SHOW RECAP: If you can’t commit to this daily, social media is not going to bring you clients

​A brokerage manager Andrew Fogliato worked with had been sending him a steady stream of referrals, and Fogliato wanted to say thanks with something better than a gift card. So he called a shop, picked a premium bottle of whiskey, and had it laser-etched with the manager’s name and the brand. The manager put it on his desk.

For roughly the next eight months, Fogliato got about a call a week from that brokerage. Nearly every one started the same way.

“I was just in his office and I saw this bottle,” they’d say. “I asked him where he got it. He started talking about you.”

That’s the kind of story a lot of marketing advice promises and rarely delivers. On a recent episode of their weekly sales and marketing show, Fogliato and Taylor Hack worked through it alongside a much more repeatable idea, a simple daily framework Fogliato has taught from stages for years but rarely walked through step by step on the show itself.

The 5-5-5 rule, and the plus one that makes it work

The framework is deliberately simple and touted by many.

Every day: five posts. Five thoughtful comments on other people’s content, specifically five questions, because questions get replies and replies do the actual work. Five story replies, ideally also framed as questions, because a story reply opens a private conversation that can drift naturally toward real estate without ever feeling like a pitch.

“The minimum is 5-5-5,” Fogliato said. “But it’s the plus one that I added to make it mine.”

The plus one is the escalation. Once 5-5-5 feels manageable, the next week becomes 6-6-6. The week after, 7-7-7. Keep climbing until it stops being sustainable, then hold there. Fogliato has watched people push all the way to 30-30-30. Most people find their ceiling well before that and that’s fine. The floor is what matters. Below 5-5-5 daily, in his view, organic social simply isn’t going to produce clients.

“If you’re unable to commit to at least doing five of those a day,” he said, “getting clients from social media isn’t really for you. Unless you want to spend money on ads.”

Why ‘nice!’ doesn’t count anymore

The detail worth underlining is what actually qualifies as a comment that moves the needle.

Facebook and Instagram have both quietly redefined what they consider a meaningful interaction. A like, a fire emoji, a single word like “congratulations,” none of it carries real weight anymore, because for years people gamed exactly that. Ten friends leaving “congratulations” under every post used to reliably boost reach. The platforms caught on.

What they reward now is what Fogliato calls a significant comment, generally four or five words minimum. Which is exactly why questions work so well as the default move. A genuine question almost always clears that bar, and unlike a compliment, it tends to get a reply, since most people feel a small pull to answer a direct question left on their post.

The question doesn’t need to be about real estate at all. Someone posts about a dinner out: the comment can simply be, “What did you get? Was it good? I’ve been meaning to try that place.” The real estate has nothing to do with it. The relationship is the point.

Why your profile photo matters more than it seems

Earlier in the episode, Taylor Hack made the case for something that sounds almost too small to matter: updating your profile picture regularly, even with a bad one taken on the spot with your phone.

The reasoning is platform mechanics. Facebook and Instagram both tend to treat a profile photo change as a notable event, which pushes it into feeds it wouldn’t normally reach. People who haven’t seen your content in a while suddenly see the update, some comment purely because they noticed your face, and that fresh burst of engagement makes the algorithm more likely to keep showing your content going forward.

Fogliato’s caveat matters here. The impact depends entirely on how active you already are in the spaces where people know your face. If you’re barely present in local groups, a photo update does little beyond a small engagement bump. If you are genuinely active, consistency becomes the asset, and changing the photo too drastically can actually work against you.

“If you completely change, like you went from a very professional headshot to now you’re with your kids, backwards hat on the lake,” he said, “there’s going to be a lot of people who don’t know it’s the same person anymore. To them, you’re that image with the name on it.”

His practical read: minor, incremental updates, a bit more grey, a slightly newer version of the same general look, preserve recognition while still giving the algorithm a reason to boost you. A jarring reinvention resets that recognition to zero, right at the moment you most want to be remembered.

Both agreed on the harder rule underneath all of it: if your profile picture is a logo, change it. Fogliato was direct about why. “Companies do not make relationships,” he said. People do. The one exception is a dedicated team account, where the calculation is different, but for any individual agent, the photo needs to be an actual, recognizable human face, close enough that a client would know you at the grocery store.

Ask for a favour, get a client

One tactic Fogliato described works because it doesn’t look like marketing at all.

Post in a local community group, not pitching anything, just asking for help. Something like: I have clients who just bought in this part of town, their anniversary is coming up, they’re new here, where should they go? No mention of being an agent is required, though including it, framed only as context, quietly signals a level of service without ever asking for business.

People tend to answer these generously because helping feels good and costs nothing. The upside compounds from there. Local business owners who get recommended sometimes reach out directly, curious about a collaboration, since a public shoutout in an active local group is free advertising for them too. What started as a small, honest ask for a client can turn into a warm introduction to a business partner who never would have taken a cold call.

The only real rule: it has to be true. A fabricated client with a fabricated anniversary is a fabrication that unravels the first time someone follows up on it.

A warning worth taking seriously

The episode closed on a note that had nothing to do with growth tactics and everything to do with risk.

Fogliato described a recent conversation with a company weighing whether to email roughly a thousand contacts who were more than two years past their last interaction, on the logic that the maximum fine, if caught, would still be worth it against the odds of landing even one deal.

The math is wrong, and dangerously so. Fines for this kind of violation are typically assessed per message, not per campaign. A thousand non-compliant emails isn’t one fine. It’s the potential for a thousand fines, triggered the moment a single recipient complains and a regulator starts looking. Fogliato referenced a case where a lack of proper website disclosures resulted in a fine calculated per page, across roughly 17,000 auto-generated MLS pages, before it was eventually appealed down.

The relevance to AI tools is direct. As more agents hand off email and outreach to AI systems that can operate at genuine scale, the ability to accidentally violate a regulation a thousand times over, instead of once, gets a lot easier, not harder. Consent and compliance rules do not bend for automation. If anything, automation raises the stakes, because the tool doesn’t know your board’s rules and won’t stop to ask.

The full episode covers in-person seminar formats that outperform their online equivalents, a brewery-based first-time buyer event format worth stealing outright, and the print-shop story behind Fogliato’s laser-etched bottle gifts in more detail. It is available on the REM YouTube channel.

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