Syndicated post from InmanNews.
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About two years ago, Kaitlin Hannig was facing one of the most challenging times in her life.
She had just gone through a tough divorce and was now a single mom. She found her work for the state of Utah very meaningful — she assisted refugee families in signing up for various federal benefit programs — but it was not the best fit for her. The job was done remotely, which was isolating, and required a more rigid schedule, which made coordinating school pickups difficult.
With her divorce behind her, she decided to make a leap into a new industry that she had always been curious about but never felt supported enough to give a shot: real estate. Little did she know then that implementing the power of social media would become a crucial part of her career transition.
“I’m going to need to rebuild my life. I’m a single mom now, and I need to do it in a way where I can be flexible and hopefully not have the kind of income constraints that usually come with 9-5 jobs now that I’m trying to raise children on my own,” Hannig thought to herself.
Hannig had watched her grandmother work as a real estate agent when she was growing up, and admired the career she was able to build. So Hannig figured that with nothing more to lose, it was time she jumped headfirst into real estate.
Just two years in, Hannig has learned some valuable lessons about the power of social media and has become a viral sensation with her content, which takes jabs at the viewer while inviting them into her listings. She now gets about 75 percent of her real estate business through her social channels. Here’s how she did it.
Doing the homework
This was the first time in her life that Hannig would be self-employed, and she wanted to make sure she did it the right way. So, she started reading everything she could about how to successfully be your own boss. That quickly became frustrating.
“It seemed like every productivity book was the very same,” Hannig told Inman. “It was written by a dude named Chad, and he was like, ‘You just gotta grind harder.’ I was like, ‘Chad, even if I wanted to, that’s literally not an option for me — I have school pickups.’”
Fortunately, Hannig eventually found a community of female real estate agents on Instagram who provided practical tips for other women in the industry and shared on their accounts authentic stories about their lives and careers.
“I just connected with them in ways that I didn’t feel like I had connected with the information I had sought out before,” Hannig said. “So when I was thinking about how do I build my own business, it was them that I wanted to model — not the Chads that just wanted me to grind and hustle.”
The women whom she followed weren’t doing anything groundbreaking, Hannig said, but it was then that she realized how useful social media could be for her business in terms of reaching a wider audience than she could by door-knocking, for example.
“For me, I can’t go door-knock 200 doors per week,” Hannig said. “But I can make a post that will be seen by triple that many people. I can have 600 people see my posts, and I can do it while my kids are in the car after I pick them up. So it just seemed like the obvious thing for me to utilize.”
Hannig also liked the fact that social media gave her an alternative to chasing clients — instead, those who liked her content would come to her when they were ready.
Finding her voice on Instagram
Before deciding to wield it for her business, Hannig was not a big social media user. She had a private Instagram account with maybe 100 followers that she knew personally.
Still, as a millennial, she realized that growing a social presence was an attainable goal. So, she decided to just start trying out different things with her posts — and ultimately landed on a jaded, dry-humored version of herself that films video clips in some unusual positions, like squatting on the ground or lying in a bath tub. Speaking with Hannig on the phone after viewing her sarcastic videos online was a bit disorienting, since the bubbly voice over the phone didn’t seem to match her online persona.
“I am not quite the same person that I am in my videos, right?” Hannig asked over the phone. “I’m not telling you that your mom’s disappointed in you, but that is definitely a part of me — that is my sense of humor. It’s not that it isn’t me; it’s more like I’ve just turned up the volume on that particular … it’s like a caricature of myself. So it is very true to who I am.”
Hannig turned to this version of herself in part out of frustration at seeing other real estate agents post content online that glorified “dream homes” that could supposedly transform someone’s life if they bought it, she told Inman. Instead, she wanted to keep things real with her content, and keep it focused on her potential clients — not herself.
“I just feel like, hey, I’m a millennial. We’ve seen some shit. And anyone who comes out with this marketing that feels perfect, this idealism, I’m like, no, our bullshit radar is just going crazy … I really hate this thing where real estate agents feel so scared of saying that there’s any problems ever, because every single house has a problem, right?”
In her videos, Hannig often issues backhanded insults to the viewer, like “The closet is so big it can hold all your clothing — and your sorrows,” or “This home has so much personality it just might make up for your shortage.” The comments are surprising and funny, addressing the audience directly while subtly highlighting points of the home.
She also started out by adopting the unusual position of squatting low to the ground while filming her videos, simply because the tripod she owned for her phone was only a few inches tall. Eventually, that camera framing became part of her signature.
Hannig says it’s important to point out that the traction she started to gain in her business through social media only started coming together in the past several months as she has been more intentional about creating funnels that work in concert with her content. And, she said, there’s plenty of room for her to keep gaining more clients that way.
“I feel like I’ve mastered the attention — I can get people’s attention, but attention doesn’t equal deals,” Hannig said. “So I think a lot of people just see the flashy content and that’s what they want to do. But I put my structures in place, I put my funnels in place before I grew. It was kind of an accident that things took off for me. More like an experiment that went right, surprisingly.”
Kaitlin Hannig takeaways
- Start off with home and neighborhood tours and experiment with different ways of making them your own.
- Make a lot of content and try everything to see what resonates with viewers.
- Pick two types of content to perfect on your social channels, and post them regularly.
- Pay attention to what content of yours creates conversations, and figure out why.
- Don’t make things overly complicated. Connection with viewers comes from imperfection.
- Study the content that you consume, even non-real estate content, and think about why it makes you stop to watch.
- Maintain boundaries between your identity and your content. If someone posts a negative comment about something you created, it is not necessarily a reflection of who you are or your worth as a person.
