Money down the drain
We are proud that the real estate industry has taken to social networking as a marketing channel and that many brokerages have adopted videos, found ways to make their Facebook efforts be more about serving consumers than touting their listings and some have even taken to Twitter and offered useful information to clients rather than chit chat about what they ate for dinner.
We are proud that consumers have connected with Realtors in meaningful ways and that many agents are seen as local resources.
The problem we are seeing is in how people are directing people to their social networking profiles via print marketing. Perhaps you’ve seen either of these on a print advertisement?
The big waste
The above icons are fantastic. They show consumers how tech savvy you are and how hip you’ve become and that you too are a tweep. Alas, the big waste is that many are featuring these icons on print marketing and we’ve even seen it on billboards, but they don’t properly direct consumers to efforts.
For example, I recently saw a billboard for a real estate firm with all of the fancy social networking buttons that say “find me, I’m so cool!” but the name of the brokerage wasn’t the Facebook page name nor was the Facebook name that I finally tracked down consistent with the Twitter handle and the YouTube account was under yet a different variation of the brand name.
Thousands of dollars were poured into a campaign that directed consumers into an endless and frustrating loop of attempting to locate their brand. This isn’t a unique occurrence either, I’ve seen it on postcards, flyers, and even business cards.
If your social networking accounts are exactly the predictable name of your brokerage (hypothetically @RedRockRealty is RedRockRealty.com and Facebook.com/RedRockRealty), but if there is any shortening of your brokerage name as your social network profile or any inconsistency between profile names on networks, we urge you to avoid wasting money and simply spell it out on your print marketing.
