How Realtors can harness the power of social media

Harnessing the power

Are you a Realtor trying to figure out just how you can harness the power of social media to build deeper relationships with your clients and generate brand awareness and leads? Over the course of two articles here on AGBeat, I’ll discuss four social media channels I suggest you get involved in and tips that’ll help you build a strong foundation for success. This article will outline the first two channels I recommend.

It’s important to note that social media both takes a lot of time and work. If you don’t have much bandwidth or help at the moment to implement everything discussed in this article, start slowly and work on one social media platform at a time. You don’t want to have a number of poorly managed social profiles all over the web as this will reflect badly on you.

Channel one: Facebook

Create a company page on Facebook. Once done, let your Facebook friends know you’ve created the page and ask them to “like” it and spread the word.

Here are some quick tips:

• Post regularly and often. I recommend once a day. 80% of your updates should be useful, interesting, and helpful information for your fans. The other 20% can be promotional posts.
• Take advantage of apps for your page. Realtor.com and Zillow have apps that will allow you to display listings and offer MLS searches.
• Try to post images with your updates. It’s been shown that images get shown on fan’s newsfeeds more than updates with links or just text. Not everything you post will get shown to your fans. Click here for more information on Facebook EdgeRank. Because of EdgeRank, it’s especially important to build engagement on your fan page, so try to ask lots of questions in your posts and get people to like and comment.
• Schedule posts right from within Facebook to save time. If you don’t have time to log-in to Facebook one day or are unable to post at a certain time, you can schedule posts to go out automatically.
• Look at “Facebook Insights” to see which posts are your most and least popular. Use this information to guide you on what to post more and less of.

Channel two: YouTube

As a real estate sales professional, use probably YouTube to showcase your listings as well as areas and properties that you specialize in. YouTube has hundreds of millions of users and many of these people are actively searching for specific properties and areas that interest them.

Here are some quick tips:

• Make sure your YouTube channel is fully completed. Include information that talks about your services and include links to your website and social media profiles.
• Also, YouTube lets you upload a background image for your channel so make sure you do so to spruce it up and give it your own personalized look and feel.
• Add descriptions for each video uploaded and ensure and these descriptions (as well as your video tags) are SEO optimized. Make sure the tile of your video also contains keywords you’re ranking for.

Look out for the part two in this series later this week for the other two great social media channels that you should get involved with.