What is Your Social Media Strategy?
I was fortunate and honored that I was asked to speak on an expert panel recently at Agent Reboot 
Philadelphia along with Bill Lublin and Kim Wood (those guys taught me!) The difficulty that a lot of agents have as well as businesses is getting involved with social media as the question always is what is the Return on Investment (ROI) ?
There are so many "social media gurus" and "coaches" out there that will teach you what to do and what not to do. And if you go to a real estate bar camp there could be an hour spent talking about a topic that could be highly interesting or relatively meaningless. At the end of the day, the right answer will be what personally works for you and your business.
I think the most important aspect to realize is that Social Media is here to stay. If you are not on Facebook or Twitter, you probably should be! Why? Because your clients and prospects are. I think outside of anything, the first way to use these tools is it is another way to be where your clients and prospects are and to both communicate with them and to stay in touch with them. Also, once you get to know the platforms better, you can use the medium as a prospecting tool by searching keywords as well. And finally, I think it is critical to direct folks on your important posts to your landing page - whether it be your website or blog.
This is where everyone on Active Rain is already SO far ahead of the curve because everyone of course already has a blog. I do not know the exact percentages of how many agents have a blog. Maybe someone can answer that question in a comment. I would have to guess that it is around 1 percent. If you do not have a blog, then it is important to have a decent website or a landing page to direct traffic to where you have more information about yourself, your business, your company, photos, videos, contact info and so forth. This obviously is key as far as lead generation. Not for nothing, but I cannot even tell you how many leads we have generated from our website The Somers Team and our blogs over the years - but I know it is a lot. It is the main reason that we have been able to build our business over the years as well as our team to be one of the most successful agents in Philadelphia. The beauty about social media is that it helps catapult your business and it helps build on that foundation of trust in the consumer/client mind as well that leads to a long lasting relationship.
And to go full circle, having a social media strategy is critical. For example:
- What number of blog posts per week is your goal?
- How many of these posts are "fluff" vs solid consumer content?
- How does your website look?
- How does it rank in the search engines? Your blog?
- Are you engaging people on Facebook and Twitter daily? But not more than 30 minutes to an hour a day? Or preferably less? Remember time is money.
- If you have just a template site with your company, are you working on getting a new website (costs are so much less these days)?
- Have you read Gary V's book "Crush It" ? Personal branding is key.
- Are you going to as many real estate/technology conferences as possible to stay ahead of the curve?
Let's all kick ass the rest of the year and go into 2012 guns blazing!
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