Five Reasons You Shouldn’t Post Your Birthdate on Social Media
This advice may surprise you: immediately remove your birthdate from all social media sites. Here’s why:
- Providing your birthdate can make you the target for identity theft, phishing scams, and other malicious attacks.
- Providing your birthdate makes it easier for hackers to access your financial records.
- Advertisers often use your birthdate to target you with unsolicited ads and text messages.
- Providing your birthdate can open you up to the possibility of age discrimination from employers and other service providers.
- Your birthdate is non-essential information that really has no real benefit to you and marketing efforts.
Some sites will want to know that you’re over the age of 18 or 21. If that’s the case make up a date. Unless the site is something like a medical portal, most internet providers and companies have no need to access your birthdate. They may want it to sell to other sites and market to you—don’t let them have it!
The Best Times to Email, Post, and/or Tweet
Have you ever wondered what is the best time to send out an email, to post to Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube or to tweet on Twitter?
According to well-known pollster Frank Luntz, the best time to email your message is very late at night so the recipient will pick it up before they go to work or early on Saturday. Luntz’s tracking system shows that more people open
messages on Saturday morning than at any other time.
In terms of Facebook, the current research suggests that the best times to post are during the workweek (Wednesday from noon to 1 pm, and Friday at 3 pm). On Instagram, the best time is on Wednesday at 11 am and Friday at 10-11 am.
For Twitter, the best times to tweet are generally during the workweek (Monday through Friday) and during business hours (9 am to 5 pm). Additional research suggests that the best days to tweet are Monday and Tuesday, with the highest engagement rates typically occurring around noon and at 5pm.
Try posting at these times to see if you get a higher response rate from your clients.
Get Your Priorities Straight
How do you decide what to do when you have a conflict between two appointments? Whenever you have a conflict, here’s a simple approach that shows you how to decide which appointment should have top priority.
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- Your top priority must always be any client who has a property under contract. This is your money in the bank. It’s better to cancel a buyer appointment than it is to lose a deal that is already under contract.
- Your second priority is servicing your current listing inventory. These sellers have committed to work exclusively with you and deserve your highest degree of attention.
- Your third priority is warm seller leads. Listings are still the name of the game. If you must decide between a listing appointment and taking out buyers, the best bet is to go on the listing appointment.
- Your fourth priority is going on listing appointments and of equal importance, prospecting for new leads. Never miss your prospecting time unless you would have cancelled a listing appointment under the same circumstances.
- Buyer leads are your lowest priority.
There is one very big exception. A whopping 58 percent of all buyers own a property they are living in. Consequently, when you receive a buyer lead, always check if they own a property. If they do, contact them immediately—the reason? According to NAR, the first agent who meets with them face-to-face gets the listing 80 percent of the time. Make sure that agent is you!
Keep Your Standards High
Given that the current rate of sales for November 2022 was 4.03 million annually (down 33 percent from the pace in 2021), maintaining high standards is more important than ever.
When times are tough and you’re struggling to make ends meet, you may be tempted to bend the rules, tolerate unacceptable behavior, or work with clients you would never work with under normal circumstances.
There’s an old expression that says, “When you lie with dogs, don’t be surprised if you get up with fleas.”
The choice is simple—only work with people who are honest, ethical, and who are not dysfunctional. The cost to your peace of mind and integrity is simple not worth doing anything less.
A Powerful New Year’s Resolution: Touch It Once
The first week of 2023 had come and gone—so have many of our New Year’s resolutions. Nevertheless, here is one simple change you can make this year that will yield tremendous results. 
When you receive an email, anything in print via U.S. mail, or any other paper item, the goal is to handle each item immediately by completing it, delegating it, or dumping it.
To keep you on track, when it comes to paper items such as bills, place a red mark on each item that you touch more than once. In other words, if you don’t handle the item immediately when you touch it for the first time, place a big red mark on it.
For items such as email, if you don’t handle it the first time you read it, highlight the first line in red. It won’t take long to realize how often you are handling the same pieces of paper or digital communication over and over. What you’ll really appreciate is all the extra time you save.