handing leads off, such as the ManyChat text that turned a comment into a phone call.
Measurement is crucial as well. Shivers named the numbers he watches. "The shares, the saves, that's what matters," he said, and he told the room views alone can mislead. That leaves room for an agent who tracks which content types produce conversations and closings, then does more of those.
The takeaway
Four people with very different careers described the same formula.
Be recognizable.
Speak to one person at a time.
Repeat a few formats you can sustain.
Measure the response that leads to conversations.
The tools for each step keep getting easier. The agents who win are the ones who keep showing up.
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