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ONCE UPON A TIME WITH GLENNDA

In 2016, I decided I needed to embrace the social media trend, again lest I go the way of the dinosaur. So I started doing these Glennda Live videos and I had someone come in and film me in my office.

And guess what? They were horrible!

However, I didn’t let that stop me from trying. Do you think Michael Jordan gave up after he whiffed his first attempt at a layup? Hell, no!

So, one day I was in my car and I was all whacked out about an inspector. I needed to rant, so I got on my Facebook Live. I now know the issue with my earlier Glennda Lives–they felt too formal, like I was trying to explain myself to a teacher who was mad at me. Turns out, when I’d say the same kind of things off the cuff from the front seat of my car, the whole thing felt so much more natural. One of my followers said, “This should be called Posts from the Porsche,” because I have a Porsche Panamera. And I was like, “Oh, I like that.” So I started going live from my car and I just loved it. It was like I was getting to talk to my friend, just getting things off my chest, telling stories about my day.

Later, I saw a TikTok video from a guy in the Tom Ferry system. Oh, my stars and stripes, his video had 43,000 views! I thought, If that guy can do TikTok, I can do TikTok. In February of 2020, I talked to a videographer… and determined it was too expensive. Then the pandemic hit and that threw everything into chaos. By October of that year, I’d had plenty of time to rethink, and I called that videographer up and said, “Let’s do it.”

That call changed my life.

I was iffy about TikTok at first because I assumed it was just kids dancing, but that is a myth. I mean, so many people on TikTok are between 35 and 48 years old, and they are buying houses right and left. Once, I got a DM from someone who had a $10M property that they wanted me to find an agent for. That buyer found me through a tennis video I’d posted. You think country club ladies are not the ladies buying and selling real estate? Absolutely they are.

I started working with my videographer, Denver. He’s a shooter/editor, so he does it all for me. What’s so great is, he’s a true filmmaker and does commercials and stuff with Netflix. Just such a pro and I needed that. I had the ideas, but working with Denver, he’s really brought out the best in me.

My initial goal was to do these Sugar & Spice real estate advice videos. I filmed eight of them in one shot and spaced them out over the course of a month. I started with 122 followers, and then I had 1,000, and when I hit 3,000, I was like, “This is good!” And they just took off from there, now averaging 344,000 per day across my video catalog.

Now I devote one day a month to shooting my videos, as that’s what works best for me. We shoot as many as we can shoot and it’s an 11 hour day. We might do 55 in a day. Denver gets there at 7:00 am to begin to set up. I do my Call to Greatness at 8:00 am and I come downstairs and we shoot in my home. I like doing the videos here because I feel super comfortable in my space. And I can have all my outfits lined up because I like to change up my looks so it’s not repetitive for the viewers.

From 8:10 to 8:30, we frame out the morning, figuring out our direction, then we shoot until lunch at 11:30. At 12:30 pm, we plan out the afternoon, then we shoot until 6:00 pm. I know it seems like a lot (and it is), but what makes it easy is that I focus on telling stories. Because that’s what good content creation is–pulling your audience into a story.

For example, that tennis story happened, like, five years ago. But I had just started back in tennis season the day before so it was at the top of my mind. When you go to create your own content, just think about what happened to you in the course of a day. You got locked out of the house. You got locked in the basement. You fell out of the basement or you fell down the stairs. Your buyer lost the earnest money. Your buyer lost the house. Your sellers didn’t take the first offer and then they ended up taking less. Everything you do is fodder; there is a story in every single facet of the real estate transaction.

Maybe you say, “Oh, I’m a new agent, I don’t have stories. I haven’t been selling real estate since Jesus was a baby.” But you do have things to say. You can talk about an article you read on luxury real estate, or the state of the market where you live, or the Doomsday prepper you heard about who’s building an entire bunker under his classic Federalist style brick home, much to his HOA’s dismay.

I think a lot about people, and I derive my stories from many different industries. What it all comes back to is being your sincere self and drawing people in. I think about the stories my grandfather used to tell me, like how his mother would tell him to go out to the meat house, how he’d take his big knife and cut bacon for the morning’s breakfast. He could paint such a picture, talking about the dew on the grass and the rain of the tin roof and the smell of it all. He brought me there with his words.

Here’s the thing–people are sick of scripted reality. We relate to people who are imperfect. A lot of the problem now is that real estate is trying to portray a Selling Sunset lifestyle and that is just not what real estate is like for the majority of us. People don’t follow me because I’m always showing off big-ass, beautiful houses–they go to Zillow for that. They don’t follow me because my shirts feature cut-outs and generous shots of side boob. As a Southern woman of a certain age, that’s not my style. Ultimately, they follow me because I’m a straight shooter. The key to my content creation is that I give them the truth and I’m gonna wrap it up in a no-holds-barred kind of story.

What my content creation has resulted in is my being able to say, “Sit down and grasp tightly, I want to make sure you listen to this. There’s no other agent in my marketplace who can say they have 1.5 million views on average across their video catalog.” There’s real power in that. TikTok says I have the stickiest follower count of anyone in the real estate space. So that means I consistently get the same viewers, and they watch the video from beginning to end. Thirty-one percent watch my videos start to finish, multiple times. And once they start following me, the unfollow rate is so low, TikTok can’t even measure it.

So if you want to start creating content–and you should–my very best advice is that you start with a story.

Want to know more about the specifics of my social media strategy? Check out this interview I did with Nick Baldwin.