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Show Summary
In this episode of the Real Estate Pro Show, host Erika speaks with Hilary Billings, founder of Attentioneers, about the science of attention in content creation. Hilary shares her unique journey from a travel blogger to a successful content creator and personal branding strategist. She emphasizes the importance of capturing attention, sparking emotion, and maintaining authenticity in content. Hilary also discusses how to measure success through watch time and the significance of social media in the real estate industry, especially with the upcoming influence of Gen Z consumers. The conversation concludes with Hilary’s plans for expanding her impact through workshops and training.
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Investor Fuel Show Transcript:
Hilary Billings (00:00)
the first thing that every piece of content needs to do is that we, obviously need to grab attention from the get-go. Like when you just think about the user behavior experience, we have to understand first what, where our content is going to meet somebody.if you’re not architecting or thinking about engineering or content in such a way that that piece matters the most, we would spend more time thinking about the first three seconds of any video
starting there and really thinking through how am I focusing on grabbing attention.
The second is it needs to spark an emotion. We wanna get people to feel something.
And so it’s your job as the creator to connect why the viewer should care about that piece of content, what’s in it for them to keep watching or to keep swiping or to keep reading.
And the last thing.
that I would say is really powerful to kick things off with is we want to create a curiosity gap. People need to know what they’re waiting for
So they’re gonna push out your content more organically than they would somebody else who doesn’t for that reason. So What can we say or show or have them read as a text visual hook so they know what’s coming, so they can be bought in and ask like what happens next? And they’re there for that.
Erika (02:45)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Real Estate Pro Show. I’m your host, Erika and today I’m thrilled to be joined by Hilary Billings. She is shaking things up in the real estate space with her company, Attentioneers. It’s all about helping personal brands and entrepreneurs grow their revenue by mastering the science of attention. I mean, my mind is just already blowing about this and we haven’t even gotten into it yet.Hillary, I’m so glad to have you on the show today.
Hilary Billings (03:17)
I’m so happy to be here. This is going to be so much fun.Erika (03:19)
Yes, yes, I think our listeners are really going to love this and get so much out of it. So let’s dive on in for our listeners who don’t know your world yet. Give us the rundown. How did you get started in in this space and, you know, get so involved with social media?Hilary Billings (03:38)
It was a complete accident. My life has been a series of happy accidents, I guess I could say. I initially got my degree in psychology. I thought I was going to be a clinical psychologist. I ended up being rejected from every graduate school I applied to. I took off traveling the world, started a travel blog, initially thinking it was going to be a way to keep in touch with friends and family. And then I started gaining readers all over the world. Within a year, I had readers in 120 countries. I thought I’d found my niche then.And then my life was turned upside down. I was hit in the chest with a malfunctioning firework. I suffered severe burns to my body. After healing from that, I entered a beauty pageant. I became Miss Nevada. After that, I was brought on by USA Today to be an on-camera host and journalist for them. I covered red carpets, award shows, behind-the-scenes interviews. I’ve interviewed everyone from Dolly Parton to Ringo Starr and Mark Cuban. Did hundreds of articles and videos for them. Went on to produce for E! News.
Then I ended up in the personal branding sector, working with personal brands to help monetize their reputations, working with everyone from Victoria’s Secret Models to New York Times bestselling authors and Keynote Hall of Fame speakers. And it was such a beautiful opportunity to get behind the curtain on a lot of different businesses and help people frame up and get their messaging in a place that resonated with the people they were trying to serve. And then 2020 hit and all my revenue streams dried up.
like many of us. Well, actually not you guys. You guys had a great time. And then I was approached by an acquaintance of mine who happened to run the largest network of Facebook watch pages. And at the time his creators were doing about 60 billion views a year. And he asked if my partner and I would be interested in creating content. Now think Buzzfeed, Bored Panda, really viral in nature, pranks, hacks, gifting videos. And it wasn’t necessarily content that we enjoyed to consume, but
We had nothing else going on. So we said, sure. We were super excited about it. And we couldn’t wait to start getting all these views and making all this money. And then we were terrible at it. We spent about nine months just banging our heads against the wall. And it was so humiliating when you’re not a teenager or in early 20s trying to make viral content and you’re just being met with crickets.
And I cannot tell you the self-doubt that would creep in the amount of
questioning and making you wonder like if you even had anything to add to the world because there was just no response nothing and we were getting hundreds of views per video and I really reached this point where we either had to figure this out or we had to move on because we were now losing money trying to be viral video creators and I had this narrative in my head around What was happening and it wasn’t very helpful. It went something like man like these viral video creators. They just
pick up their phone, and they film something, and then it goes on the internet, and they just look into millions of views. And it’s just so unfair. And that was hurting me and hurting my perspective. So I had to start asking a different question, which was, what if everything that I thought was accidental about their success was actually really intentional, and I just didn’t know the secrets? So we took one weekend, and we watched thousands of viral videos, which I do not recommend that you do for your mental health.
And we kept a spreadsheet because we didn’t know what we didn’t know. We didn’t know what actually mattered, but we just knew we were hearing all these different things. Like you need to try trending audio. You need to post a bazillion times a day. You need to post at certain times a day. You need to use these hashtags. You need to be on certain platforms. And as we were advocating and integrating all this different data around what’s happening at second one, what’s happening at second three.
What are people wearing? What are they saying? What are the hand gestures? What are the edits? What are the cuts? What platform is it on? How long is the video? These numbers and patterns kind of started to emerge in the content that were very different than the popular advice that was being hailed at the time. And certain things needed to happen in any piece of content for it to have some massive success and virality, regardless of platform.
regardless of genre, regardless of industry, regardless of length of video or trending audio or what have you. And it was super interesting. And what it was really rooted in was in psychology and in what the viewer needed to understand in order to be bought in to watching the content. So we took these learnings and we applied it to our next video. And that next video did 5 million views.
The video after that did 10 million views. And it’s not to say that everything that we touched turned to gold, but roughly one in every four of our videos did over a million. One in every 10 did over 10 million views. And we went from no views our first nine months as content creators to over a billion organic views. And the following 12 months as content creators, we grew my TikTok following from zero to 400,000 followers in 40 days.
Uh, we’ve gone on to wool over double that we’ve done billions of views since then. I’ve, directed videos that have done 10, 50, a hundred million views. And it’s been such an interesting ride. even sat on ticktocks advisory board for awhile. And then we got to a point where I like to say that we left the dark side because we knew so many personal brands and entrepreneurs in it. And I had worked with so many of them as a personal brand strategist.
And we saw them struggling. saw everybody knowing that content was important and trying to make it work and them having the same struggles and challenges that we had when we started and thinking that it’s them and that they’re the problem and that no one wants to hear from them. And so they would give up and say, this doesn’t work for me or this doesn’t work for business. It’s only for entertainment. And then they would lose out. So we were curious to see if everything that we knew and the formulas that we put together around content, if that would apply.
to industry specific entrepreneurs? And the answer was yes. So we created attentioneers with that purpose. I keynote on the science of attention and how to capture and keep it in a digital age, create content that your audience cares about that you won’t cringe at. I love to bridge the gap between that. think a lot of personal brands and entrepreneurs, they struggle with what they see as popular on social media because sometimes the super hyper.
mega viewed videos don’t feel like it’s in alignment with them. And so how do we help them bridge the gap where they can get more exposure, get more views and still ⁓ be within their authenticity formula, as well as, we do workshops and one-on-one coaching and course trainings and certifications to help industry providers really see a difference and make the impact that they want to have in their business.
So it’s certainly not been a straight road.
But I think that’s one of the things that I’m learning to love about my life more and more is that just embracing the turn and seeing, where’s the opportunity and how can I take that opportunity now to bring my heart centered leadership and service to somebody else.
Erika (11:44)
Yeah, wow, that that is just so, so awesome and incredible. And, you know, again, I want to I want to touch on what you’re doing that is is so unique is that you’ve broken this down to a science, the science of attention. Do you think you could break that down into one or two key principles that pros on who are listening can use to stand out online?Hilary Billings (12:11)
Yeah, would, yeah, we can definitely do that. So the first thing that every piece of content needs to do is that we, obviously need to grab attention from the get-go. Like when you just think about the user behavior experience, we have to understand first what, where our content is going to meet somebody. So unlike meeting someone at an open house or at an industry event, or even at a philanthropic event or out in the wild, as it were, you have the length of time from someone’sthumb on the bottom of their phone to the top of their phone to make an impact. That’s it. So if you’re not architecting or thinking about engineering or content in such a way that that piece matters the most, we would spend more time thinking about the first three seconds of any video over anything else because we knew if we didn’t do that, we were going to lose people and all the other work that we put in on the backend wouldn’t matter a lick. So
starting there and really thinking through how am I focusing on grabbing attention. There’s a lot of different methods that you can utilize for this from text hooks and visual metaphors to bold statements. And ⁓ you can do mystery reveals and games and puzzles and flash forwards where you’re showing something that comes later, that’s going to help bring attention. There’s all these different mechanisms that you can use, but at the end of the day, the viewer has to be able to answer the question, what’s going on here.
is step number one. If they don’t know, if it’s unclear what they’re gonna get out of that piece of content, they’re moving on. They don’t have time for that. The second is it needs to spark an emotion. We wanna get people to feel something. And oftentimes when we’ll have entrepreneurs come to us and say, I’m just not having a lot of people engage on my content, usually it’s because you’re not moving them emotionally. People will talk and people will connect with you through comments and they’ll take certain behavioral actions
depending upon what emotion you get them to feel. So if you’re not getting them to feel something, they’re not gonna engage. And the unconscious question that everyone is asking after what’s going on here is why do I care? And so it’s your job as the creator to connect why the viewer should care about that piece of content, what’s in it for them to keep watching or to keep swiping or to keep reading.
And we’re talking about this in the context of video, by the way, but this really applies to anything that you’re doing, whether it’s email outreach, whether it’s a carousel, whether it’s a LinkedIn post. I want to help entrepreneurs become better storytellers. And whether you’re telling the story in a paragraph or an eight second video or a 15 minute long YouTube, all of these things matter. So we got to grab the attention. We got to make sure we’re stopping the scroll. Then we need to spark an emotion. And the last thing.
that I would say is really powerful to kick things off with is we want to create a curiosity gap. People need to know what they’re waiting for and platforms reward accounts. They reward creators who can help keep people on their platforms. That’s their goal is to keep their viewers on their platform as long as possible. So if you as a creator have a lot of content that has long watch times, has high completion rates, you’re helping the mission.
So they’re gonna push out your content more organically than they would somebody else who doesn’t for that reason. So what can we tell them? What can we say or show or have them read as a text visual hook so they know what’s coming, so they can be bought in and ask like what happens next? And they’re there for that.
A great just hyper visual non-industry specific example of this is
Guy gets down on one knee holding a ring and there’s this unconscious question of, she going to say yes? Like, are you emotionally invested in this person? If you are, then you’re going to stick around to see what she says. And that’s going to help you get that long retention time. So the more that we can start to add in these three components is a fantastic starting point for any industry professional that wants to up their content creation game.
Erika (16:50)
Yeah, I can see how helpful that would be. you know, I think one of the challenges is that, you know, everyone knows they need to grab attention, but they don’t necessarily want to do something that might, you know, be like a viral, like cringy type video. So how do you help people balance the authenticity and getting their message across in that context?Hilary Billings (17:14)
100 % and 67 % of people would rather watch authentic content versus polished content. And so I think also something that stands in our way is that Asians specifically, they wanna come across as really professional. But sometimes the most professional thing to do on social media is actually not to look overly polished, to not have the super high def DSLR cameras that are doing all of the filming and to be a little bit more raw in the delivery of the content. It allows people to connect with you more on a human level.The way that we present this, because I never want anyone to put out content that isn’t in alignment with them. And we’ve done this before. We’ve helped people get views and then they’ve come back and be like, well, the wrong video went viral. And what we found was that those videos weren’t in alignment. What, what we call their authenticity formulas. This is something that we like to have all clients start with, which is we want to make sure. And and I personally think that the term authenticity has been really played out a lot in the past couple of years.
And I struggle as a people pleaser with the idea of like how to be more myself or like how to take away all the things that aren’t me and just like allow that to shine through. It’s like, I have a very analytical blame. So I want to know like, how can I actually look at what I’m creating and say, yes, this is an alignment or not an alignment. So our authenticity formula does that. And the authenticity for most pretty simple. It’s just, it’s your values multiplied by your voice.
It’s your values multiplied by your voice. What do you care about? And how are you communicating that to people? And these two things, when they overlap exponentially magnify each other and they can be both positive and negative, right? Like some people don’t value very important things or they value negative things, or they might speak to people in a very negative way. And so those two things, when it combined, creates an interesting reaction. And this is how we get to see unique thumb prints on content.
Even if people are talking about the same darn things, I like to say that, especially in an industry like real estate, everyone is serving for the most part, the same product. Like I am going to help you buy your house. I’m going to help you sell your house. There are hundreds, if not thousands of qualified licensed agents in my area that could get the job done. So what’s the difference? Why am I going to choose one or the other? Well, it’s because the experience that they’re going to give me.
The experience that they’re going to provide me is in alignment with what I care about and how I want to be treated and how I want to be talked to and whether or not I want someone that knows the numbers and the insight, it’s going to be a straight shooter or going to be more fun and upbeat or loving and nurturing. All of that comes into play about my experience. And so what really the differentiator here is, cause I’m assuming that everyone is equally as good at their jobs is we’re coming down to an experience that’s being provided.
And so when we are creating content around our values and around our specific voice, our personality traits that we want to resonate through our brand, we’re giving people a sample into what it’s like to be with us on the day to day. And Google talks about this in, they created the study around how many touch points it takes for someone to decide whether or not they’re going to buy from you. And the answer was it’s, it’s called the seven 11 four rule.
It’s seven hours of content, 11 different places or 11 different touch points of content in four different places. So the first question that everyone needs to ask themselves is can someone go spend a day with you online and get to know you as a person or get to know your personality or know what it’s like to walk and talk with you. And if you don’t have that much content, that’s your first order of business. Just to go create seven hours worth of content so someone can get to know you on that level.
You’re going to naturally reach the 11 engagements because those are individual posts and the four touch points of different places that could be, it mean it to be on four different platforms, but that could be an email list that could be on Instagram and YouTube. And then you see them out in person in the world, or you text them because you saw them at an open house. Then they get an email and then they see you on Instagram and they see you on Instagram again, and they see you on Facebook and now they’re ready to move forward. So.
I’m all about how do we help you find that voice and values package? And then we’re creating all the content around that. And we have lots of different mechanisms with which we help people to ideate, to ensure and within our content maps that this is staying within alignment. But that’s where I recommend that everyone start. And it also allows people just to let go of the stress and the need to have to be like the agent next door.
Cause we get a lot of resistance of like, that that guy is really funny and I’m not funny or I want to be funny, but that the guy that’s being really successful is super serious. And the answer is, is there are people for everybody. And one of the things that when we’re looking at examples of different types of content in our training, we’ll, we’ll have agents watch a bunch of different styles of creators that are giving a similar type of content and a similar.
value in their content as far as like here’s a piece of education, here’s a little bit of negative information about me and how I’m going to entertain you in the next minute. And it’s really fascinating to see how agents have different preferences for other agents. And so we always ask at the end of this exercise, like, who would you go with? And no one, it’s never a hundred percent unanimous on one particular agent. Usually it’s completely spread across the board and it allows agents to really see
that there isn’t a right and a wrong. It’s all about alignment. It’s all about finding that frequency because the people that like you and like what you have to say and the way that you say it are probably gonna be the ones that you jive with the most in real life and are gonna be your dream clients to work with. Cause you don’t have to feel like you’re having to be something else in person and trying to win their business. They’re already won over by the time they even get to you. So that’s where we like to start with people to help them bridge that gap between wanting content that performs well
and making sure that the content is true to their being and also gonna magnetize the right people that like who they are as a person.
Erika (23:08)
Right, yeah, man, the gears are just turning in my head with, you know, how that authentic messaging just, you know, gets the right people, you know, in front of your content for people who, know, are trying the, you know, different strategies with their content. How would you recommend that they measure success during that time period? Because, you know, it’s, probably takes time to build that, that audience as much as people want to go viral with what they make.Hilary Billings (23:20)
Mm-hmm.Yeah, and I also want to caveat too, it’s, you can go viral in industry specific content. It’s a lot harder. It’s a lot harder to go viral with a content post about an open house in Vancouver than it is to go viral about a prank video. Like you have to just think about the pool of people that are interested in that content at any specific point in time. And your job, while we want you to reach the most people possible and we want you to be as well known as possible, at the end of the day, every agent that I’ve talked to,
they want more closings, they want more clients, and they want a streamline of people that really wanna work with them so they don’t have to work as hard on the outreach and the outbound and fighting for that business and having that become a referral stream. And a lot of agents now are even saying that their top high quality leads are coming through social media even more so than MLS right now, even more so than referrals. They’re getting more new clients through social media now than they are through referral business. So we wanna help.
to set them up for success with that. And it’s really easy, especially if you have a small following or you start posting. And even when we have agents go through our trainings and certification programs, sometimes, not always, in fact, we have a lot of agents that see massive success off the bat to the tune of like 6,000 % increase on their video views or start to get these new clients within a 30 day, 60 day window. And then we have some that see the opposite. And part of that is you’re learning a new skill.
Right? So you’re, like to say you’re learning to write with your non-dominant hand. Just think about how long that would take you to get good at something. So you’re up against a growth edge. You’re trying something new. You probably don’t already have this built into your business development every week. Competence precedes confidence, but the best metric to look at isn’t going to be the views, isn’t going to be how many followers you have. It’s going to be the watch time on your videos. Are your watch times improving? Are people staying and watching your content longer?
Because also if we know that we’re getting better at that, if we’re getting better at getting people to stick around, the algorithm’s going to start rewarding you for that at some point in time. So your goal isn’t necessarily to get to millions and bazillions of views off the bat. want that for people, of course. And what I want to do is help make really good content creators. And we make really good content creators by knowing how to engineer for a higher watch time. So that is the golden standard of metric in our case.
And even when on our road to our first billion views, we never had more than 30,000 followers on Facebook, but we were getting videos that were doing 10 million, 20 million, 50 million views because the watch times were so heavy and the algorithm wanted to support those. So you can bat way outside your follower range if you are working on engineering content. And when people typically start and they want to put so much focus on the analytics,
And I love that we want to focus on analytics because I really believe in letting the data drive the conversation. And I also believe people do that too early versus like, we just need to practice the new skill. You’re not basing your value or your valuation as an agent off of your first results from the first month and saying, well, didn’t sell any houses this month. Clearly this isn’t meant for me, right? Like you probably never have done this before. And you’re learning how to talk to people and you’re learning how to market yourself and you’re learning.
how to even write up the paperwork or submit an offer and you’re meant being mentored by the people. There’s a long road to get to feel comfortable and confident in that. And so we like to refer back to that too, where people want to see these metrics right away. And, and really there is a longer play here, but I’ll say all that to say the, the rewards really are worth it for the agents that are committed to it and are committed to showing up consistently. Studies are now showing that real estate agents.
that are investing in social media are more likely and they are selling more homes and they’re selling more homes faster than those that don’t. Their performance is improved. They’re making more money up to 15 % more every single year because of the use of their social media profiles. We’re seeing even if somebody is getting a referral that 44 % to 71 % of people are still going to an agent’s social media profile to make a decision as to whether or not they’re going to engage even if they have a referral in hand.
So we think that referrals are the biggest deal. We think that that’s going to be the thing that gets us the business. And it’s not. People are looking at social media, even if you don’t have virality, to understand you as a person, to understand your voice and values, to understand what type of experience they’re going to get from you. a digital social presence right now is really leading to perceived credibility of agents. So you don’t have to be big. You don’t have to have tons of followers. But it’s my belief that you are responsible for showing up.
The other reason I think it’s massively important for people that may be on the fence is that next year, 2026, Gen Z becomes the largest consumer population on the planet. And the way in which they interact with brands, the way that they’re finding people is so dramatically different than anybody else. even millennials are saying that at least 50 % of millennials are saying that social media is important when choosing a realtor. And that’s their primary focus that they’re looking on to help determine character, to help determine if they want to work with somebody.
So I think it’s massively important, even if you’re not seeing the results that you want off the bat, that you keep with it and look at it as a long-term investment in that magnetization and ability to till new leads and build that credibility long-term.
Erika (28:59)
Yeah, wow, absolutely. And what we what you were saying about with like Gen Z, I mean, I don’t think social media is going anywhere. So, you know, you got a lot of work coming. So with that in mind, Hillary, how how do you plan to expand your impact? What does that look like at attentioneers with what you have going on in the future?Hilary Billings (29:21)
with my brand as a whole, my company as a whole.Erika (29:24)
Yeah, or just you.Hilary Billings (29:25)
Okay, well, I love helping heart centered entrepreneurs and mission driven messengers to get in front of the right audiences. feel like one of the things that I really excel at is being able to help someone figure out what they want to say in a way that feels authentic to say it and then bridge the gap between that and the way that their clientele and consumer can best hear it. And so I love being able to bring that together and help entrepreneurs and business owners to see what’s possible.So I’m super excited. We’ve got a lot of cool things going on. I’m keynoting more and more on the science of attention, which I love to talk about, or the authenticity formula and how to create authentic impact with your content without feeling cringe as you’re going about doing it. So I love stepping on stage and doing that. We’re doing a lot of work with independent brokerages and companies, Fortune 500 companies, to come in and do workshops and trainings and teach people the art and science of attention.
And I think it’s so important that even if you’re outsourcing this to somebody else, that you understand all that goes into it and really the viewer’s mindset and how we have to earn attention these days. Because if we’re still stuck in a place of people should know me or this should have done better, and we’re not accepting that it’s our responsibility to get people to pay attention, we’re really setting ourselves up for a life of suffering. And so I want to empower.
every business owner to take back control of their timeline and their leads and their impact. And so that’s, think what I’m most excited about is being able to be kind of the man behind the curtain, helping to push everyone out to be seen and grow their businesses in a way that feels sustainable and authentic and exciting so that those connections can be made.
Erika (31:07)
Yeah, absolutely. I just love your approach and it’s been really inspiring, Hillary. Before we wrap up, if someone listening wants to connect with you, learn more about attentioneers, or maybe even explore how to get certified so they’re really understanding the science of attention, what’s the best way to reach out?Hilary Billings (31:16)
Thank you.The best place to find me is attentioneers.com. That’s attentioneers.com. And in fact, I love to provide to people, you I know it can be so overwhelming to get started or people will be on board of, okay, I know I need to do this. I know this is the next step. I still don’t know where to start. It still feels so overwhelming. So we have a viral content blueprint that we offer for free to anybody that wants it on the website. You can get that at attentioneers.com forward slash blueprint.
And this will give you 40 tried and true hooks to start your content with, to get you going. You’ll get a chance to look at our viral workflow to help you understand maybe where you’re getting stuck within it, as well as AI prompts that we leverage to help make content stronger and make your ideation time more efficient. So you can get that at attentioneers.com forward slash blueprint. But I love to get, people reach out and let me know.
what their experience was with the blueprint. We’ve had many people come back to say they have 10x to their views overnight or they’ve gotten 10,000 views just from leveraging some of the hooks. And that’s really exciting to help people get those instant wins to see what’s possible on the other side.
Erika (32:41)
I love how you’re empowering us today to cut through the noise and build content that actually moves the needle. Thank you so much for dropping all this knowledge today, Hilary.Hilary Billings (32:53)
It’s been my honor. Thank you for having me.Erika (32:55)
And for our listeners, if you got value from this episode, make sure that you’re subscribed to the Real Estate Pro Show. We’ve got more conversations coming up with game changers like Hillary who are redefining what’s possible in the real estate world. We’ll see you on the next episode.
