Real Estate Professionals – Add Social Media to the Marketing Mix

Posted by Jim Leonard

If there’s one area that people in the real estate business typically neglect, it’s developing and implementing a detailed and deliberate marketing plan. Most of the time, Realtors and brokers simply play ‘follow-the-leader’ and employ whatever methods those around them are using. They get a web site, send out postcards, giveaway calendars, call on ‘expireds,’ join the Rotary Club, and then cross their fingers, hoping that new business will come their way as a result. Rarely are they intentional in their marketing efforts, nor do they take time to analyze and evaluate what methods are the most effective.

And so it is too with many who wander into the social media arena. A fellow agent in your office has encouraged you to have a Facebook presence, to use Twitter, or join ActiveRain – a site dedicated to real estate.  

Using the tools of social media allows you to expand/enhance your digital footprint. With more and more consumers accessing the Internet for their home buying and selling needs, one of your primary strategies should be to spread and enlarge your digital presence. It’s not enough to simply maintain a web site. The end goal should be to dominate a specific geo-targeted area and maximize your ‘findability’ for select key search terms. In other words, when consumers enter particular key search terms into a search engine, terms that are relevant to your local market, some element of your digital footprint should show up in the search results, i.e. blog article, web site, pod-cast, video, etc..

Using social media empowers you to make meaningful connections/interactions with your sphere of influence and potential clients. It enables meaningful ‘touches’ to occur faster, more efficiently than more traditional methods. That’s not to suggest that you should abandon your previous marketing efforts. Utilizing social media should simply augment – not replace – the tasks you’ve been doing up to this point, especially ones that are proven to result in new business. Nothing will ever replace the value of face-to-face contact. But what you’ll find is that social media can become one of the most cost-effective and results-oriented marketing methods you can employ.

Now that you hopefully have a better understanding as to the ‘why’ of social media for real estate professionals, begin to map out some specific practical applications you can use to develop your own successful social media strategy.