Whether you’re an experienced agent or just starting out, you can use social media to promote your business and connect with consumers online.
Online Open House
Prospective buyers want to know as much as they can about a listing before seeing it. Luckily, the Internet makes this easy. If you record video, you can upload it to YouTube and then embed the video on your website or share it via Facebook, which lets buyers glean as much information as possible before ever stepping foot into the location. It’s one way to weed out ill-fitting real estate listings, because videos show so much more than pictures. This also helps your buyers develop questions about the listing.
When clients have interest in making appointments, you can also use the Internet to schedule those appointments. Tungle.Me or Google Calendar offer a central locations for you to track your meetings, and you can allow others in your office to see this data, too. These solutions allow you to check in from your computer or phone while on the run, so you’re never tethered to the office, and you can cut redundant bookings, too.
Social Media Requires Socialization
One of the mistake real estate agents and other professionals often make about social media is expecting that a profile will run itself, but this just isn’t the case. Someone has to be behind the Facebook page or the LinkedIn profile, otherwise it becomes stagnant and potential buyers or sellers won’t view it as valuable. Frequent updates
remind consumers that you’re there, and they’ll come to lean on you when they’re ready to buy or sell. Some successful real estate firms have used Facebook as a way to immediately answer questions about listings and even give prospective buyers with a couple of potential options before they begin their search.
Companies like Corrocan have separate Twitter accounts, one for new listings and one with industry news, so Internet users can choose which account to follow. In fact, experts recommend posting more than just listings because this can be useless information to your followers. Instead, you should post industry news, statistics and commentary about what’s going on in today’s real estate world. Even someone who is actively looking for listings won’t have interest in every listing that you provide on Facebook or Twitter, so this extra information provides value and not alienate readers.
Making Connections with Other Professionals
Social networking doesn’t just allow you to connect with other real estate professionals. People don’t just move within the local areas, and these professional relationships help you better help customers. For example, you might not be able to directly help someone who is moving out of state, but you can provide connections and become involved in the process, if you know other real estate professionals in the area. Similarly, your contacts can give you the same service when the opposite happens.
Furthermore, social networking provides a way for you to contact other agents and share tips of the business. If you have long-distance associates, you don’t need to worry about being local competition, so you may feel more free to share.
Not only should you associate with other professionals like yourself via social media, but you can use social networks like LinkedIn, which exist solely to connect professionals, to find those within the same and similar industries who would know consumers who want to buy or sell property. Landlords and property managers are among the professionals who can send interested consumers to you.
These are just a few of the ways you can use social media to succeed in real estate.
Citations:
- Photo with CC license. Taken from Flickr. Author: Neal Schaffer
Benjamin Ben Sawyer is Social Media Consultant for more than 5 years. He helped a lot of companies to establish their online presence and improve their rankings, thus gain more visitors and potential clients to their websites. Currently he is working for arvernebythesea.com , well known real estate company from New York, as their Social Media Strategist. In this article, Ben shared with us some of his most important tips for building a successful Social Media management campaign.