Happy Monday -
Many real estate agents have a love/hate relationship with Zillow. Zillow earns $300M a year in revenue selling a product that you harvested. They sell information about your hard-earned listings. Without your harvest, they have no business. They use your harvest to generate leads and then they sell leads back to you, and if you do not want to buy them, another real estate agent will. This makes many real estate agents feel like pawns.
As bad as it all sounds, there are worst things being sold by giant conglomerates, and they are harvesting it right before your eyes. Zillow is infantile as compared to some of the other companies who use you to turn a profit. Think Facebook, Instagram, Google, and Twitter. While Zillow simply harvests your hard-earned listing inventory, some of these other giants, are literally selling you. They are mining you. A gold miner picks and sifts away at dirt and rock, and some of these companies are doing the same with you. That’s right, Zillow is selling your listings, and Facebook and other giants, are selling you. They’ve turned you into a commodity. A 2020 documentary entitled The Social Dilemma proves a theory that social media companies are in the business of capturing your attention, and then selling your attention to the highest bidder, thus, turning you into a pawn.
When it comes to social media, are you a player or a pawn? In other words, are you controlling it, or is it controlling you?
The commodity that social media giants are selling is your attention. Thus, they constantly work to improve their ability to hold your attention. For example, in case you are not on the platform as regularly as they like, they email you when your friends make updates to their feeds. As well, you likely get daily emails reminding you that it’s so-and-so’s birthday and thus it’s prudent for you to head over to the site to wish them a Happy Birthday. And then, there is the never-ending feed of scrolling stories at the top of your social media page. If you click on one of those stories, it’s a short video prepared by one of your friends. That story then feeds into another story from another friend, and so on. The story feed doesn’t stop until you stop it. Thus, inertia is on the side of social media. In addition to intrusive email notifications and scrolling stories, there are also push notifications, nerve-wracking binging noises, and, of course, the always dependable advertisements of all kinds of cool things that you love. God forbid you click on one of those ads because then that advertiser shows up in your feed over and over and over and over. There’s a symphony of calculated happenings when you log in to social media, and all of it is designed to get your attention, because, just like crude oil, coffee beans, natural gas, and gold, your attention is a commodity that you don’t own, and social media companies are selling it for top dollar.
What if you don’t want to be a pawn in the game of social media? Better yet, what if you want to be a player?
If you want to remove yourself from the gameboard, it’s simple, you must limit your access to these sites. That means shutting off all of the notifications so they cannot so easily lure you in. You must remove your attention from these platforms, refocusing your attention in a way that is not exploitable. Rather than mindlessly hopping onto a site for hours, every visit must be made with a conscious awareness of the intention of the platform that is beholding you. This way, you can visit quickly, deliberately posting or gathering information for your own use, and then leaving without clicking, scrolling, or buying. Removing yourself as a pawn requires intentionality, speed, and focus.
If your interest is to become a player yourself, that’s where the fun begins. In real estate, the smart trick is to use social media to your advantage without being used as a commodity in the process. This requires that you post regularly while visiting the sites for a limited engagement with the people who matter to you; customers and friends. A simple way to do this is to use a social media scheduling software like Canva, which doesn’t require that you lend your attention to the social platforms while doing so. Using such software, you can schedule all of your real estate-related posts, including new listing announcements, relevant information about the market, articles about your community, and more. While the game pawn unknowingly gives over his attention for exploitation, the game player intentionally uses the gameboard to garner friends, relationships, and new business, without giving up any of his own attention to be sold to the highest bidder.
Social media is a tight rope that we must walk as vigilantly and harmoniously as possible, but not to our own self-degradation. We cannot avoid it altogether because we then risk the possibility that other agents are picking up real estate conversations when we are absent. That being said, we also do not want our attention sold to the highest bidder, with nothing in return, like the Zillow model. Thus the only option is to walk the tight rope, thoughtfully and intentionally navigating through these platforms as a player, posting great content for the benefit of our potential customers, rather than sitting back and letting the platforms thoughtfully and intentionally manipulate us for their benefit.
How to Win the Game:
Step 1 - Understand that it is a game.
Step 2 - Concede that it is a rigged game.
Step 3 - Last but not least, with deliberation, decide whether you are the player or the pawn.
Once these necessary three steps are completed, you need only maneuver across the gameboard accordingly.
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