TRAINING VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: The Social Media vs AI Real Estate Marketing Battle – Which Will Win?

Okay, so I hear this all the time when we talk about artificial intelligence. There’s so much fearmongering around it. It’s almost like you’re going to get left behind. You’re going to get left in the dust if you don’t get up to speed on AI.

There are two pieces of this I want to talk about.

Number one: that’s not necessarily true.

Your ability to navigate tools like Gemini or ChatGPT is helpful, but in most cases within the real estate profession, service providers are rolling out tools that are already infused with AI. You don’t need to be the raw architect of those systems. If you want to search for things and write better prompts, that’s great. Learning how to search well and write effective prompts is important—just like it was important to know how to search effectively on Google. The difference is you can do a little bit more with AI.

But stressing out that all of this is going to pass you by? No. These tools are going to be marketed to you like candy. They’re going to be infused into products you already use. New products will be created around AI. They’re not going to pass you by. They’re going to be all over your inbox and your social media feeds.

I’m not here to fearmonger. But I do want to talk about something I see happening.

There’s a quiet battle going on between social media and AI.

Search engines came first. After Y2K, after the year 2000, search engines really took off. Showing up in search became everything. That’s when pay-per-click advertising exploded. That’s when real estate teams started being born, because suddenly we could create excess leads through search.

Around 2010, social media really started to grow. You saw people become social media rock stars. And I’m not knocking social media. It’s important. We teach it. We coach it. It matters.

But we don’t want to be just there.

Here’s why: if you are only on social media, you are not going to show up in AI.

AI pulls very little—if anything—from social media. For example, we get tons of coaching clients because when someone searches, “Who’s the best real estate coach for brokerages?” we usually come up first. “Who’s the best real estate coach for teams?” we usually come up first. “Who’s the best real estate coach?” We’re consistently in the top three.

Why?

Because we aren’t just on social media.

We have extensive content indexed on Google. We have a large volume of Google reviews. We have YouTube content that gets pulled into search engines and lives there long term. Social media posts, on the other hand, go down the feed and disappear.

If you want to be relevant, if someone searches “best real estate agent in Denver, Colorado,” you need to show up where AI is looking.

That’s why we’ve been pushing Google reviews even more than Zillow reviews. That’s why we’re pushing YouTube content so heavily. That’s why we’re pushing blogging.

There is going to be a revival in blogging like you’ve never seen.

Strategic, effective blogging is likely the single biggest factor driving AI-based searches right now. I don’t know about you, but I personally don’t search much on Google anymore. Like most people, I’m going to Gemini. That’s the trend. It’s becoming infused with everything, and people are getting very comfortable with it.

My recommendation is to learn Gemini. I believe that’s the future of AI for our industry, which is heavily search-driven. Google’s footprint is simply too large to compete with. Gemini is integrated with email, search, and everything else in the Google ecosystem. It can change how you operate.

You also need to search yourself. What is Google saying about you? Who is Google saying is the best in your area?

It better be you.

If it’s not, then we need to do some things differently. Because when it comes to AI, this is what you can control. Search is back in a major way, and social media is going to lose some clout.

There are still effective strategies on social media. But those who are only social media famous—posting quick content, short blurbs, surface-level material—without putting in the deeper work are going to see some decline.

More than half of our new coaching clients right now say they searched us on ChatGPT and we showed up as the best—best for teams, best for brokerages. We’ve built a strong historical presence in those areas.

That’s not accidental.

Getting good at blogging, teaching blogging, coaching your agents on blogging, coaching them on YouTube—these things matter. You need to learn how to craft blogs that attract AI.

For example, if you have a video on your blog post, you should post the full transcript of that video at the bottom of the blog. That helps AI pick it up more easily. That’s one simple tactic. Just having the video is not enough. Include the transcript at the bottom.

You can still have your normal written content. But that transcript at the bottom is powerful.

Understanding these strategies attracts business to you so you’re not always hunting for it. That’s powerful.

I know this stresses some people out. Yes, there’s a lot to learn. But I love learning-based professionals. Many of our clients are the highest producers or the largest brokerages in their markets. We’ve been coaching and training this for years.

Their fishing poles are already in the water. We’re just moving over the school of fish.

The rich are going to get richer in this environment.

But if you’re not preparing for the future, this is the one thing you can control with AI. This is what you should be thinking about right now.

If you have administrative support, develop that person into a blogger. If you’re by yourself, learn to do it yourself. For the future, the most important role of a marketing director—or you, if you’re solo—is to create effective blogs, understand keywords, and consistently publish optimized content.

We have a course on this at the Icenhower Institute that walks through exactly how to do it.

Get uncomfortable. The good news about something being hard and uncomfortable is that most people won’t do it. That means you’ll have less competition online.

You know what to do. Now go do it.

Hope that helps.