Digital Stalking
How I actually find out about clients. Facebook is a public confession booth, one site knows your whole life, and one service makes it all go away.
Digital Stalking, or Research if Shane is Listening
An advisor watched me pull up a client’s details the other day and asked how I get all of it. It hit me that I have never shown you my process. Four things. Three are ways to find, one is a way to disappear.
- Search their Facebook. Friend or not, open their profile and hit the search button on it. Search “HPB”, “happy birthday”, “anniversary”, “kid”, “proud”. People post everything, and their friends post the rest. Kid’s name, birthday, anniversary, it is almost always sitting there in public.
- Look them up on TruePeopleSearch. Free, ad-infested, and creepy in how much it returns: phone numbers, emails, birthdays, past and present addresses. Look yourself up while you are there. You will not find me. I do not exist.
- Make yourself disappear with Incogni. It deletes you from the data brokers all over the web. You will still show up on Sotheby’s, Realtor.com and Homes, that is the point. What goes away is the broker data, and with it the spam calls. I was at 20 to 30 a day. I am down to four. This is my highest recommendation.
- Export your sales from the MLS. Last year, ten years, twenty, whatever you have. Go through them, find those clients, and put their closing anniversary in Cloze or whatever CRM you use. The more the CRM and the Home Platform know, the more they can do for you, and some of what is coming will blow you away.
Your assignment this week: Three things. Search a client on Facebook and on TruePeopleSearch. Sign up for Incogni. Export your past sales and add the anniversaries. I said I was going to push you to 30 contacts a day. Not today. Just do these three.
Transcript
Moment of silence, please, that my co-star isn’t here. I apologize. I tried to get her to come here, but mom wants to go to school, blah, blah, blah. But you know, you just got to deal with me today. So I apologize, but at least we’re going to talk about something fun. I’m going to call it digital stalking, and I’m sure Shane would prefer I call it research. So that’s what we’re going to learn about today on Tool Time.
All right, so I was showing an advisor a few things on Cloze the other day, and they asked me, how do you get all this information about your clients? And it occurred to me that I never actually showed you my process. So today we’re going to talk about it. There’s a couple of really cool websites you’re going to learn about and a couple of really cool tools.
All right. So the first one, I don’t know if you’ve heard about it, but it’s called Facebook. Yep. Facebook. Everybody puts everything online and almost everybody puts everything on Facebook. Here’s the trick. You’re going to go to Facebook, whether you’re a friend or not doesn’t matter. You’re going to find their profile. You’re going to open it up. If they’re your friend, you just click the search button and you can search HPB or happy birthday or anniversary or kid or proud or any of that stuff. You would be amazed what either they or other people will put that’s public for everybody. You want to know what their kid’s name is? You can find it. Same with birthday. Same with literally almost anything. So that’s my first hack. Facebook is the coolest. It’s the greatest public disclosure website in the world.
All right. This one’s a sneaky one, kind of sneaky. It’s called truepeoplesearch.com. You will be inundated with the ads, but it doesn’t cost you anything. And it pulls up a surprisingly creepy amount of information. So phone numbers, emails, birthdays, addresses, both past and present. It’s kind of insane. You should look yourself up. In fact, while you’re at it, you should look me up. You won’t find me. I don’t exist.
Here’s my third really cool trick. It’s a website. It’s called Incogni. It is absolutely amazing at deleting everything about you all over the web. Now, we’re real estate agents, so we still have Sotheby’s International Realty and Realtor.com and Homes and all this other stuff, but that’s not the point. The point is data brokers don’t have you anymore and you get way less spam calls. I’m sure you, like me, get 20 to 30 a day. I’m down to four. So my highest recommendation is to sign up for Incogni at the end of this.
The last little trick, the thing I recommend you doing right now, is exporting your sales from the MLS, whether it’s the last year, 10, 20, whatever. Export those and go through them and find those clients. Put on their anniversary date inside of Cloze or the CRM that you’re using, because the more information that you give to your Cloze and to the Home Platform, the more powerful it will be. There are some super cool little things we’re learning about right now that are going to absolutely blow you away.
So anyways, that’s your list. Digital stalking on Facebook and truepeoplesearch.com. Incogni if you don’t want to be stalked. MLS exports for your past clients. I gave you three things to do this week, mostly because you guys still aren’t organizing your contacts. I told you I was going to make you go to 30 a day, but I’m not going to today. Just do those three things, okay?
All right. I’ve been rambling long enough. Ben is looking at me. Thank you so much. I appreciate you. I hope you have a great week. Take it easy. Bye.