How a realtor should be using Social Media – Top 7 tips for Realtors & Social Media

I do many coaching calls for our 500millionstrong clients. Many of them are Realtors and I get a lot of the same questions about Real Estate & Social Media.

So I thought it might be helpful to the Realtor community to give this advice on how to use Social Media.

Here are some of the best ways to use Social Media as a Realtor.

Top 7 ways for a Realtor to use Social Media.

(*in no particular order)

#1 Facebook - Facebook is great for Realtors. Most Realtors get a ton of referral business from friends and family – and primarily this is exactly who your connected to on Facebook. This is also who you clients are connected to The trick is to not be selling your services all the time.

No one goes on Facebook to be sold, so updates like “I am taking new clients” never work.

How do I use Facebook then? Simple, Take the “Top of mind/awareness” approach.

Post updates like “I am grateful to be blessed with so many great clients.” Or post photos of your listings with comments like “Super excited for this new listing – isn’t it beautiful?”

Then get ninja and tag your sellers in those photos. This is a great way to get in front of their network ALWAYS add your clients on Facebook. Communicating with them on “their wall” is a great idea as well. Just keep it classy and don’t sell using this approach – ever”

Be sure to leave an update on their wall once you close. Example – “I just wanted to say thanks for your business. You guys were a treat to work with” or something along those lines.

#2 YouTube – This is often times the most overlooked of all the networks. Hands down YouTube is one of the best things you can do to get more business as a realtor online.

How? Simple – start filming all of your listings and throw them up on Youtube today.  I did this, I kept it real simple (as you can see here) and just turned on my camera and then proceeded to walk and talk. My buyers loved it – My agents loved it as the buyers they showed homes to who had seen the videos were 5x as likely to sign.

1 quick tip when it comes to YouTube:

Make your title “Keyword rich” – Example: If your listing is in Santa Barbara – Make your title “Santa Barbara Real Estate – 1234 hight st” Most of my videos ended up on Google as the first result. This in turn drove a ton of targeted traffic to our website.

If you want more information on how to get your videos to show up on the first page of Google for popular terms like ” Denver Real Estate” go get www.VideoTrafficAcademy.com – I guarantee if you get it – your videos will be all over Google for the best keywords. The course is that good.

#3 Twitter – I honestly think Twitter might be one of the least useful ways to use Social Media for a Realtor. Actually I take that back. It can be useful, but is very time consuming. BUT – if you enjoy Twitter and use it currently – make sure you are focusing on building a local following. If you live in Miami Florida, a follower in Denver probably will never lead to new business.

To build a local following I would look at the followers of News Celebrities, Radio DJ’s, Local Restaurants, Rotary Clubs Etc. These kind of profiles will almost always have a local following. I would then go and follow all of their followers as many will follow you back. Using this tactic – it works as a virtual handshake. Most people you follow will wonder who you are and why you followed them – they in turn will look and your profile and many will click on your website link.

If you don’t want to do this following – you can use a tool like Tweetadder to do it on auto pilot. Tweetadder can be your best friend if you value your time. It’s not cheap – but it’s worth it.

#4 Linkedin - This is the diamond in the rough of Social Networks. Take full advantage of LInkedin I promise you will thank me later. The best thing you can do first is to optimize your profile. My business parter Lewis Howes has a great post here explaining exactly how to do that. The second thing I would do is get active in groups. I would start my own group, and also get active in others that are local.

Start a group – this is a great way to get more referrals. We have a Realtor student in who started a “Young Professionals” group on linkedin. He then invited all of his local friends and the group took off. After 2 months He held a happy hour mixer/get together for the group. The first time he did it – 25 people showed up – not bad! The second mixer he through over 100 attended. As you can imagine – as the head of the group, and the host of these events – he got & gets a ton of referrals! Literally over 2 million dollars in business came from this one tip for him.

#5 Ads – Linkedin & Facebook – As a Realtor, personal branding is everything. Ads can be an amazing way to build your personal brand. There is probably no better tool than Facebook ads to build your personal brand. The targeting options on Facebook are ridiculous. Do you know your customer? If you do you can laser target them on Facebook. Categories for targeting include – Sex, Education levels, Zip Code, City, Marital status, Interests etc.

#6 Blog / Website – While a blog is not a necessity, you should definitely have one. This can be the hub of all your online marketing efforts. A great place to drive Social Traffic to turn it into leads. WordPress is the only platform I would recommend. There a million great themes specifically for Real Estate. I used a WordPress site for my listings. WordPress is super easy to use.

#7 Email Marketing – While not social – A good email marketing campaign should be your #1 priority.  If you set up a decent site with a good email capture in place – you can expect to convert 5-15% of your traffic to your email list. This was vital to my success in Real Estate. Every time I sent an email – my phone immediately rang off the hook. in 1 year my list quickly grew to over 10,000 people. People loved getting my listings by email.

Hopefully this will spark some ideas on ways you can use the internet and Social Media to drive more traffic to your listings. I could have easily written an entire post about each of the 7 ways mentioned above. If you liked what you read or would like more on a specific network or method – let me know below.

This is another installment of “I find cool stuff and share it with you” – cause I’m cool like that.

Recently my friend Trevor Mauch sent a message over to a mastermind group we’re both in with a link to create your own YouTube “search story”. It’s a fascinating tool that can be used to create a great piece of marketing for your business or brand in all of about 5 minutes.

What is a “Search Story”?

Remember the popular “Parisian Love” commercial that ran during the 2010 Super bowl? That was the the basis for the search story campaign. YouTube & Google have now made a tool for you to to use to create your very own search story.

To get an idea of how this can be used:

Here is the video I made to help promote a new service we are rolling out called  Free wordpress site.

You can see exactly how we implemented it here – www.FreeWordpressSite.com

Some guidelines you may want to follow:

(These 7 guidelines were provided to me by another great member of the mastermind, Dale Hensel, from Paper Assets 101 )

When creating your search story video, YouTube allows you to enter 7 search phrases that pull results from Google to create the video – so here are useful tips and guidelines.

1. Your Target market’s BIG QUESTION
2. Your target market’s REFINED QUESTION (when the big one doesn’t answer it)
3. The BIGGEST BENEFIT you can give them (if they had the answer now)
4. The next Biggest Benefit you can give them
5. EMOTIONAL HOOK (or heightened emotional state they are experiencing or seeking out)
6. Decision that you want them to make.
7. Fast forward to their dream as if it already happened

By structuring your 7 lines like this, you can walk someone through a sequence that ends with emotion, and a call to action and the benefit of doing it. For short videos that you can make, this is a huge marketing tool Google has handed us.

You can make your own search story here - http://www.youtube.com/searchstories

Go make your own video now and if you liked this post – share it!

This has to be one of the funniest, clean & safe for work videos I have seen in a while. Before you watch it, consider this social media tip.

I like to share funny thing’s on social media. I recommend you do the same.

These types of posts get a lot of traffic and re-tweets on Twitter. When someone RT’s you on Twitter it includes your username which inevitably drives traffic back to your profile, which inevitably gets people to follow you and exposes them to you or your business. Also because Twitter has such a limited profile and lacks photos, videos etc – People will inevitably click on your website.

Tip – Share funny things in the late afternoon or evening. They get a lot more traction that time of day. Share inspirational and educational things in the morning.  Quotes work really well in the morning!

Anyway – here’s one of the funniest videos of a “port a potty” prank.