Facebook, Twitter, Linked In and understanding the power of social media marketing

These buzz words are being used today and unfortunately most real estate agents have no idea how to use these tools to their advantage. The main problem with social media stems from not really knowing what Facebook, Twitter and Linked In are designed for. And once you finally understand the purpose of these tools it becomes really easy to use them in your business to generate leads.

They are not a place to put your new listing on and definitely not a place to talk about your recent sale success or up coming home opens. Actually it is really funny browsing through real estate agent profiles on Facebook, they are boring, uninteresting and as a potential seller why would I want to be your friend?

Doing this is the fastest way to lose followers and damage your reputation. Your so-called ‘friends’ will be removing you from their feeds and un-friending you faster than you meet them. And then you wonder what you are doing wrong… So now that you know what not to do, you are probably sitting their thinking, ‘well Merv that’s all I put on there and if this doesn’t work, what does?’. The key is in the name, social media is about building relationships with people and helping them with their problems.

The trouble is most of us use social media as a blog and try to communicate our business through it. Another problem with is, you don’t own Facebook… so why would you invest ‘all’ your efforts into promoting another companies website and not your own? However once you understand that social media is a ‘marketing’ tool it becomes very easy to build relationships and generate business from the available social media sites.

You should be posting snippets on Facebook and Twitter that link back to your website where visitors in their head will thank you for advice and then click to find out more about you. Ah ha, the penny should drop now. Facebook is designed to drive traffic to your website through social posts and targeted ads.

Facebook did not become the biggest and most profitable website with the most users because it wants to make friends… It has been designed to be the biggest advertising platform on the internet. Just like Google AdWords. They really are the wolf in sheep’s clothing and they both do it really well and in a consumer focused way and this is the key.

Everything you do on the internet should be focused at the visitor and your target market. Never ever make it about yourself or you will fail.

If you want to learn more about social media and how to build an internet marketing solution to power your lead generation in this connected world, contact us here.

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