How To Improve Social Media Engagement For Your Business

Hey, it's Mark Podolski, the Land geek with your favorite niche real estate website, www.thelandgeek.com. and today's guest is new. It's an entrepreneur with a really cool solution for a lot of you. But before we talk to our guests, I'd be remiss if I didn't properly introduce my co host. You know him, you love him. Scott Todd from scotttodd.net landmodo.com if you're not automating your Craigslist and your Facebook postings, posting domination.com thelandgeek Learn anything about anything. Investor ninjas.com Scott Todd. How are you, Mark?

I'm doing well. How about you?

I'm miserable right now. I have a fancy new mic and it's not working. And it's worse because it's on the Mac and maybe I should get a Surface.

Yeah, listen, my Surface is doing just fine. Mics are working fine. I don't know, Mark. Maybe you need to get a real computer.

I got a Surface also.

Oh, boom.

I'm using it right now.

I love this podcast already, Mark.

This podcast is already depressing. I'm gonna drop off and let the.

Two of you guys have a Surface moment, huh?

Do this for sure. You know, whatever, whatever. All right, our guest today is Michael Lam from Cato.com. michael, welcome. Tell us a little bit about you and Cato.

Thank you, guys. Well, I'm excited to be here. Thanks for the invite. You know, very briefly, what we do is we help real estate agents get more engagement opportunities by essentially turning their social media posts into the smart websites that have a live chat attached to them. So imagine you're going to. Most real estate investors do this, especially agents. They'll post a coming soon. A real estate listing right on Facebook is very common thing they'll do. They'll post photos. But what we do is we take the exact same process. Instead of posting it directly, you go through Cato. We'll turn that into a landing page so when someone clicks on it, it goes to a website that has a gallery of those photos that you just posted, maybe with a video, with a virtual tour, but has a live chat that automatically starts the sales conversation for you.

That's really cool. Are there any other applications that it could be used for? Let's say you're not a real estate agent, but you own real estate and you're selling it for sale by owner.

Absolutely. And there's a perfect question you asked because it's applicable to any business that just wants to generate conversations that leads into sales. So for sale by owner will be perfect because they're a bit limited on their exposure. So a way to do that is they can create their own property listing through Cato and then use that as a tool to generate those engagements. And you can put down on multiple platforms. It's not just Facebook. So you create it once you share it on maybe Facebook, and then you share it on the biggest B2B market, which is LinkedIn. Post it over there. And the conversations are universal. They all go through one central location and it's all through your phone. So the minute someone puts their information in, we have AI voice technology that will actually call the lead within two minutes and drop a ringless voicemail and personalize that message. So we do a lot of automations in the background really quickly. So the minute someone gives their information our AI voice, it's like what you would hear from Alexa. It sounds just like that, but might be better. I personally say it sounds better. And it'll call them, it'll say, hi, Mark, my name is Arisa, I'm Michael's AI assistant. I just got your inquiry. I sent a message to Michael who'll call you back shortly. So it does that within two minutes and buys you time to actually follow up. And that does a tremendous job because it builds that initial relationship. Because it's not a cold call because now you're following up on that voicemail that was just dropped.

Okay, Scott, Todd, are your, Are your wheels spinning?

I mean, that's pretty cool, right? Like, that's pretty cool stuff. And so, like, how complex this seems like it'd be complicated to set up it is it?

Well, for their realtor. No. You literally sign up. Yeah, you sign up, you pay for all the. All of this automatically set up for you. If you want to customize, maybe the messaging, you can go in and make some change to it, but people can get out in the gate maybe in less than five minutes. You pay for it and you can literally take your phone, take a few photos and share it on Facebook and the website's done for you automatically with the live chat. You don't have to worry about setting up the live chat, how the message is going to come to you, the fact that you just downloaded the mobile app, it's all set up automatically, seamless.

Okay, Mark, listen, I think that just to be fair to you, Mark, I think we should just. In this podcast now, you and I, we have this like hidden gem that just you and I use. No one else, like Talk about scarcity mentality. Let's just shut it down now and you get the safe face because your microphone issue, no one will ever know. We get this cool technology that no one will ever know.

You know what, this is sort of a little hidden gem. So Michael, who's your competition? Like, I think Scott might be right, we might just end this now. And really, you know, I don't think you know about this, about Scott and I, but we're constantly competing. So I'd like to get an exclusive deal just with you and Cato as long as Scott can't have it because this could double my sales.

Yeah, it's amazing. Obviously I'm the founder of the company, so I'm very biased, but you know, I went through a lot of trials and tribulations, you can say a lot of challenges and led to this point. And this is by far, you know, obviously my best product. Our best product. And we just launched about last quarter. So, you know, this isn't something that's been around for some time, but I've been in the AI chatbot business for more than three years. I was one of the first to build one of the most viral chatbots on Facebook messenger in maybe 2017. Prior to Cato, I started another company called Gohire with a partner of mine. And I'll share this story with you that explains how we led into Cato was I was in HR industry early on. I was actually convinced by my co founder to join his company, let's start to go into hr. I was never really fascinated with hr, but I wanted to get off the ground. I wanted to do something other than the 9 to 5 type job. I decided let's just get into it. And then we had this problem where people were just going on our website and they were just bouncing. So we get maybe thousands a month coming to our website and they would just leave, they'll come in, they two seconds in, they bounce. So we're like, okay, what's going on? So we decided to put a live chat in, start talking to the people that were going on the website and we're just asking them like, how can we help you? And they were just didn't know how to search for jobs. They would tell us, I'm looking for a part time job in Kansas City. So we realized, okay, if they were looking just for something simple as that, we just went in the background, created another tab, went on our own website and did a search for them and said, oh, I found 2,000 jobs for you part time in Kansas City. We gave them the link. Then we realized, okay, how do we automate this? And this is how chatbot technology was just coming to the media in late 1617. This is when Facebook, Microsoft, Google, all these platforms started coming out saying, you can do chatbots. And for those of you listeners who don't know what a chatbot is, essentially an automated messaging system. You send them a message and it replies back automatically in context. So we had some system in place where we would say, you know, are you looking for a job? They would say yes. Then we would ask them what type of job and what location. And then based on just maybe two or three questions, we would send it off through our server. That would pull in thousands of jobs and we had access to international jobs. So when we built something on Facebook, I think it was around Thanksgiving 2017 when we released it. Within 30 days, we went in over 100 countries doing over 100,000 messages. And when I logged into the computer, I literally thought we had a virus on Facebook because I kept seeing these conversations going back and forth and I wasn't the one typing. It was our system interacting with the consumer. And. And it just took off. And then that's how basically I got into chatbot. I mean, prior to that I was very technical, but chatbot, that's how we got into that space. And then we got into automated voice technology. And this is how Alexa came out and how we got more involved with using tools like Alexa and got us to eventually once. I skipped a lot of steps here, but Go Hire was a very integral piece of my path that led me to Cato. So I stuck with Gohire for maybe a year and a half and then I decided to leave because just HR wasn't my cup of tea and I wanted to do more real estate. You know, I've been investing in real estate. You know, back in. I started buying properties back in 2008, right when it crashed. You know, I always joke around, tell people I wish I was that smart. And I timed was just at that time, that's all I can afford. And it was just to my benefit that, you know, the prices were dropping like crazy. So I got in at a very good price and I started, you know, accumulating properties over the course of the years, buying homes, doing some flips, doing a lot of single family residence properties. And, you know, I was very fascinated about the entire industry. But one thing that stuck with me was just the agents, like the agents, maybe I was way ahead of the curve in terms of technology and I was always like maybe five steps ahead of the agents. And that really bothered me because I knew I needed an agent no matter what. Like, in my. I couldn't see that I can do these transactions without an agent. I really needed that agent to be there. There's a lot of aspects to real estate investing that a lot of, I would say tech entrepreneurs in the real estate space don't understand because they think that you can just cut out their commission and get rid of agents. But when you invest in properties and when you buy properties, a lot of it is just very emotional. You're talking about just not just the individual, but like, you know, if you have a spouse like those, those two needs to be in sync with the transaction. And a lot of times the agents are the ones who will, you know, help, you know, help cater and help control those emotions because it's the biggest purchase of your life, you know? Yeah, I know a lot.

No, no, absolutely. So I'm all in on the chat bot thing. In fact, I don't even know if Scott Todd knows this. I actually had an opportunity to invest in manychat. It's series A.

Okay.

Round. So I've been very interested in the chatbot space for a long time. Scott and I have a very simple philosophy. We can always make more money, we can't get more time. So anything that we can automate, systematize, delegate, we love. Now the question is, let's say that we have an ad on Facebook for this piece, this 10 acre parcel in Texas. Well, we might get 50 inquiries on it. Like we put up the ad on Facebook, we might get 50 inquiries. Would the. With the bot, would we be. Would we be using your bot to create the ad and then the bot will then respond? Because my knowledge of the bot with Facebook is they have to. They only can. Can sort of engage on a Facebook page. It can't be like in Marketplace.

Yeah, that work. Yeah.

So just to put. Just to put some clarity around that too, really what's happening, Michael, is we go out and we post an ad. Not an ad ad, but we make a post in marketplace. Okay. And so in marketplace, like when someone responds to something, you can't fire up a chatbot because the chatbots for business and not a personal. And you're posting under the personal piece. Right? That's the context of Mark's question.

Yeah. So in the marketplace, I'm not too familiar with that. And I think, to be clear, what we do on our end, we're at the very early stage of the automation we don't leverage the actual chatbot technology like what we built at Gohire. That's actually down in the pipeline. So what we're solving in the real estate industry is the fact a couple of things. One, you know, close to 50% of real estate leads never get responded to. So the fact that once a lead is captured, we deliver that to the agent multiple ways, instantaneously. We send them a text message, we send them an app notification, we send them an email. So there's no excuse for the agent to not be aware of this lead. Secondly, we make sure that if they give their phone number, the lead gives their phone number, we follow up. So we don't continue the conversation. We don't carry a conversation like a chatbot technology could do. We have that in our prior products. But right now that's not our focus. Our focus is really to, if they're posting something on Facebook personally, how do you get them into a landing page and then how you get them to have that conversation started? And that's what we're solving. If you're already posting these photos by yourself, why not put a strategy behind it? Why not take them to a landing page that has a live chat, has a pixel, and you can start retargeting them automatically? So that's what we're solving is like, that piece will do the automation now. And I'll step back because a lot of people, I used to support a community of 3,000 bot developers in Motion AI. The biggest misconception is people think that you can have this chatbot that's going to solve this problem of you not being there to have that conversation. That's, that's the. One of the biggest, I don't know, maybe fallacy or misconception because chatbot is not at a state right now that is affordable, that can have a conversation that's fluid. Okay. What I mean by that is you will easily detect this is not a real person, and you can easily detect that this is an automated system. So what we've always, you know, what I always have taught is that you've got to be clear up front. You got to let them know this is an automated system. And, and you guide them through a process, meaning you give them buttons that they can press that can guide them down a flow. So you pre qualify the lead. You ask them, are you looking to buy? Yes or no? And if they say yes, then you ask them, how soon are you looking to buy? And you ask them questions that are relevant to those answers, but you take them Down a path that is still fluid, but you give them buttons to press, whereas you don't have to make them type it out or you're not trying to ask them a very open ended question. Because then if you do that, I mean, I don't know if you know this, but I don't want to bring up these stories that I find funny, but Microsoft, they had this bot called Tay. I don't know if you guys remember that, but it was very, I would say viral because that bot went racist. And it was because early on they, Microsoft claimed that they had a very intelligent chatbot. Go ahead and play with it. And people started messing around with that bot and it turned that bot into a racist bot and they had to turn it down. If you just step back and not look at that, what I just shared. But more on the amount of money that was involved to create this chatbot was a lot of money and they still made mistakes. So as an entrepreneur, as businesses looking to embrace chatbot technology, if a company is offering, you know, 50 bucks a month for this, you've got to understand, like, you know, you gotta ask yourself, like, how much money did they put in to make? If they're claiming it's gonna be really, you know, intelligent, you gotta, you know, you know, I always take it with a grain of salt. Gotta be careful because, you know, if the company is coming in with very clear expectations, that's what you want. But if they come out and say we're an AI company with the smartest and will solve your problems, you got to be careful with that. So, you know, that's just my be aware type, you know, because I've seen it all.

Okay, so you would recommend then that instead of sort of putting our ad up in Marketplace, we could put it on LinkedIn, our personal Facebook profile. We could use Twitter.

Yes, in your Facebook business page.

In your Facebook business page. And then using your technology, it would then respond with AI, it would call them if they were a qualified lead.

Yeah, they put in the information. Absolutely. And you can do, you can, you know, if you make, if you're doing a land, you're doing a promotion about a land, you know, you say something maybe interesting about that land, right? And maybe that land. I don't know, I don't know. I mean, I'm in Silicon Valley here. There was tons of land near Google's biggest campus that they're planning on building. So maybe you're promoting selling a chunk of that land there. You might want to have your initial question that will Automatically pop up will be a question related to that. Are you looking to live near Google's next campus type thing? And if that's the case, maybe that's an important qualifier because you're targeting people who are interested in technology that wants to live in that space. Right? So whatever that first question is, it's gonna have to be the question that will kick out maybe 50% of your non qualified leads type thing. And then from there you go on. You know, what we seen is that you don't get a lot. I mean you might get a lot of traffic, but you don't get a lot of inquiries unless they're like serious intent. Like the way people system is set up, it's like if I'm looking at your content, if I really have a question, I'm already giving you my intent that I got this question. I'm not going to chit chat with you. I know people have concerns like if I put a live chat on my website, I'm going to be chit chatting with people. And I tell people, dude, people have so much crap in their life they don't got time to chit chat. If they look at your content and they have a question, it's because they've shown interest. You should answer that. You know, you got to start building that relationship right away. And I tell people, like if you're running a business and you get a phone call, are you going to automatically say, I don't got time for this. Or if you are available, wouldn't you want to pick up the phone call? Because that could be, I don't know, Bill Gates on the other line. I don't know. Right? I mean, you don't know. So you need to pick up that phone call and then start qualifying. So similarly, instead of a physical phone call, you got this virtual call, right? Someone's messaging you through the Internet. Especially with the pandemic happening, the shelter in place, this is the best time to do it.

Well, let's take Land Moto for example. Scott has a platform. Landmodo.com people list their properties on the platform. Thousands of people, you know, thousands of listings. Yet could Scott embed this technology a chat where maybe not for every listing, but just for LAN Moto, do you have questions about upload, like just for the consumer, do you have questions about the service? And then I might have questions like what's the difference between premium and the free version? And then the bot essentially would respond, could he do that just on his website?

He could. So in theory he could we have a, you know, that's next. I'm sorry, turn off my phone here to put a live chat on your website. That's something that we're putting out in next quarter that you have right now. It's all based off of landing pages. So if he, you know, our product is geared towards those who are more on social media. If you're posting photos or videos on social media, that's what we're targeting right now. But that's certainly down in the pipeline where you can put that, put that chat box in your website.

Let's say I go and visit Land Moto and he does a retargeting ad to me. That's where I could then engage with your technology.

Absolutely. What we've seen is people run ads, they'll have like maybe a carousel of images, and then at the end there's always this option to learn more or view the website. And when they click on that, it takes them to the Cato's landing page where they look at the content again and then they end up speaking to someone or they double opt in. So the leads that they do get on Cato is actually more qualified because they went through the ad, they submitted the information, and they went to the website and they still submitted additional information. So you're getting just better quality. You're not getting quantity, you're getting quality. You're getting people who actually have interest.

Scott Todd.

I was just gonna say, Mark, the cool thing about what they're doing, that you think about this, right? Like too many times, people are so focused on their website, oh, I need a website to start my business. And we keep telling them, like, no, you don't. Well, to me, the cool thing that you do is you download his app, you take pictures of the land right from your phone. Like, you don't have to have to take pictures. You can take it from the camera reel or the camera roll, you can upload it. You're creating this thing, it sends it to your personal Facebook page, or it sends it to your business profile page. But when it does that, it also creates a landing page. So then when he's on fit, like let's say that you go and you look at my listing on Facebook, you're like, oh, let me see this thing. Well, I can either give people the link, like, hey, do you have a website? I don't need a website. Why? Because his software created a landing page for me automatically. All I got to do is give them the link and then when they go back to the link, and they're looking at the link, and they're like, I'm interested. All of a sudden, his technology kicks in. So even on Facebook, it's not about the Facebook chat, the way that you're thinking about it, the chatbot, it's about getting them to come back to the landing page. And that's where all the magic happens. So unlike all the chatbots that are out there, his secret sauce is that he's getting them back to the landing page, which I love, because you own the landing page. You don't own Facebook. You don't own their stupid algorithm. You get them back to your landing page, and then all of a sudden, the technology kicks in. So, like, do you need a website? No, not with his technology, because now you're just creating the website from your phone. Okay. And that's the secret sauce. Yeah, the social media, all that stuff. But we know that social media doesn't really kick in that much until you get them back to your landing page. So could you run a Facebook ad, I'm sorry, in the marketplace, and provide a link? Hey, want to learn more information? Click here. Because you can put a link in a marketplace ad. They click there. Now they're back on your landing page, where the retargeting all kicks in. You don't get from the Facebook piece. See, we got to kill this podcast right now, Mark, because, like, this is good stuff, but you got to think about how it gets implemented. Like, that's the thing.

Hey, Scott, you hit it. So I wanted to mention a few things that will get you even more excited, because you got it. I mean, you caught this very quickly, because the fact that you're driving. We're driving the consumers to a landing page that is really owned by you. You have a pixel embedded in it. You're talking about not just Facebook pixels, we're talking about Google Pixels. So anyone that has a G account also gets tracked automatically under these systems. So the minute they go on your landing page, you. You know, in the marketing world, you can have a campaign that runs like, 10 bucks a month that constantly puts your brand in front of people's faces. The fact that they saw one of your CATO pages, it puts it into a database so that now they're seeing the land geek everywhere they go, because you put in, like, 10, 20 bucks for those who have seen your content, right? So now you're building this pipeline of potential customers in the future. On top of that, you're right. It's creating this gallery of photos and landing page because of the pictures you've taken. And you can go even further because if you want to, you do a post in the evening, you go back on the computer, you can add in a video, you could put a virtual tour in. And you know, one of the things we're working on already is putting, working with a company to automate a video slideshow. So, so when you put in three, four photos together, it's automatically going to create a very professional looking, like promo ad with those photos.

And then, so then my question is, is there a way that I can not start this from my phone, but to have like an assistant start it from the computer?

Absolutely. And if you want to use a lot of the advanced features, highly recommend on the computer, because on the computer you can customize a chat box per landing page. So let's say you have a land in Florida and a land in San Francisco. Let's just say each of those chat box can be relevant to those lands. So maybe the link, you know, the chat box for the Florida uses a blue color and it, you know, talks about something about the Florida, you know, environment. And then you have one in San Francisco and you talk about the environment in San Francisco. But the chat box, when they start the conversation, the custom greeting is going to be relevant to whatever that content is. And we're not talking about spending 30 minutes an hour to figure this out. We're talking about click, click, click, you're done. It's all within the space that is given to you. We've designed it to be really simple because our target audience are realtors. And realtors want simplicity, right? They, they don't want complication. A lot of them are not tech savvy. So we've made it to be super easy to use.

Michael, I would just say that the one thing, the one thing I don't love about like, and I like it, right? Like, don't get me wrong, but like, obviously there's, there's ways that we can improve everything, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

The one thing that I don't love is I wish, and I'm hoping I can have influence here, I wish that I could do a C name with you. Okay, so like I could do like scottsland.com and like all of my properties filter under there and I see that you can do a custom domain, but it says $15 per year per property.

Yes, yes.

Like that's expensive, man.

Yeah, so if so, we already are. Let me see it clearly. It's already in the pipeline to do something in the map, in the space of what you just spoke about. You pay for a specific domain. Let's say, you know, landingsf.com every time you make a post relating to that, it will build you this one website that every post gets added to that website. So you start building a real time dynamic.

Yeah.

Link. It's like you're creating a marketplace, right? Yes, Craigslist. And every time you click on it, it takes you to an individual landing page for that post. So just, it's all interconnected. So that's. Cato's already thought about that. We're down in the pipeline on that. But it'll be, you know, maybe. Maybe in the fourth quarter type thing.

All right, well, Michael, we're all in. So once we hang up, we're going to have to have another discussion about other things. But you're not at that point in the podcast where we want to put you on the spot and ask you for your tip of the week. A website, a resource, a book, something else actionable, where the art of passive income listeners can go improve their businesses, improve their lives. What do you got?

Yeah, so two things. You know, this is something that I wish someone gave to me when I started out my entrepreneurial career. Career or just in life. It's a book called Millionaire Next Door. I don't know if you guys have read that. I think the media does a horrible job of conveying reality. And when you talk about wealth, what it means to build wealth and what it means to be financially free. People see the glitz, the glamour, the jewelry, the cars. In reality, the painter, your plumber are the ones who are millionaires. And it's because of, you know, how much money they're keeping. They're being very smart about their money. You know, people give a bad name of being, you know, cheap. You know, there's the difference between cheap and frugal. You know, I like to say I'm a proud, frugal individual because I don't waste my money. I'm not going to buy a Maserati. I'm going to buy my Prius. So I saved my money on the gas and the foot, you know, in actual eco footprint. But, you know, that's something like that book. When I read that, it just made me feel so much better knowing that, okay, the path that I'm going at, because I was never a spender. But, you know, you always hear that you got to spend to play. You got to, you know, you know, you got to. You got to spend money to make money type thing. But, you know, reading that book really puts in perspective, like, you know, anyone can do it. Literally anyone can do it. So that book, for those who are looking to, you know, get a better understanding of how successful people think, I think that does a really good job as a majority millionaire next door. And then a second book that I started to read, I think it's called. What is that book called? It's called why doctor Skipped Breakfast by Gregory Charlotte. Check that book out because that book talks about why intermittent fasting is a great thing, how it can reverse aging. When I started, I've been fasting maybe the past year, and I did it more because I've just been so busy, I don't have time to eat running the startup. But I didn't realize the actual health benefits of not eating or skipping your lunch. There's actual really good health benefits from this. And reading that book has really kind of, you know, makes you feel better, like, okay, you're not doing anything that's detrimental to your health. So those two books are probably the two books I recommend right now.

Yeah, I've been intermittent fasting for years now. Dr. Peter Attia has a great, like, podcast on this and there's an app called Zero that kind of gives you all the education you can track your fasting. And yeah, it's. It's great. Scott. Todd, what's your tip of the week mark?

You know, when you look at a website and up on the browser tab it's got that little icon there. Those things are called fave icons, right? Like you got this cool little thing and sometimes people have this website and they don't even know how to create one of those things or what it's even called, what's called a fave icon. And ultimately, what's really kind of cool is that you can go to my tip of the week for this week, which is Favicon IO Favicon IO and when you go there, they help you easily create one of those little things. You load it into your website and next thing you know, you look like a real, real website.

Look at that.

That's cool.

Very cool. I wonder if I even have that on my new website, huh? Very cool. Well, look, those are great tips, guys, but my tip is going to actually make you a ton of money and save you a ton of time, which is what software is all about. Go to kado.com, k a y-o h.com engage and delight your prospects instantly. Chat, auto engagements, marketing. Help consolidate your social media engagements. It's video friendly, smart website builder. And this is Q1. Wait till Q4. This is just the beginning of all this magical AI goodness. So Cato.com I have a link to it. K A Y-O H.com Michael Lam are we good?

We're good. Thank you for bringing on, guys. Appreciate it.

Scott Todd, are we good?

Good. Mark.

I want to thank the listeners. Remind them today's podcast is sponsored by flight school. Learn more How 16 weeks up the mountain of land investing. Scott Todd, as your Sherpa can literally transform your life. Passive income without renters, rehabs, renovations, or rodents. Learn more. Just go to landgeek.com training training schedule a call. All right, Scott, let's do this. One, two, three. Let freedom ring.

All right.

Not bad, not bad. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, Michael.

Bye.