On this episode, we talk to Jess Lenouvel, founder of The Listings Lab, about what to post on social platforms like Facebook and Instagram to get people to choose to work with you as their agent. Jess describes three types of content – authority content, personal content and social proof – that help agents build relationships with their audience that can lead to business. Authority content provides valuable information and communicates what you bring to the table. Personal content gives your audience a sense of what you’ll be like to work with. And social proof includes things like case studies, testimonials, and PR. We also talk about how to incorporate paid marketing into an organic digital plan.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Gayle Weiswasser:
Welcome to the Homesnap Snapshot, a podcast about digital marketing for real estate agents. Each episode we talk to agents just like you who are successfully using some type of digital marketing to build their brand. When it’s over, you’ll walk away with concrete ideas that you can use in your own marketing to help grow your business. Today’s guest on the Snapshot is Jess Lenouvel who is the founder of The Listings Lab. Jess, welcome to the show.
Jess Lenouvel:
Thank you so much for having me. I’m super happy to be here.
Gayle Weiswasser:
We’re excited to have you. All right. Before we jump in, tell us what The Listings Lab is and how you got started with that and working with real estate agents.
Jess Lenouvel:
For sure. For sure. The Listings Lab is a marketing and mentorship program that helps agents go from six to seven figures by creating relationships at scale. We use up-to-date digital marketing tools, as well as social media to help people not only grow an audience but also to create a system in which people are reaching out to them. We really focus on attraction marketing rather than chasing, which is very, very different than most ways that the real estate industry uses marketing. I was myself an active agent for about 14 years before I started The Listings Lab. I got into the business really young. After quite a while, built my own multiple seven figure business and realized that I wanted to help other agents.
Jess Lenouvel:
I was watching so many agents in my office and in my industry struggle. I thought, I don’t think that it’s fair for me to hoard all of this. I think that’s when I started making the transition. It was definitely a bit of an existential crisis where I had these moments of, what do I want to do for the rest of my life? Am I going to sell real estate for the rest of my life? What’s next for me? I don’t know. The Listings Lab was just in my heart, I think.
Gayle Weiswasser:
You said something interesting. Do you connect consumers with agents?
Jess Lenouvel:
I don’t. What I do is I teach realtors to be fully self-sufficient in their inbound client flow. We’re basically training agents how to be fully, it’s basically the idea that there’s a lot of companies out there that will sell realtors fish. We actually teach the agents how to fish.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Okay, great. You’re teaching them how to develop leads and how to build clients, get them.
Jess Lenouvel:
Exactly.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Okay. Got it. All right. Today we’re going to focus on Facebook and Instagram, which I know is something that you’re very interested in. I was going through your website and there was something I read on your website which really caught my eye because it’s one of the themes that we talk about on this show a lot. A couple of episodes ago, we hit 150 episodes and we went back and gleaned about five different themes that come up over and over again when I talk to agents. One of them is, I’m just going to quote your website because I thought you expressed it really nicely. It says, “You need people who already love you and your message so that they are pre-sold on working with you.
Gayle Weiswasser:
When you hop on the phone, all you need to do is tell them your commission rate and ask when they’re available.” That idea that your marketing should personalize you to the extent that when you get on the phone with people, they already know you and they already want to work with you. That’s something that has come up over and over again on this show. Let’s talk about how it is that social media allows agents to achieve that level of familiarity. How can they use these platforms that we all use all the time? How do they approach these platforms to achieve what it is that you laid out on your website?
Jess Lenouvel:
It’s definitely not a really like, oh, I don’t want to oversimplify it but I also want to make it manageable so that anybody listening can really get a grasp of it. We use a nine point psychological journey to take someone from stranger to client. Now this can be used in ads with retargeting. It can be used in an email sequence. It can be used in a guide. But the whole idea is that there’s certain things that the human brain or a human being needs in order to say yes and move forward. Now, the way that most agents are using social media is actually only touching on one tiny part of that. A lot of agents are just posting, just listed, just sold, or pictures of pretty houses and staircases and things like that. Basically all that’s really doing is showing people that you have some business and that you are an active agent.
Jess Lenouvel:
That’s really not enough for someone to actually move forward and choose you. People, all humans, we make decisions using emotion before we use logic. We make decisions emotionally and then we back those decisions up with logic. What we really need to do is we need to make sure that every single person is engaged on the emotional side and as well can back up every like that feeling, that emotion, that inner choice with the logical side of things. It’s just basically what we’re doing is we’re mimicking the growth of a real human relationship. We’re just doing it online in that scale. As an example, I’m going to just simplify it into three major buckets of content. The first one is authority content. The second one is personal content. The third one is social proof.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Take us through what those are.
Jess Lenouvel:
Yeah, 100%. Authority content is going to be things that actually position you as an authority. They’re the things that move somebody through this lens to this person is credible. All of this is, maybe not obviously, but is geared around a niche. If you’re trying to speak to everyone, no matter how good a content creator you are, you always are going to speak to no one because your messaging will become too vague. All of this is geared around, okay, who do I want to serve? Who am I targeting this messaging at? Have I done my market research to understand their pains, problems, fears, and desires? After that comes these three buckets of content. Authority content is going to be, what does this niche or what does this demographic need to hear from me in order to learn something?
Jess Lenouvel:
It’s the same thing as like the give, give, give, and then you ask. A lot of the time, a lot of real estate content is just a bunch of asks. It’s, here’s a picture of my head and call me, or here’s this thing that you really want. Now give me all of your information and then I’ll give it to you. A lot of this is the opposite of that. It’s, how can I give value? How can I give tips or educate this client base on what it is that they need or what it is that they need to know? Now, a lot of people will say, oh, I do that with market stats. Now market stats are actually the most misused tool when we’re talking about social media, because a lot of the time people will say, oh, well, here are the numbers.
Jess Lenouvel:
Now, the thing that will make you credible and the thing that will actually build this kind of authority is actually using the term, this is what this means for you, right? Interpret the stats. Tell them what it means for them. Give predictions based on where things have been, where do you think that they can go. Different things that people can really latch onto and learn something from. Authority content is basically what questions do you get asked on a daily basis, answer those questions in content. Make sure that you’re giving as much as you can, and not necessarily having a call to action or throwing your phone number at the bottom of every piece of content, because that really does sour the whole idea of there’s a certain amount of relationship and there’s a certain amount of value that someone needs to get from you in order to trigger that principle of reciprocity.
Gayle Weiswasser:
I mean, it’s not rocket science. I mean, you’re basically getting in the head of your audience and thinking, if I were them, what would I want to hear? What’s helpful to them? How can I satisfy a need of theirs? Which is how you open to this conversation, which is looking at the different levels at which people need things and figuring out how you can provide it.
Jess Lenouvel:
Absolutely. That’s the first part of the authority. The second part of the authority type of content is also educating your audience on what you do, how you do it, and why you do it that way. It’s building out a signature process or a signature system that is trademarkable, that goes along with your name as a brand. Part of what you’re doing is you’re also educating your audience on your process, your signature system. Because what you want is them to buy into your signature system and your methodologies as opposed to only buying into you. Those are the two parts of authority content.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Can you give us an example of a piece of authority content?
Jess Lenouvel:
Yeah. As an example, I actually posted something on my Instagram today that talks about omnipresence and why omnipresence is important to building scalability within your market and being top of mind and making sure that when someone is ready, that they’re choosing you. That’s an example of part of my methodology, omnipresence is the middle piece of my methodology. That would be an example of authority content. Myth busting content can also be, the truth behind open houses or what does sold over asking really mean. Things like that where you’re busting myths in the industry and basically you’re telling your audience the truth about something that a lot of people don’t understand.
Gayle Weiswasser:
I’m sure right now there’s a huge need for that type of content when the market is so crazy and unpredictable and people don’t really know how to deal with it.
Jess Lenouvel:
100%. Yeah. That’s one part of it. Now the personal content bucket is the piece that most agents are missing. I think a lot of people will think, oh, well, this is my business. My personal stuff doesn’t belong in here. I just want to go back to what I said before about how we make decisions emotionally first, and that know, like, and trust factor, the likability factor is actually one of the most important things in terms of how people choose to be in relationship with someone else, how they’re going to choose an agent. It’s not just about, okay, can you get this job done? Are you the best person for the job? But also, do I like you? Do I trust you? Are you someone that I think will really show up for me and do your best job or do your best work for me?
Jess Lenouvel:
A lot of that comes down to, do I resonate with you as a human being? Some of this is going to come from origin story or brand story. When we break down the personal content piece, it’s usually personal beliefs, personal philosophy, personal story. These are going to be things that, how does this person show up in the world? What do they do in their free time? What kind of a human is this person? Do you have a dog? Right. A lot of my personal content is geared around, I’m obsessed with my cats and I am a very proud, crazy cat lady. That’s part of it is just people know me and they know me in association. I have people who I’ve never spoken to before who I’ll get on a call with and they know the names of my cats. There’s an element of familiarity there where they feel to a certain extent like they’ve seen behind the scenes. I think that there’s too much polish in the way a lot of agents try to portray themselves online and they try to be this perfect specimen of an agent. That’s not how people build relationships and that’s not what people resonate with.
Gayle Weiswasser:
I think agents tend to downplay the importance of that.
Jess Lenouvel:
Yeah. Agreed. For sure. That’s personal content. Then the third bucket is social proof. Social proof is we break it down into three pieces. It’s case studies and testimonials. Then the third piece would be PR or media attention. I think media and PR is something that agents don’t use as much as they should and that there’s a huge opportunity there. Because something like PR, not only does it build authority, but it also has this transfer of trust from the audience of the people who already follow that media outlet to say, oh, this person has been vetted by this outlet that I already trust or that I already am engaged with. There’s that. Then the testimonials and the case studies. Testimonials are massively important obviously.
Jess Lenouvel:
A lot of the time, what agents will do or the mistake that they’ll make is they’ll take this testimonial that gets sent in, they’ll put it in Canva. They’ll make it far more beautiful than it should be. There’s an element of manufacturing that most people create when it comes to testimonials. The way that we teach it is take a screenshot of it. The more raw and the more untouched that testimonial looks, the more trustworthy it is. That’s the testimonial side. Then case studies. I love case studies. I think people don’t use case studies nearly enough. When I’m talking about a case study, it’s basically, talk about a client that you’ve worked with, where they were before they worked with you? What happened during the process? Where were they at the end of the process? Right? Because really all sales is, is current situation, desired situation, and the journey between.
Jess Lenouvel:
I always give the example of HGTV, right? Everybody loves an HGTV show. The reason why the network is so popular is because the entire network is a network of case studies. Whether someone is looking to flip or flop, or they want to live the Caribbean life, or whatever it is. Like, love it or list it. It’s a case study. You’re following along this person who might be in your current situation and you’re watching them essentially make this transition into where you want to be. It shows you that it’s possible. Not only is it possible, but also this person, this agent who has already guided that other person through this journey can do the same for you. There’s an element of trust and credibility that also comes with the case studies. Makes sense?
Gayle Weiswasser:
Yeah. How do you share a test without sounding self-promotional?
Jess Lenouvel:
Totally. Normally what I would do is the screenshot I think works really well because it’s not this… I think that there’s this false humbleness that sometimes agents try to use because it can be awkward. Instead of just saying, hey, I’m so honored that these people chose to work with me, things like that, what I would do is I would… Usually what I would start with is say you’re sharing the screenshot of the case study. In the caption above it, it can be a really simple, this is where these people were before. This is what they wanted. Basically use a mini case study to go alongside the screenshot. The reason why this works so well is, I mean, stories of any sort are 22 times more memorable than facts.
Jess Lenouvel:
The fact is that the testimonial is that this person is happy, but you tell a little bit of a story alongside the testimonial and you humanize the testimony a little bit. What you’re doing is you’re actually putting the attention on the client as opposed to, look at me, look at me, look how great I am. My clients are happy.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Or maybe you talk about the experience of working with that client, why it was gratifying, what you liked about working with them. Shine the light back on them but you’re speaking in this testimonial so that people will remember that as they are struck by the personal part of the story too.
Jess Lenouvel:
100%. Yep.
Gayle Weiswasser:
What about people who live in big markets with lots of other agents? How are they to satisfy the media PR side of it?
Jess Lenouvel:
It’s definitely going to be a little bit more difficult to get PR. I mean, I live in a market with 60,000 agents. There’s pretty much everyone and their dog has a real estate license. There’s definitely a lot of choice in terms of who this media outlet is going to focus on. I think a lot of that also comes down to relationships, right? Reporters are also people. Even though they have a job to do, they still are going to resonate with certain people and not with others. You can be the top producer in an area. If you and that reporter don’t jive in terms of personality and you can’t have a conversation that you both enjoy, chances are that reporter isn’t going to want to work with you long-term. A lot of the time, reporters will actually put things out into the world or online saying, hey, I’m looking for real estate agents or mortgage brokers or whoever to comment on X, Y, and Zed.
Jess Lenouvel:
Now a lot of that is just being aware of where to look, but also responding in a timely manner. Then over time, let’s say you get quoted by the same reporter more than once or twice because you’ve actually responded to their requests for quotes or requests for opinions, then from there, because you already have that initial relationship. You can reach out and say, Hey, I have a lot more to say. I know that you’re constantly looking for information and all of this stuff, I would be happy to literally just provide that to you anytime you need it. They’ll always quote you. Then over time, what you can end up doing, which is what we’ve had. We have a couple of people in our program that have done this is that they become essentially this big newspapers in-house real estate expert.
Jess Lenouvel:
The other thing too that you can do from a media standpoint is podcasts, right? Podcasts are a really great source of PR and media. Agents, they’re in their cars all the time. It’s very easy to build relationships with other agents, but also let’s say that you want to be on an investment podcast, a local investment podcast that teaches investment practices in your local market. You could bring some expertise to that and people listening who resonate with you obviously would be able to reach out and find you. I think that it all really comes together in a way of how willing are you to put yourself out there and just being on the lookout for opportunities.
Gayle Weiswasser:
I will say that on the Snapshot, we’re always looking to find agents who are doing creative things with marketing. Think about podcasts like mine as ones where, get yourself on the show and then you’ve got a piece of evergreen content you can share over and over again and people can listen to you talking about what you know and something that is relevant to them and they’ll be impressed. Then that just helps with that social proof that you’re talking about.
Jess Lenouvel:
100%.
Gayle Weiswasser:
A lot of the stuff that you have mentioned lends itself very nicely to organic content.
Jess Lenouvel:
Yes.
Gayle Weiswasser:
But we all know that organic content does not get much visibility under the current business models of our friends at Facebook. How does an agent look at creating a digital marketing plan that includes paid marketing but still is faithful to what you’re describing? Which is a content strategy that’s not centered around a lot of the things that people traditionally put into paid marketing, which is their recent sales or their listings, or static pieces of content. How do you marry paid marketing with what you’ve been describing?
Jess Lenouvel:
That’s a really great question. Now, first of all, before we jump off of the organic train, most agents are only posting this type of content on their business pages. Your business page is always going to have the least amount of reach out of everywhere on Facebook and Instagram. The best reach that you’ll ever get is on your personal Facebook profile because the organic reach on that is always going to be tremendously higher. Now from a paid traffic standpoint, basically what happens with most paid traffic is that people will pay to get someone into their world. They collect phone number and email address, and then they’re done. Then they start hitting the phones. The truth really is, is the way that I look at things, I would rather invest more into that lead once they’ve become a lead than just to generate more leads on the front end.
Jess Lenouvel:
This is the idea of going deeper rather than wider. Now all nine content types that we teach and the psychological journeys that we teach, you can simplify it into the three buckets that we just talked about. All of that becomes really excellent retargeting content. This is where this idea of omnipresence that I brought up earlier comes in. The best part of it is that it’s also automated. The same content that you’re using on your Facebook and your Instagram organically should be in a proper mix being used to nurture those people from a paid traffic standpoint with retargeting, email campaigns, messenger campaigns, whatever it is that you want to use after that person becomes a lead. You can bring them in however you want, just make sure that the front end targeting is, from a messaging standpoint is going to attract the right niche.
Jess Lenouvel:
If you’re working with upsizers, don’t put a starter condo on your front end lead gen ad because you’re going to get first-time buyers in there and then the rest of your content is not going to resonate. Let’s say that you have a home or a property or a hot sheet or whatever it is that you’re using on a front end to bring people into your world that will resonate and will work for, say that upsize or niche that you’ve chosen. From there, then you want to retarget. The frequency is totally up to you. It also depends on how much you want to spend. You can, let’s say put your relevant content in front of them like one or two times a day. All of this can be done automatically through your ad manager.
Jess Lenouvel:
What I wouldn’t do is what a lot of older school things that have worked in the past but don’t work really anymore is retarget with listings. A lot of the time what people will do is they’ll retarget with other listings that that person might be interested in or off market properties or things like that. All you’re going to do is just, you may get a click here and there but you’re not building the relationship. The whole goal of all of this is to get that person to reach out to you and say, hey, I’ve seen your stuff. I’m ready to work with you. Will you be my agent? All of this can be used in a lot of different ways. The key here is be in front of them as much as possible. You’re going to build top of mind awareness in a much cheaper way than buying a million billboards in an area.
Jess Lenouvel:
On top of that as well, people, again, we make decisions emotionally first. We back them up with logic. People are going to be seeing you. They’re seeing your personal content, which is very, very important. You’re giving them every single thing that they need from a psychological standpoint in order to say yes. Does this make sense so far?
Gayle Weiswasser:
Yeah, it does make sense. It’s interesting what you said about investing more time in retargeting and nurturing those leads once they come in than trying to get more and more leads. That’s a good argument for why organic content works well in this scenario.
Jess Lenouvel:
In conjunction with, right? Because, well, let’s say that this person is seeing you, they like your content. They’re seeing you once or twice a day. The chances of those people also clicking through to follow you organically are much higher.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Got it.
Jess Lenouvel:
Your audience, your organic audience can also grow that way as well as your email list as well. I mean, because obviously we don’t own our audiences on Facebook and Instagram. You also somewhere in there would also want to make sure that you’re transferring that person in that audience to an owned list of some sort, which is usually email.
Gayle Weiswasser:
What mistakes do you see people making over and over again that make you shake your head?
Jess Lenouvel:
Where do we start? Number one is just listed, just sold, under contract. Things like that. I think that there’s way too many people who are taking awkward photos of their clients with a sold sign in their hands and things like that. I think there’s just better ways of doing it. I think that from an ad standpoint, just like I mentioned before, boosting a bunch of ads, throwing spaghetti at the wall, hoping something sticks, and then creating these lists or this low end database of people that then they’re trying to manually follow up with. From a business model standpoint, you’re only one person. It doesn’t matter how many ISAs you hire. They’re never going to convert at the same rate that you would on the phone. I mean, I’ve made this mistake myself.
Jess Lenouvel:
By no means am I criticizing because I’ve done it myself. I remember going into the office and having to make 200 calls a day and thinking this isn’t scalable. How am I ever going to get that lifestyle that I got into this business for if this is my business model? That’s why we teach the retargeting. We teach the psychology so that all of that, basically that stranger to client conversion is done in an automated way. All we really have to do is respond to the people who are saying, hey, can you come list my house? Hey, can we have a conversation about real estate? The quality of lead is so much higher and there’s a steady flow of, I can be on vacation or I can be so busy that I can’t possibly create any content and my funnel is still full. That pipeline is never empties. I think that moving away from I’m going to manually double down and build my business to how can I create more efficiency and more automation but not have it feel too automated to the person who’s actually in the funnel.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Got it. Okay. Let’s talk about Instagram. Instagram is a different platform from Facebook, different types of content, different audience, different ways that people interact with it. What do you recommend differently from what you’ve laid out already on the show for Instagram?
Jess Lenouvel:
The content types are the same. The content buckets are the same. I would say Instagram is a lower attention span, so shorter content, more visual content. Something like reels and face and stories are super important. Reels are great for if you’re trying to grow your audience. You will get so much more traction with a reel. Stories are a great nurturer, a great way to show the behind the scenes, be really raw and real with your audience just on a daily basis. The other thing too that I think is really important is don’t spend all of your life creating content. Once you have a certain amount of really great content that has proven to work for you, there’s a million different ways that you can repurpose that. Let’s say that you have a video that you did that got a great response. Send that to rev.com, get that transcribed. There you have a written piece of content that you can also use, you can break down.
Jess Lenouvel:
If you’ve got a longer video, you can take little pieces of that longer video, shorten it into a real, into a story. There’s a million different things that you can do with a hundred pieces of really fantastic content. I think from an Instagram standpoint, it’s really important to be consistent. Even more than Facebook, I think consistency is really, really key with Instagram because the algorithm will reward you for it. The second thing is use every tool that Instagram offers. Use IGTV. Use your static posts. Use stories. Use reels and mix it up as much as you can because the algorithm and Instagram as a platform will reward you for using all of the tools and all of the things that they offer.
Gayle Weiswasser:
That’s great advice, especially about being consistent. You hit on something too that I always talk about. I call it cope, which is create once, publish everywhere. Really good about kind of repurposing content, chopping it up into smaller pieces, using the content in a way that fits the medium. Whether you’re looking at reels or stories or Facebook or whatever it is, you can really get a lot of mileage out of one piece as long as you’re tailoring it to the right format.
Jess Lenouvel:
Exactly.
Gayle Weiswasser:
All right. How about COVID? How has your advice changed in the last year or has it?
Jess Lenouvel:
The only thing that I would say people have pivoted is the messaging, right? You have to follow along with what people are needing and what people are asking for. A year ago, we were definitely saying, don’t pretend like COVID doesn’t exist. Don’t keep creating content, because it’s going to feel irrelevant. There’s this thing that’s happening in the world and that’s what everyone’s mind is on. But over time, depending on the market, there are some markets who are fully open and there’s not a lot of conversation and talk about COVID anymore. In those markets, should you still be talking about COVID all the time? No, there are other markets like the Toronto Market. We’re still very locked down. COVID is still something that’s very, very on the top of people’s minds.
Jess Lenouvel:
To ignore it and to not include it in some of your content and not create through that lens is a little bit tone deaf, but the actual rollout of the content is the same. The key to really good content is finding something big from something small. You’re not necessarily going on trips to Belize or the back end of your life may look very different and might actually to you seem very boring. Being able to make the small, big, whether it’s a look that you got on the street, whether it’s a conversation that you had with someone and being able to create content around that and still make it interesting is a skillset that is quite important in a time like this.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Absolutely. How have you changed your own marketing over the last year?
Jess Lenouvel:
My marketing hasn’t shifted that much other than to talk about how agents should shift their marketing, to be honest.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Got it.
Jess Lenouvel:
Right? Some of my authority content has shifted in terms of what should you be doing or what you should you be doing differently? Because I mean, obviously all of my content, all of my marketing is geared towards agents. We’ve also, just like anything else, we’ve started putting out shorter clips of things. I’m going live in my Facebook group and doing mini trainings more often. At the beginning of COVID, I actually did a full series of trainings. They were long and really in depth on digital marketing, because everyone was saying, my business comes from open houses or my business comes from door knocking or things like that and I can’t do those right now. I don’t even know how to start online. One of the messages that has come out from this is you can’t have a manual business anymore.
Jess Lenouvel:
Look what’s happened. Here was a whole situation where people couldn’t go knock on doors. We couldn’t do open houses, things like that. We’re seeing even more how important a digital presence is. The fact that you can build it and leverage it and create credibility online when everyone was sitting at home just staring at their phones, sitting on the couch.
Gayle Weiswasser:
All right. Well, Jess, this has been amazing, so much good information, so much good, just concrete stuff. I love that.
Jess Lenouvel:
Thanks.
Gayle Weiswasser:
You’re welcome. Very specific ways that people can connect, personalize, do what we said at the outset, which is give people enough information about who you are so that by the time you are interacting with them, you’re already several steps into the process. I think you gave lots of really, really good concrete examples of content people can be creating and ways to use these platforms. Before I let you go, I’m going to ask you the question I ask everyone. I’m very intrigued to hear your answers, which is, tell me about some apps on your phone that maybe our audience is not familiar with and doesn’t already have on their phones that either make you more productive or more energized or relaxed or entertained.
Jess Lenouvel:
There’s a couple that I use. I would say Skitch, which is S-K-I-T-C-H. Skitch is one of those things that you can do a lot of editing of videos and things like that. I actually will drop my screenshots in there because sometimes I’ll take a screenshot from somewhere and I’m like, oh, I don’t know if this person wants me to share this or not. It allows me to in a clean way blur that person’s name or blur out something that maybe there’s something personal in the screenshot that I wouldn’t want to put out into the world. I would just blur that one section and it does it in a way that looks very clean and it looks like I’ve dropped it into like Photoshop and spent a whole bunch of time on it.
Jess Lenouvel:
It actually takes like 30 seconds. The other thing that I use a lot, which may not be too different for everybody, but I use the Lightroom, the Adobe Lightroom app a lot. It’s because I think there’s an element of when you put a photo out onto social media, it’s competing with all this other visual content. It’s super important that that photo is bright. What I’ll do is I’ll drop it into Lightroom and I’ll just throw a light and airy preset on it or something like that, which doesn’t alter or make the photo like I’m not digitally making my butt smaller, anything like that. What I am doing is I’m brightening the whole thing so that it’s going to stand out in the feed. The third one would be the Pomodoro app.
Jess Lenouvel:
I use the Pomodoro technique a lot, which is the idea that our brains are really only meant to focus for 20, 25 minutes at a time in terms of deep focus. What I’ll do is I’ll use the Pomodoro timer and I’ll set it for 20, 25 minutes. I’ll work intently with some binaural beats in my headphones. Then once the timer goes off, I’ll get up, walk away, stretch my legs. Sometimes do some jumping jacks, go and get a coffee, go and do something else for five minutes and then come back and sit down to really focus and work again. I find that my productivity with Pomodoro has gone through the roof.
Gayle Weiswasser:
That takes a lot of discipline though, to tear yourself away, go do something and then come back. That’s a lot.
Jess Lenouvel:
I find that my brain and my eyes, my eyes need a break sometimes from the computer. I wear blue light blocking glasses, but I still find that if I stare at the computer too long, I find myself clicking around. I’m like, why am I clicking around? What I’m doing is I’m actually just being unproductive. I find that my productivity is a lot better if I work in 20 minutes spurts.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Got it. All right. Well, I will link to all of those. That’s very helpful. I think that Skitch has come up before on this show. I have not heard of Pomodoro. I certainly never heard of Adobe Lightroom, but that’s a great way to use it, just to brighten things up. It is true, your eyes get attracted to bright, shiny, happy looking pictures.
Jess Lenouvel:
100%.
Gayle Weiswasser:
As opposed to dark and shadowy. That’s great. All right. Jess, if people want to reach out to you and learn more about The Listings Lab, what’s the best way for them to do so?
Jess Lenouvel:
Join my Facebook group, it’s totally free. It’s The Listings Lab Method for Real Estate Agents. Just www.facebook.com/groups/TheListingsLab. There’s 18,000 other agents in there and there’s lots and lots of content, lots and lots of trainings, things like that.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Great. All right. Well, I’ll link to that as well. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing all this great stuff.
Jess Lenouvel:
Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure.
Gayle Weiswasser:
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