Episode 11 - Leveraging Social Media for your Business

Hey everyone, welcome back to Owner Occupied. We are here to bring you episode 11. I'm really excited about today's episode. We do a deep dive on social media, what works, what doesn't work, how you can use it to grow your business. And learn more about areas that interest you. Russell has a very interesting strategy that he uses specifically on Twitter. He also goes into detail on Facebook and Twitter advertising techniques that he's found to be very effective. And we talk also about LinkedIn, what works and how to use LinkedIn for yourself and your business. We talk sort of generally about finding the social media outlet or platform that works best for you.. And then we wrap up with the discussion of Twitch, which is a fairly unique social media platform that I use as a way to sort of relax and unwind at the end of the day, and also build connections for my business and in the real estate world. So stick around, we are going to jump right in.

Hey, Peter, how's it going?

Hey, it's going well. How are you, Russell?

I'm doing great. I'm doing really well. Business is flying at the chaotic pace I like. I know you've had a hectic start to your day.

Yeah, I know we were joking before we started the show that an inbox zero would make you nervous because you like that sort of chaotic nature showing that business is moving along. Whereas I love an inbox zero because I feel like, hey, everything's done, everything's buttoned up, I can relax. So it's funny how we approach it.

I'm not exaggerating. I have 23,000 unread emails.

Oh my gosh. I couldn't sleep. Couldn't sleep.

Right. Well, it doesn't seem like you ever sleep with your Twitter activity, your Facebook, your Twitch, your— it gives the impression anyway of this constant on-the-go and that's gonna—

Oh, well, those are just the 3 VAs I hired to run all those accounts.

You got your virtual assistant around the world, 24/7 responsive. Peter, we're going to talk a little bit about how you use social media and think about it in the, in the context of business. And, and how our different approaches might be beneficial to some of the, the other business owners or our listeners. So Twitter is how we met. Yep. How do you think about Twitter as a source for business or for your purposes in using it? What are you trying to accomplish on Twitter?

Yeah, so Twitter is how we met. It's, it's kind of incredible that this whole podcast came about and we know each other just because of Twitter. What am I using Twitter for? Well, a bunch of different things, I think. I've been on Twitter— I joined, I think, in late 2008, so I've been a member or a user for many, many years, over a decade. And for almost all of that time, I only was really followed by like a couple friends, really. I mean, I had a few hundred followers, um, and I viewed Twitter as just kind of a place to sort of goof around, relax. Didn't take it seriously at all. But something happened in late 2020 on Twitter, and I don't know if it had been going on or if I just stumbled into the right corner of it, but I found a few people tweeting about real estate and real estate syndication, buying properties, small business, that type of thing. And really, it was a totally new experience seeing how these folks were interacting, sharing value, helping each other, connecting., and I was really intrigued by it. So I started to follow those people and the people that they followed and interacted with. I think this was in October of 2020, and then quickly decided that I wanted— I sort of wanted— it seemed like they were getting a lot of value out of, of their interactions and of their followers, and they were also providing a lot of value, and I wanted to see what that was all about. So I started to take it more seriously in October of 2020. And I'm sort of still in that.

They take it more seriously. What did that mean for you?

Well, that meant that instead of just tweeting random funny things I thought of or retweeting like a goofy GIF or, you know, just a picture of my kid or something, I was instead deliberately crafting Twitter threads that would help someone understand how property management works or taking a screenshot of something I was working on at work and adding some commentary and posting that, replying and engaging with accounts. It just really— it's almost like if you could picture using Twitter from my house or using Twitter from work, that would almost be the distinction. Like, it is now a business tool, um, and I'm using it for business purposes. Of course, to meet, you know, cool entrepreneurs and connect with real people as well, but more thinking about it as, hey, there's something here, uh, both in the sense of being able to share what I've learned but also maybe get something out of it too. Um, so that's what I set about doing, kind of like as an experiment, um, just to see what would happen. And I'm sort of still in that, but I think it's, it's already proven itself worth the time investment, you know, many times over.

So I primarily, uh, I use Twitter, and I had two different phases. I was a really early adopter. I had a high-profile job in the legislature and reporters and politically powerful people were interested. And so I built a significant Twitter following around a political engagement world. And then I left that world to become a lobbyist where my employer didn't want associated with any of the controversy that I'd built a significant following on. So I ended the account, I deleted the account. Oh, wow. Okay. I deleted the account and threw my—

And how big was that account?

It wasn't, it was probably 8 or 9,000. Oh, wow. It was, I was the original Russell Lowery or whatever. But the number, I don't remember. I don't remember the numbers, but the impact of it was the followers, the power of the followers, the people who were following the account and that were engaging with it were political insiders that mattered. So knowing what I know about the value of that audience today, I would have never deleted it.

Yeah, do you ever wish you could go back and reactivate that somehow?

I tried, and after a time period, Twitter, abandoned it. So when I re-engaged Russell Lowry 10, I started from scratch, but I wasn't in the political power position that commanded the attention. And at the time when it was starting up, people just naturally kind of followed you back. It wasn't like everybody was there. And so no one was evaluating your— like, it feels like some validation when somebody follows you today. It does. It didn't have that feel when it first started.

You're right. Yeah, I remember that.

Yeah. What are you having for breakfast? I'm having coffee. You know, it was just a different tool. So today I primarily used it, and I still do, I primarily use it for learning. And so I would still tweet. I thought of it as just talking out loud to myself. I would just say things to myself and other people happened to overhear what I was saying. And so I would never tweet I would never tweet something as benign as I'm having toast because I would never say that to myself. But, um, but I would— my brain is kind of random and I'm thinking about a variety of different things all the time, and I would tweet that stuff out. And, um, and it was actually Nick, uh, and Sweaty Startup and that thread that had convinced me. He wrote a thread about how to use Twitter And some of it was more helpful than others, but I've shared it with a lot of other people in that I look at it and said, would people know what you're an expert in if they scrolled through your Twitter feed?

Yep.

Doesn't mean ever talk about anything else, but doing that. And I found that I was naturally gravitating toward those people anyway, because I was getting value out of them. And I follow lots of people, but similar to, to different approaches, I, I pretty much, I don't, I don't interact with my home feed all of that, that much. I pretty much interact with my notifications and mentions because I set notifications for an area where I'm studying or learning. Or doing a deep dive on a subject matter. And so I was looking—

So how do you do that? Do you follow a hashtag or something? How does that work where you set up custom notifications?

Well, for instance, I was studying small business and getting business advice. I was— my revenue and my business was growing, but the structure and how to think about it and a different approach to it and how he was going to invest the proceeds of the business, I just didn't have a vision for that. And so, I started thinking about real estate and doing a real estate purchase with the profit from my business that I could see was going. So, I planned to do a property acquisition, invest in property. That was the next phase of what I was going to do with business. So, not knowing anything about that, I started following a lot of those people in that world looking for a place to— how am I going to invest? What is that going to look like? But what I'll do is I set that notification bell for people who I wanna see everything they're saying.

And so— You know, I forgot about that notification bell 'cause I never use it.

I only, that's my only real interaction with Twitter. If I don't set the notifications, I'm almost never on that basic home timeline. But I've studied maybe half a dozen different issues, what I call deep dives. By just changing my notifications about what it is I'm reading. Yeah, I follow people who I think could add some value and then I set notifications based on what I happen to be studying at the time.

That's much more strategic than the way I do it. The way I do it is I follow anyone. I follow only people for whom I really want to see everything they have to say. I'm kind of picky about who I follow. Right. Um, so if I'm following you, you should— that's like a big deal. Yeah. Um, and I use the, I use the chronological view, the old school, right, ordering where I see everything in reverse chronological order instead of only seeing what the algorithm thinks I'll find interesting or whatever. Um, I guess I'm just, I'm kind of stuck in that old school mentality. So, um, I'll unfollow people, you know, if they're just spamming like sports updates or random other stuff I'm tired of seeing. Um, because generally, because genuinely, if, if I'm following you, I see literally every tweet that you write. Wow.

Um, so good, bad, or whatever. Yeah, I could never do that. I, I call it deep dives, but, um, but I usually, I'm, I have the notifications set for, for the best 5 or 10 people Yeah, I'll occasionally follow lists, a few different lists, and then I'll interact with the stuff that's on the list. But I would say it's primarily a learning tool for me in, and then what I put out to the universe, I've decided to, to restrict the content. My— yeah, I hit delete a lot. Yeah. And so with the idea, just the basic framework of I want people to understand that I understand politics and using politics as a lever for solving problems at a deeper level than most people understand that. And I try and throw that out there. Yeah. So that people can get that sense. And then I'll interact where I try and add some value to other people's tweets. And so I don't just jump in. But if someone's having a problem or I can solve something or they're thinking about something wrongly, um, that then I'm looking, I'm looking for, for help. Um, one element of that, and maybe it's unique to my business, but, um, I, I look for those interactions where, where people are, have a problem or a pain point, and I try and learn about that problem so I can think about a solution. So I am gearing up. You would not— it would scare the people I'm stalking on Twitter to know how much time I'm spending. And they have no idea who I am. I don't matter yet. But I might matter to them a lot if I can actually solve this problem. But I look at it, and a couple of guys, Moulson Hart and And a guy, I just love this guy, I was listening to a YouTube video from him at 3 o'clock in the morning. I think his name is Michael Patreon. He's an Amazon fulfillment guy. But sells a lot of product on Amazon and so does Moulson Hart, two totally different personalities. But they share a massive pain point with with Amazon. Yep. And so, uh, I listen to everything they say. I, I've looked at their properties. I look at the product that they sell. I'm trying to understand how they make money. And I, I, I intuit, I understand that when you have lots of millionaires that are suffering bad pain points and working through a problem, because they are all problem solvers in order to make millions of dollars. There's no— you have learned how to solve problems, um, but they haven't been able to solve this one or reduce their pain associated with this one. And so I do it as a learning tool, um, but also as a business development tool, because if I develop a solution for that pain point I will make a lot of money on solving that pain point for a lot of millionaires.

Okay, so just to close the loop and make sure that my politically unexperienced brain is following you.

Yeah.

So theoretically, yeah, if you were friendly with a legislator who was sympathetic to sellers who are getting burned on Amazon, then maybe you could work with that legislator in California to craft some good policy around, hey, Amazon, if you want to do business in the state of California, you really need to follow this, this, and this types of procedures in dealing with seller grievances. And then maybe you would engage some of these folks that you had been researching and say, hey, I'm working on this. We would love your input. Or if you'd like me to represent your interests in this, you can engage my firm. Is that—

I don't know, I'm probably getting the details wrong, but is it along the right lines? That's a, that's a really straightforward approach. Okay. And I tend to— I have to think a little more creatively on something like a global enterprise like Amazon. And these business guys, they don't want a legislative fix to the details of their of their interaction with Amazon. But to the degree Amazon is exercising market power to abuse them, um, they might just like that to stop, and—

but they don't know how to do that. But you know how to make— you could—

but you do, right? And so I would look— just, I haven't figured it out yet, but the solution— what, instead of passing a law that says you have to— Amazon has to interact with sellers this way. I would— you might look at a different pain point for Amazon and say, and say, we are gonna— I'm just making this up, but if we said, and I don't necessarily think it's a good idea, but if you said, I'm gonna tax retailers with gross revenue above $5 billion, uh, I'm going to have a revenue tax. And, and that would get Amazon's attention and they would hate a revenue tax. Um, and, and then if you got the power to pass that, you might then say we will lower the tax or we'll drop the bill if you solve this problem.

This market, you're giving away all your secrets here, Russell.

I better cut you off. Rocket science, but it's hard to do. One, it's hard to think of, and two, it's hard to do.

I love this.

But on the other side of solving problems for millionaires is lots of money. And so that's just one. There are other problems. And so, uh, people are building a warehouse or they need a warehouse space to get their stuff in the Amazon fulfillment centers. Um, how do you get a light industrial piece of property entitled or an ag land entitled so that you have cheaper access to an Amazon fulfillment center? There are just a laundry list of ideas that clutter my desk about how to solve problems for for what I think of as Amazon millionaires. They're people whose business is intimately tied to Amazon, but they have all these pain points and workarounds that if I can come up with cheaper workarounds than what they're currently doing using politics as a tool, that I can monetize that. And it led me in weird places, and I've got some relationships in the business now, and it's just the one thread. But I use Twitter to learn what those pain points are and understand that and find people who are talking and knowledgeable about that, who, who put out videos and content and blog posts and books that I can spend time and then thinking about it. And the same way a lawyer thinks of legal solutions or an engineer thinks of an engineering solution. I, if I understand the business well enough that I can apply a political solution, it can be cheaper or better or a different solution than the business person thought of.

That's, that's a great summary.

You should cap that last 3 minutes of audio and like send that to new clients. I'll put it out as a clip, but it's— I got to get that down to a 30-second pitch, and then I could have one of those course module things that people are always selling on.

Well, I think the last few sentences there was perfect. I think, hey, you know, engineers find technical solutions. And what was the one you said before that? Lawyers find legal solutions. Legal. Well, we find political solutions, and those can often be the most cost-effective way to solve a problem with your business.

Boom! Marketing, marketing. All right, let's write it up.

All right, cool. Well, let's, let's, uh, I want to talk a little bit more about Twitter, and then I know we, we want to move on to some of these other platforms here. So I wanted to share a couple things, I guess, about why, why I picked Twitter to sort of go all in on. Um, and it really, it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with Twitter itself. It just so happens, I think there's two things that, that kind of synced up for me that made me pick Twitter. One was I learned that that's where my people are. There's a lot of people on Twitter talking about small business and property management, real estate, and that happens to be the things that I love and care about and can also provide the most value in. And so if it turned out that those people just weren't on Twitter and they were instead in two or three Facebook groups, then maybe I would kind of go hard on those Facebook groups. The other thing that really synced up is that it turns out that the way I think and the way I articulate ideas and thoughts and the way I like to interact with people is a nice fit for Twitter itself, which is a textual medium. Okay, you're mostly writing words. You're not generally, you know, recording a video response or an audio response to a tweet or I mean, sometimes you do, but it's more unusual. Um, and you can contrast that with like Instagram, which is very much a, obviously a visual-heavy, uh, video image type, type platform. And my brain is much more textually oriented, and so I feel very comfortable composing tweets and replying to tweets and writing, and writing threads. So, but that's not going to be true for everyone, right? So if you're looking at social media as a way to lever up your business or build connections or do whatever. You need to figure out where your people are and you need to figure out what works for you. And the other sort of piece that really helped me come into my own on Twitter was finally solving this question I had had in my mind for so many years, which was, should I be engaging as myself? In other words, as my Peter Lohmann Twitter account? Or should I be engaging as my company? Or in other words, the RLPMG Twitter account, because I have an account for both. And it was like I couldn't, for whatever reason, I was really confused and kind of stuck on that for so many years. Like I was, I would sort of wonder like if I put out a tweet from my personal account that's like, uh, we, we just hired someone and it changed my business and here's how that's going. I had in my mind that people would be like, like, what, what business? I don't know. Like, what are you talking about, dude? Like, I have no idea what you're talking about. What business?

What person?

Like, I had in my mind, like, oh, that should be coming from the RL Property Management Twitter account, because then they would know, you know, that what business it was. I don't know. I was very confused and frustrated. And I eventually just figured out, I'm going to just tell you, the listener, so you don't have to wonder the same thing. You do it from your personal account. You can just pretty much just completely abandon your business Twitter account.

No, that's an emotional connection. You and your partner and your very best employees have an emotional connection to RL Property Management, but the rest of the world does not. So Facebook is sort of the granddaddy. We've talked a little bit about Twitter. Is Facebook a primary for— so Twitter is your primary. Where do you see Facebook fitting in the mix?

Yeah, so Facebook is, is definitely a distant second. I am active on Facebook. I had been off the platform for years and I rejoined about a year ago. Um, I use it a couple different ways. One, I think the primary way I really use it is there's a lot of value in the groups. So you've probably heard people say on Twitter, like, it's all in the DMs. And that actually really is true on Twitter. Like, pro tip, open up your DMs if you're, if you're trying to grow your presence there, you're going to be amazed what comes through. But on Facebook, it's in the groups. So I'm a member of 3 or 4 different trade industry type groups where it's a bunch of other property management company owners. And we're talking, just talking shop and And that's useful not only to keep up with sort of the bleeding edge of what's happening in the industry, but also I'm able to show my value and my sort of thought leadership by sharing the best of best articles and ideas that I have with the idea of just sort of staying connected with other folks that, that are, you know, at the top of their game in the industry. And then I'm also in like a local real— a couple different local real estate groups.. And I'll post, you know, if people are asking about property management, I can post in there and we do generate leads through there. And then on my personal page, you know, I'll do an update every few weeks of just something interesting I'm working on or a photo or something like that. That's friends and family. So there's, there's not a lot of business use there. I guess that's more about just staying connected to personal friends and stuff. Um, that's my take on Facebook. I'm not like an expert on Facebook, and it, it's not sort of like— I feel like my people aren't really there. So getting back to what I was saying earlier about Twitter, I don't invest a whole lot of time and energy onto it.

How about you? I use it a lot for clients for advertising purposes, for reach and audience, um, and I'm, I'm evaluating some of this and, and how I do it, but, uh the— you can create— I create groups and audiences, and I've done some in the past where you can really divide people. And so once I've got them herded into different categories, you know, and it could be, you know, I love Biden, I love Trump, I hate Biden, I hate Trump. Those are 4 different categories of people. And then you can present niche messages to those people. It makes shooting fish in a barrel from an advertising perspective. Um, you know, I would just— I, I've just been feeling guilty about, uh, perpetuating that sort of division, which is very helpful for advertising purposes, but I don't think it's healthy for our culture. And so I've just been backing away from it as a strategy because I just don't feel good about it. Like, but it works really well and not everyone is backing away from it. And so I've just been reevaluating my interaction with Facebook. I haven't posted there for several weeks now because I can't control on my personal feed who I'm saying what to. Facebook is deciding that. And so if I post 10 different things, but Facebook is only showing some people these 2 things and other people these 2 other things, The impression of who you are is totally distorted. Yeah. And so, so understanding that from a business perspective, I haven't been subjecting myself to that personally, and I'm just reevaluating it. But I, I do think the idea of a group and coming together to talk about specific things— I've sort of burdened a lot of my friends are lobbyists and PR people and government staffers. And the financial lessons that I've learned, I'd like to share with them. They're often high net worth individuals or high income individuals, low net worth individuals. So they're people who have made good money or making good money, but not necessarily preserving or building wealth. Because the nature of how we make money in this world, once you make it to a certain level, $150,000, $200,000, $250,000, that range, once you make it there, it's very easy to maintain in that space. And if you're making that kind of money every year, you might— your lifestyle might be one level, but your, your asset ownership and wealth creation there are other levels to it that I just don't think a lot of people in my space understand. So, with the idea of adding value, I think I just like maybe use the group and some credibility I have in my community to create a space where we could talk about the business of politics and wealth creation in a different way. So, I might use the groups that way, but I haven't fully developed that strategy yet, but that's on my mind on, on how to use it. I see a lot of your stuff on LinkedIn, and I share the podcast and bits and pieces on LinkedIn. It's more expensive to advertise on LinkedIn, so I haven't really devoted much time to it. How do you evaluate LinkedIn, and what are you trying to accomplish in that space?

Yeah, so LinkedIn is really powerful. I think it's undervalued. A lot of people think of it kind of as a joke, and they go there and they feel like they're their feed is filled with nonsense and they're constantly getting spammed. Um, and those are problems, but there's also a lot of value there because, you know, when you connect to someone on LinkedIn, um, they, they're gonna see your stuff if they're on the platform with any regularity. And there's certain groups of people that spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. I think, um, sort of working professionals. Bankers, lawyers, CPAs, anyone, like a lot of government people. There is an audience there that's valuable. And so I like to use that platform to sort of showcase our company's capabilities and my own industry knowledge. So I'll actually kind of take what's really resonated well on Twitter and repurpose that content on LinkedIn. Um, the LinkedIn algorithm is a little less forgiving. You really have to have something good if many people are gonna see it. And so I'll kind of, Twitter's more forgiving and, and you can pump a lot of volume into Twitter without really affecting anything. So I'll use Twitter almost like a testing ground and then just take the best of the best. But so yeah, I try to, uh, forge connections there. The search is really powerful there. So if you're looking for, uh, a certain type of person that works at a company or you're researching a company. Or you're researching a candidate for a position you're hiring. We do use it for hiring. We'll use the LinkedIn Jobs feature. I've got a job posting up there right now for our director of maintenance operations. And I had a great conversation with a gentleman this morning from who applied from LinkedIn. So, uh, definitely worth investing some time there. You, you can expand your network and, um, it's just another avenue to stay in front of people the way I, I think of it as like, I think of sort of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram as there's very little overlap there. So if I post the same thing on all 4 of those platforms, very few people are going to see it 2 or 3 times. But it's a way to make sure that I'm staying top of mind in front of all my connections. And so it's just sort of, it's another one of the avenues by which I can remind people about who I am and what our company can do for them or for folks that they may refer. So I don't have any type of amazing strategy ideas. I think I feel more comfortable on Twitter, but I don't think it should be overlooked either.

It sounds like an area to continue to develop. You know, it's, it's strong. You know, it's useful. Exactly how and where you're going to extract the value I like the idea of touching different people in different spaces too, as I think about it. As I think about it that way, that's a good way to think about it. I may spend— I may devote 5 or 10 minutes a day to LinkedIn to just give it a full ride and see what develops. It's— yeah, it's— do I use it as— I think of it as a place to go hunting for some talent or when people are job hunting and just stay connected with the people who I'm there. I'm kind of interested in what other people are posting, but I assume if someone's posting on LinkedIn that they're job hunting is kind of how I think about it. And I know that's not the case or that's the stereotype. And so I just need to get more comfortable with it.

Yeah, and I think for all these platforms, it's really worth taking some time to prune the deadwood. Just go through, unfollow. I mean, you don't have to unfriend or, you know, just make it— remove a connection, but you can unfollow on all these platforms. You can either mute or unfollow. You'll stay connected to them, but you won't see their stuff. And just taking out the worst 5 or 10 people from each of these networks is going to dramatically change your experience because Once you clear out some of that spam and nonsense from people that are just irrelevant or way too noisy, the, the algorithm is going to now make room for much more high-quality content that's tailored to what you want to see. And by liking things and muting people, you're training the algorithm about what you want to see more of and less of. And it really works. I get a lot of value out of my LinkedIn feed. I stay connected with what's happening locally here in terms of properties changing hands. In terms of what brokers are active. You know, I just, it's valuable, but you're not just going to get on there and instantly see value. You have to invest some time and share posts of your own and be careful about who you're connecting with, especially on LinkedIn. Like, I'm pretty picky again about who I accept connections from. I'm not going to connect with every random IT services guy that wants my business, you know. There's no value in connecting with someone that's just trying to sell you something unless you think there could be like a synergy there.

So, right. I, it's funny, I, I love sales calls and people and, and the curse of my business is that I have to answer my phone. Like there's no way I can't answer my phone. That's what ultimately answering the phone makes my cash register ring. And I, I get the jitters about missing a call. Yeah, my mom ran out. Yeah, I talk to the guy who's selling me, my car warranty's expiring. I'm the reason you guys all get those calls 'cause I chat with that guy. But then I will often, when I get a good sales call, I will connect with that person on LinkedIn. Like I will go look them up. Yes, I'm trying to hire your salespeople and fit them into something. I don't mind connecting with people. I'll connect with— if somebody sends me a connection request, I accept it. Um, I don't necessarily engage with their stuff, obviously. I'm trying to curate my feed that way, what the intake. Um, but I spend more time than maybe I should. But I— and it's scary, and I have no problem doing it with— on your podcast. But my rule is I will pretty much help anybody who asks. Like, if you ask me for help, I will dive into that problem and try and help, like, yeah, and try and, and solve it and, or think about it, because I can't not think about it. And so, and a lot of times that turns into work if it's an expensive problem, and I can solve it. It turns into work. If it's a cheap problem and I can solve it, I can solve it. I get better at solving problems. You identified me as a problem solver, and I didn't make any money on it, but the expense associated with solving a problem generally determines how much money I get paid to solve it, or how much money you make from me solving that problem will often determine how much I charge for it as well.

Yeah, I think that's a, I think that's a really great way to move about your life and on social media too. I think a lot of people get really caught up in posting on social media and they forget the value of commenting on other people's stuff, whether it's Twitter, whether it's Facebook, whether it's LinkedIn. Jump into the replies and add value there. Comment, say, hey, that's really exciting. I'm so happy for you, or Hey, that's interesting. We actually ran into this problem. Here's what we did. Or just anything. I mean, just show the people that you're a real person and you give a hoot about what they're doing and their trials and tribulations and their successes. And that, you know, it's funny, I've gotten some of my highest value interactions have been in replies to other people's posts, not just me firing off whatever I think is going to be you know, valuable that morning. So that's something to not overlook. Something that always comes to mind when I start to talk about social media is a quote from a friend of mine named Allie Lehman, who runs a marketing agency, very successful and does incredible work here in Columbus called The Wonder Jam. But she says, the world wants more of you. And there's some real truth to that. And it's one of those things that you don't really believe it until you see it start to happen. And I have felt that pull a little bit in these recent months as I've been more active on Twitter and with the podcast. And you're getting comments and feedback from people saying, I love your stuff, I love your content, blah, blah, blah. And I think everyone has an area that they're experienced and articulate and could find an audience in and experience that same sensation of like the world wants more of you.

So It's a, it's a good— you've really tested the bounds of that theory with, with this last network that we're gonna talk about. I will confess that this is the only one where I am fairly confident I add no value and I simply lurk. I'm, I'm confessing to that when we start, but I assume that the fact that other people disagree and find value, that maybe I can learn from this interaction. But I am a Twitch stalker. Tell me how you use Twitch and what you invest in Twitch, because it— and then I have a theory of Twitch that I'll share after you after you give your rationale.

Okay, so if you're not familiar, Twitch is a live streaming platform. Um, you can stream, which means broadcast your video from your computer, and then your audio from you talking is basically what it is. And so a lot of people use it for gaming. You know, you stream, you know, professional, uh, esport folks will stream themselves playing Call of Duty or whatever. Um, and so there'll be the most successful Twitch streamers are like super entertaining or funny during their stream, and they end up building communities around what they're doing. And so part of the experience on Twitch is there's a chat, and the chat is anyone who's following the person and watching their live stream can just type. And you, so you can type and interact with the streamer himself or herself or the other folks in the chat. And so I was aware of Twitch because I really like to play this game called Rocket League, which is like car soccer, kind of. It's a pretty popular game. I just like to play and unwind for a few hours at the end of the day. And so I ended up just by following the scene a little bit, following some people on Twitch who broadcast Rocket League. And so I had known that, you know, people use Twitch for all kinds of different things, not just gaming. And I just got to thinking one day like, hey, all I really want to do at the end of the day is sit around and play Rocket League for a couple hours and chit-chat about business and real estate and property management. So why don't I just combine those two things? And I'll stream myself playing on Twitch. And I'll just invite whoever wants to come in and watch and just ask me anything, or we'll have a good discussion. And so I started doing this maybe a month ago, I try and do it 2 or 3 nights a week, it's usually around like 8 or 9 PM Eastern. And it's been minorly successful. And by successful, I mean, it's not just me playing and no one's watching. I'll usually get 1 or 2 people in the chat who are active and engaging with me, and we're having a good discussion. And then my most recent stream, I had a friend and fellow property management company owner come and join me as a guest. And so he, we kind of like co-hosted the stream and we were playing together. So yeah, it's a lot of fun. It's very casual. It's not really like my other platforms where I'm trying to be like serious business guy. It's much more about just kind of sharing whatever's on my mind and just interacting with people.

I started to comment once and, uh, my— you, you have a, you have a fan. My son says that you're very good. Oh wow. Yeah. And so we were watching and, uh, He plays and I don't, and he doesn't play that much. He used to play a little bit more. He's, uh, okay, he's 12. He's 12. Anyway, that, that son is 12 that, that's interested. And I— yeah, you were playing a game and you hadn't scored, and I was like, do you ever score? Like, um, and he— Dad, don't do that! Like, like, he thinks you're— he thinks you're awesome and that my question would have just And again, that's 12. He would have been embarrassed that he lurking on an anonymous account asked someone he doesn't know a question. Would have embarrassed him. So that's just one little aside just to let you know that.

Oh wow, well, that's great.

That's nice to hear that. Yeah, that he is a fan. But if you successfully convince your wife that, um, that spending a couple hours playing video games is work.

That's right. That is great. I'm working, uh, don't, don't bother me. I'm working right here. Uh, no, she, she's actually supportive. Um, she got it right away. She said she, she recognized the value in it. And, uh, you know, obviously we have nights that we set aside for, for doing stuff together and It doesn't always happen if I'm having a hard time getting our daughter to go down or whatever. Right. But yeah, it's fun.

I'm just experimenting. It seems healthier, a healthier wind down than maybe a double dose of an alcoholic beverage or something else that people might do to wind down in the evening. Yeah. Yep. Well, I think that's a good overview. I hope, I hope our listeners get some some value out of it. I did. And I'm going to put some work in at least on the LinkedIn and Facebook group. I think a little more attention in both those areas.

Yeah, that'd be great. And if you're not following Russell and I on our various social media accounts, go ahead and do that. And you can find me on Twitch if you want to just look for the gamertag Property Management Gamer. So it's twitch.tv/PropertyManagementGamer if you want to follow me and you'll get notified when I go live.