April 1, 2010

Guest Blogger: Alva Cranford,  Breeze Marketing Media

Social media networking has totally revolutionized how we do business. Real estate professionals have always been experts at building their brand through networking relationships; today, social media provides the opportunity to expand that reach even more. Each day, millions of consumers turn to the internet to check email, catch up with friends and family, entertainment, and research their next purchase! Google remains top dog as the number one search engine, but did you know that Facebook is ranked as the 2nd most popular website in the country? Not far behind is Twitter (10th) and LinkedIn (15th). These are also amazing tools that can be utilized for online marketing with essentially no cost to you!

According to the National Association of Realtors only 30% of Realtors are taking advantage of social networking. Wow! Considering a referral today is as easy – and efficient – as forwarding an email, sending a text message, or sharing a virtual tour link, it’s kind of surprising that more realtors have not taken advantage of this incredible viral marketing opportunity. And it also give a tremendous competitive edge to the realtor who utilizes social media as part of their integrated marketing strategy.

Getting Started with Social Media: Facebook

Creating an account at Facebook.com is simple enough. There is also a Help Center, click here to access, that provides information about how to use the site, adding photos, videos, setting up a Fanpage, and the important privacy settings. You can snap a photo of a new property you’ve just signed to list, and post to your Facebook page using Facebook Mobile, before you even drive away!

A few things to consider when setting up your Facebook page is how you plan to use it. If you have your privacy settings set to “Everyone,” anything you post can be found in an online search of your name, so you have to consider if a funny inside joke could be considered offensive to a prospective client who googled your name and stumbles across that. At the same time, every post shared using the “Everyone” setting gives your brand more visibility across the web. Some use LinkedIn for business contacts and Facebook for social – another option for Facebook is a great tool they offer called Facebook Pages – and it’s free. With a Fanpage, you can invite other realtors and clients to “become a fan” – this allows you to publish content, such as photos and links to new listing virtual tours. You may think, I already have a website that does that, but keep in mind social media takes your message to “where” people are and many are spending a good deal of time on Facebook! One of the best things you can do is first post content on your website, then post the link to your site on Facebook and Twitter to push the message out.

You can use the Facebook Events application to promote events such as your next Open House! These are the free tools available, but Facebook also has Ads which allow you to target clients based on targeted region, keywords, and budget.

The continuing advances in social media make it easier and easier everyday to grow your business with virtually no out-of-pocket expenses if you do the marketing yourself. There are also integrated marketing companies that can do these things for you if you choose to outsource your online marketing. Today, there are applications linking Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn together making it even more effective and efficient to utilize social media in taking your message to the largest number of people.

Check out the Facebook groups and pages as they offer additional opportunities for networking! Simply search for a topic to see the many available ones to join.

One last tip for making the most of your Facebook account, some of your friends may really love to play online games such as “Farmville,” “Mafia Wars” and more. You can open your page to find it filled with these silly status updates – if you find them distracting or annoying, you can simply slide your cursor over to the right of the post and a “Hide” will appear – click on that and you have the option to hide “the person” OR “the application” … click that and they will stop appearing on your page!

The Importance of Social Media in Marketing

Social media marketing is not only competitive and real-time effective, it’s also eco-friendly. When you print and distribute flyers and brochures, you never really know how many of those will go straight to the trash can for both a waste of investment and natural resources. But social media allows you to both continue to build brand awareness, but also be found when people do real-time searches for realtors and/or homes online.

An additional important benefit of using social media in marketing is link juice. This is a term used to describe the fuel that helps you be found by consumers who use search engines to find what they are looking for online. Similar to the Facebook image above showing the networking of people connecting, search engines look for sites that have many links coming in to them from other websites; continually building links to your website is among the most important marketing work you can do to push your site up in page rankings in organic searches.

We’ll look at other social media tools and websites in future blog posts. If you find this information helpful and wish to share with other realtors, please feel free and we’ve made it easy to do so. Simply move your cursor over the images below to post on your Facebook or LinkedIn page, tweet out on Twitter, Buzz up on Yahoo, or bookmark on Google (additional options available below).

To learn more about Alva and her integrated marketing services, check out her website Breeze Marketing Media.