Yesterday I attended two presentations about using social media effectively. The presentations were tailored to real estate professionals and hosted at the San Diego Area REALTOR (SDAR) office.
I arrived early and spoke with three of the attendees while we waited for the presentation to begin. One agent named April was concerned about privacy and the ability to separate her personal facebook page from her real estate fanbook page. Some people discussed not knowing what to “tweet” about, one agent asked for advice about upgrading to an iPhone4 or 4s (get SIRI and the upgraded camera). The entire group was socially engaged.
The presenter discussed the statistics that overwhelming indicated that the majority of home buyers and real estate transactions begin online- whether the statistics are accurate or not it’s safe to assume that if you are not found online you will miss opportunities to do business. For some reason she skipped the discussion on using google analytics and engagement measurement tools. Her presentation was engaging though and covered a wide variety of social mobile web technologies and tools to get excited about researching.
The presenter discussed establishing a habit of posting online information everyday during “peak” times, the need to follow and build followers across facebook and twitter, and focusing those messages on 4 primary and 4 secondary markets in as localized an effort as you can travel and service effectively. During the sessions we setup a facebook fan page, explored the topics of search engine optimization (SEO), as well as the short hand characters used on twitter and social media- such as the @user and #hashtag to signify keywords.
During the advanced topic session we reviewed online application sites such as:
- Facebook.com
- twitter.com
- dlvr.it (delivers wordpress rss to a facebook page as a content entry)
- bit.ly (url shortner so you can fit more characters in your tweet)
- truetwit.com (tweeter validation -not to be mistaken with verified on twitter)
- twellow.com (third party twitter directory)
- twitbacks.com (templates for your twitter account)
- paper.li (your own online newspaper)
- hootsuite.com (project management dashboard for a few leading social media sites)
- & many more
Selecting the social media sites and tools to use from the ever expanding offerings from new startups and social sites requires dedication, technical knowledge, consistency, social awareness, and a commitment to analytic performance monitoring.
Follow me on twitter and facebook (I prefer instagr.am to author my tweets and wall entries- just snap some pictures, add your comment @ # and post to your social accounts) if you would like to get more information about social media uses in real estate, analytics, and reviews of the website and tools that make it easier to adopt and improve your presence online. I’m currently using google+ and I must say that I prefer it to facebook.
