social media explained

Social Media Explained

Why Do Realtors Need Social Media

As a consumer, it seems like Real Estate was made to be marketed online.

It’s hard to remember the times when my husband and I would spend the afternoon driving around with our open house list to see a bunch of properties that once we got there we knew we had no desire to buy.

Social media is a genuine method of self-promotion and customers can actually get to know you through a variety of tweets or Facebook posts about yourself and your business.

When you do this you allow people to choose what they want to look at and will contact you when they are genuinely interested in using you for real estate.

It becomes an introduction without a formal introduction. It’s not obtrusive.

Impressive Stats•94% of all home buyers started their search online

•Facebook has hit over 500 million users

•Realtors WHO ARE effectively USING SOCIAL MEDIA are at a HUGE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE over those WHO ARE NOT!

•According to the National Association of Realtors Annual Technology Survey released in October 2010, an estimated 84% of agents and brokers ARE USING social media for business purposes. That number compares with 67% of agents and brokers who in 2008 said they were NOT USING social media

•74.1% of ONLINE consumers are spending 32.7 hours a week on the computer

Websites

WebsitesFour Things Website Owners Need To Be Doing.

#4 - Make Sure Your Website Is MobileGone are the days where we wait till we get home and sit at our desktop computer to search the internet. The trend for hand held devices is only getting stronger and tablet sales are going through the roof so if your website is not mobile compatible your potential client will just move on to the next.

#3 - Take The Force Opt Off Of Your Homepage.Google is in the process of weeding out all the fly by night make money quick pages and taking them out of the google rankings. If you have this on the homepage of your website take it off and put it on a different page. Although they will never state it publicly it is well known that Google frowns upon this tool being used on a website’s home page.

A WebsiteFour Things Website Owners Need To Be Doing.

#2 - Advertise Your Other Social Media Venues On Your PagesFacebook is where everyone goes to hang out so it is important to let everyone know you are on facebook. If you tweet let your reading audience know this as well and the same goes if you blog or have a you tube account.

#1 – Change Up The Content On Your Home Page From Time To TimeYou may have noticed that from time to time the top left box on the home page of our office website changes up. It started when I began promoting the Garage Sale, then I had a list of events for Canada Day for London and area and now I am promoting the Great Canadian Neighbourhood contest. Gone are the days when websites were created and not updated for 10-15 years. Make a short video based on the monthly press release put out by LSTAR and change it up from time to time.

Twitter

@RLPTriland

TwitterWhat Is Twitter?

Twitter is a website, owned and operated by Twitter Inc., which offers a social networking and microblogging service enabling its users to send and read other users messages.

A message sent on Twitter is referred to as a tweet (not a twit, although some twits do send tweets)

Tweets are text based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the users profile page. Twitter users are sending 640 tweets per second and it receives 180 million unique visitors per month.

TwitterFive Reasons To Use Twitter

5 – SEO (Search Engine Optimization)Google and Bing recently announced their search algorithms take into account the Klout or reach of the social media profile that posts links to your website. By building up your Twitter account with thousands of followers your tweets will help improve your websites ranking.

4 – Content DistributionTwitter is the most efficient content distribution system on the internet today. By posting your blog articles on Twitter they have the potential of being exposed to millions of people

TwitterFive Reasons To Use Twitter

3 – Lead GenerationWhen you post and share valuable content on Twitter you will drive web traffic to your website.

2 – Branding AwarenessBy being active on Twitter you are increasing your brand’s awareness by opening up lines of communication between your brand and other people

1 – Competitive IntelligenceTwitter is a great place to “spy” on your competitors to find out what they are up to

Information from kunocreative.com

Facebook

FacebookFacebook Demographics

•More than 750 million active users

•50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day

•Average user has 130 friends

•People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook

•Average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events

•Average user creates 90 pieces of content each month

•More than 30 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each month

FacebookFacebook Demographics

•Entrepreneurs and developers from more than 190 countries build with Facebook Platform

•Every month, more than 250 million people engage with Facebook on external websites

•Since social plugins launched in April 2010, an average of 10,000 new websites integrate with Facebook every day

•More than 2.5 million websites have integrated with Facebook, including over 80 of comScore's U.S. Top 100 websites and over half of comScore's Global Top 100 websites

Stats were gathered from facebook.com

FacebookWhy You Need A Facebook Business Page

With more that 750 million users and growing, Facebook is the place to be these days. The potential reach is amazing, and not tapping into it in my opinion is a mistake. If your target market uses a social media tool, you should be using it too.

I get asked all the time “I’m already am on Facebook! I have a profile page and I use it daily. Why do I need to create a business page too?

The main issue with using your personal profile page on Facebook for business is that it’s simply not very professional to do so. Most profiles on Facebook are highly personal, and include personal photos, random updates, fun games and all kinds of material that is great, but is not appropriate for a business account.


Do your client and prospects really need to see those photos of what happened in Vegas, or read the war of the words between your family members that you may have commented on?

Do you want them to get notified whenever you play Mafia Wars?

It’s not that a Facebook business page should be dry and boring. On the contrary, it’s good to add the occasional personal update to make it more personable. But a Facebook business page should be much “cleaner” than a Facebook profile, and should have a greater focus on the topic of real estate. After all, that’s what your clients are interested in.


While having an additional presence on Facebook may seem like a lot of work, keep in mind that regularly updating your Facebook business page can be almost fully automated by using a social media dashboard such as hootsuite.

Add humor to every so often to your postings – people LOVE to smile

You should still issue the occasional personal update, but the vast majority if the work can happen automatically, saving you time and money

FacebookPosting on Facebook Business Page

•By all means make photo albums with descriptive text accompanying the photos and post those on your business page.•Congratulate your clients when they buy or sell their property•Casually mention your open houses•Post helpful home hints and community information. In the summer we have lots of outdoor festivals to post about•Post a recipe or two•You should post no more than three times per day on Facebook. If you’re posting on your business Fan Page, make sure you stay on or around your topic.•I recently took a course that suggested these key posting times: 8:30am, 11:30am, 1:30pm and 6:30pm

FacebookAdvertising on Facebook

Pay attention to a copy of your ads so that they are beautiful engaged. You want people in the audience to check it out.

Include a graphic in your ad

Write a call to action so strong and clear so that your readers know exactly what is expected of them when they have read your ad.

Don’t forget that the best ads are easy to understand and not subtle at all

FacebookAdvertising on Facebook

If you are new to the system, it may take a little while before you start to see a readable results but the most important of all is the approach that you take.

If you are able to create effective campaigns, with ads that get a high click through rate, there is no looking back!

FacebookFacebook Insights

Facebook is a great platform for communicating with existing customers, marketing to potential customers, and showing the great things that set your brand apart from the rest. But how do you know if your Facebook messaging is actually effective?

Facebook Insights although new to me is quickly becoming my favorite part about Facebook because useful information can be obtained to help improve the effectiveness of your Facebook marketing. Additionally, you are able to view trends over time.

Take, for instance, the Interactions details, located in the Page Overview section of Facebook Insights. Individual post impressions and feedback, page activity, post views, and post feedback are all monitored. Change the date range to include months, weeks, or simply days worth of activity.

HootsuiteWhat Is Hootsuite?

•HootSuite is a Social Media Dashboard!•Rather than being a social network, HootSuite allows you to connect to multiple social networks from one website.•Using HootSuite’s unique social media dashboard, teams can collaboratively schedule updates to Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Wordpress and other social networks via web, desktop or mobile platforms plus track campaign results and industry trends to rapidly adjust tactics.•Launched in Dec. 2008 by Invoke Media, HootSuite’s rapidly growing user base includes governments, artists and organizations like The White House, Martha Stewart Media, SXSW and Zappos.

KloutThe Klout Score is the measurement of your overall online influence. The scores range from 1 to 100 with higher scores representing a wider and stronger sphere of influence. Klout uses over 35 variables on Facebook and Twitter to measure True Reach, Amplification Probability, and Network Score.

True Reach is the size of your engaged audience and is based on those of your followers and friends who actively listen and react to your messages. Amplification Score is the likelihood that your messages will generate actions (retweets, @messages, likes and comments) and is on a scale of 1 to 100. Network score indicates how influential your engaged audience is and is also on a scale from 1 to 100. The Klout score is highly correlated to clicks, comments and retweets.

The final Klout Score is a representation of how successful a person is at engaging their audience and how big of an impact their messages have on people.

Klout

I registered the office facebook and twitter account with Klout about a month ago immediately after I took Richard Silver’s course at the board.

After taking this course I changed up our social media presence based on the information I was given that day, and this venue did help me monitor if what I was doing on facebook and twitter were making a difference according to this venue. It was a helpful tool to me for this purpose.

KloutNow that I have shared this information with you I have one more thing to say about Klout.

While I agree that in the beginning it is a good guideline to monitor the progress of your social media venues it is so not worth it to stress over your Klout score, or your stock price Boardwalk Avenue and on all kinds of other measures that don’t have much to do with anything related to your real world.

Worrying about whether or not you’re an influencer by someone else’s measures is like having a toy steering wheel and thinking you’re driving the car.

InfluenceInfluenceOne definition: The capacity to have an effect on the character, development, or behavior of someone or something, or the effect itself.If you just pause for a moment and re-read that last sentence, it’s really worth it. Now, contrast that with how many people tweet you or don’t, who posts links to your stuff or who doesn’t, whether such and such replies to you or doesn’t, and tell me that online influence has a lot to do with real world influence. No matter how much I’d like to believe that telling you how much I love my Hyundai Accent will influence you to buy cars, it won’t. (And if it did, I’d certainly expect a bird dog fee.) It just doesn’t work that way no matter how many people tell you it does. You might have a slightly better opinion of something because I say it’s interesting or great or whatever, but rarely will I influence someone to take an action of that nature. However, most online scoring systems would suggest that I have the potential to influence that kind of change.

ClosingThere are many, many more social media avenues that could be covered such as YouTube, Linked In, QR Codes, Four Squares, Flickr and not to forget blogging. But those will have to wait for another session.

It is my personal opinion at this time that a website, twitter and facebook business page are the top three and that is why I focused on them.

I started with the facebook page for the office and read everything I could get my hands on and took webinar after webinar and a couple of courses at the board. I did not venture into any other social media venue until I believed I had the facebook business page down pat.

Months later I moved on to Twitter and started tweeting for the office and just recently the office blog was launched.

ClosingAs I said in the beginning I am passionate about this subject and love to sit and brainstorm with agents regarding which venue and media they should start with.

I believe that the saying “Do It Right or Don’t Do It At all” pertains to social media as in all other facets of life . If you are not willing to commit to the time it takes researching your content and interacting with those on your twitter and facebook then this is not for you.

Start small like I did – choose one of the social media venues and devote your time and effort into that.

Lone Wolf have great webinars, the RLP Network has a social media course , YouTube have awesome video tutorials, obeo.com has great free webinar and Marci James constantly updates her information, there are courses at the board and last but not least my door is always open.