Social Marketing 101 for Real Estate Agents

Most people have heard of Facebook and YouTube, but what about Scribd, Flickr, or Digg? There are many different sites out there that have been created to help real estate agents reach out and communicate. Best of all, most of these sites are free!

Read on to learn the basics about the latest social marketing sites and how they help can help you communicate with your prospects, leads, clients, and referrals (and get more deals, of course!).

Blogging

What is a blog? A blog, known more formally as a web log, is an online diary with entries that are updated frequently. Some blogs are created for personal use as others are strictly for business. Most blogs are interactive, which means visitors are able to leave comments.

So what are some benefits to having a blog? It’s a great way to drive traffic to your website and boost your site’s rank in Google and other search engines. Plus, it allows you to demonstrate that you are the real estate expert – and that’s why your clients hire you, right? Blogging is definitely worth making part of your social marketing plan.

Read about how to set up a blog, and what to write, in our blog post Blogging Part II: What to Write.

Facebook

Facebook is a great free online community that gives people the power to share and stay connected with family, friends, colleagues, clients, and prospects. Did you know that if Facebook were a country it would be the third largest, with an amazing population of 400,000,000?  That’s bigger than the entire United States (population 308,898,000)!  Clearly, Facebook has something to offer.  And its chief benefit to you is the sheer number of potential clients who are active there.

Real estate agents love using Facebook to market themselves. Through their Facebook business page agents can post blogs, upload videos, update their status, offer MLS search and market snapshots, and much more.

Twitter

Twitter is an information networking website, designed to keep you connected to the latest information that you find interesting – and to the people who want to hear what you have to say. You can post “Tweets” – like a quick shout out to your targeted audience – any time.

Real estate agents use Twitter to communicate with clients and prospects in real time.  Plus, Twitter offers a number of location-specific tools that allow you to get hyperlocal (and we all know that real estate is about location, location, location). 

Read about those location-specific features, and how to use them to build your business, in our blog post  6 Tips for Using Twitter to Build Your Real Estate Business.

YouTube

YouTube is a video sharing site. This powerful website allows you to broadcast yourself online, to share your story with the world. Some broadcast themselves singing, dancing or getting hurt; as others make professional clips for business use.

Real estate agents use YouTube to post video logs, or vlogs – short video clips that are posted online like a live journal for the web world to see.  Our real estate clients have also found great success in videotaping their own home tour of their listings (largely gone are the days when you needed a professionally-produced virtual tour; today it’s all about do-it-yourself in real time).

Scribd

Scribd is the world’s largest social reading and publishing company – “where the world comes to read.”  Real estate agents use Scribd as a resource tool and to upload documents.  When you upload your monthly market statistics presentation, or your latest report on the best schools in a given neighborhood, for example, Scribd will index those resources with Google and the other search engines – giving prospects yet another way to find you.

Flickr

Flickr is one of the best online photo management and sharing applications in the world. Created by Yahoo!, Flickr allows you to upload photos and share them – sort of like the YouTube for photos. You can easily connect your Flickr account to Facebook, Twitter, your blog, etc., making it easy to transfer photos to and from your different social media applications. Real estate agents use Flickr to upload pictures of homes that are on the market and other pictures that are valuable to them as an agent to share. Again, the more you’re sharing in more places online, the more chances you’re giving prospects to find you.

Digg

Digg is fairly new and has been working on getting its name out there in the social world. You may have come across a Digg button online or seen the Digg symbol on TV. Either way, Digg is a great place for you to connect and share content from around the web. With an account on Digg the goal is to get visitors to click the “Digg” button on your blog post. The more people “Digg” your post, the higher it moves up in Digg’s rankings.  Your ultimate goal is to get enough Diggs that your post shows up on the main Digg page – that, as they say, is the ultimate Google juice!  (One more way to drive traffic back to your website, where you can turn visitors into leads.) 

OnlyWire

Do you want to create an account for all the highest ranked social media sites, but don’t have time? Well with OnlyWire you can – it only takes one click to submit to 42 social marketing sites. Using OnlyWire saves time and still allows you to put your name on the social marketing map – genius! Real estate agents from all over are posting blogs and comments everywhere on the web, in just one click, thanks to OnlyWire.

So what have we learned?

There are at least eight  great social marketing tools that are really essential for real estate agents like you who want to reach out and communicate with prospects. In social marketing, the more content (blog text, videos, photos, comments) you push out to the world, the more you engage with other people, the more leads you’ll generate and clients you’ll convert.

All that said, we know that  integrated social marketing can feel very complicated.  That’s why we’re here to help.  If we can answer any questions, please leave us a comment below or contact us directly.  Happy marketing!