"Who the heck has time to do all of this?" is a question that may have entered your mind these past ten days. Certainly, a social media marketing campaign neither:
produces immediate results, or
is easy to implement.
An effective social media campaign develops over years, not weeks. All of the ideas I showed you are free or extremely low-cost (less than $50/month) but they do require a time investment on your part. To develop a web presence like I or Greg Swann have is kind of like eating an elephant; you have to do it one bite at a time. Here are some tips to help you get started:
Blogging is an excellent way to practice all five pillras of social media marketing. It is a great way to demonstrate your expertise, provide contect for the search engines so that you are "findable" for certain key phrases, and answer client-generated questions in the public's eye.
Oftentimes, mainstream media read weblogs to look for local experts when working on a story. Ive been interviewed and quoted by:
Should you decideyou want to set up your own weblog, you have many platforms from which to choose. I prefer Typepad because of its simplicity. Here is a video about how to set up a Typepad weblog:
Twitter is a quickly growing social network, designed around the simple question "What are you doing?". Essentially, users answer that question in 140 characters or less and post it so that all of their "followers" can see the answer. Before you dismiss the network as banal, think about how you might watch for sales oopportunities or broadcast useful information on Twitter.
LinkedIn is perhaps the "Grand-Daddy" of the social networks. It is far more "professional" in its presentation and appeal than Facebook. Over 42 million professionals from 200 countries are using LinkedIn today.
When you join, you create a profile that summarizes your professional
expertise and accomplishments. You can then form enduring connections
by inviting trusted contacts to join LinkedIn and connect to you. Your
network consists of your connections, your connections’ connections,
and the people they know, linking you to a vast number of qualified
professionals and experts. Through your network you can:
Manage the information that’s publicly available about you as professional
Find and be introduced to potential clients, service providers, and subject experts who come recommended
Create and collaborate on projects, gather data, share files and solve problems
Be found for business opportunities and find potential partners
Gain new insights from discussions with likeminded professionals in private group settings
Discover inside connections that can help you land jobs and close deals
Post and distribute job listings to find the best talent for your company
Here is a video about how I've used LinkedIn, since 2003, to build my customer base:
ActiveRain.com is one of the coolest destination sites for REALTORs. To date, over 150,000 real estate professionals have registered on the site; a good bumber of them use the free blogging platform it provides. Active Rain has a nominal monthly fee for a consumer-facing weblog.
Active Rain's Brad Andersohn shows you how to set up an Active Rain profile:
Trulia.com is another strong, national website which attracts both buyers and sellers. In my opinion, Trulia is setting itself up as a national, online MLS search site.
Rudy Bachraty shows us how to set up a Trulia profile:
Zillow.com is a powerful website which attracts both buyers and sellers alike. Sellers often use it to check out the "Zestimate" for their home and neighboring properties. Buyers are attracted to both listings on the site and the Zillow Mortgage Marketplace.
In this video, Sara Bonert explains how REALTORs can use Zillow to market themselves by:
Google is the premier search engine on the internet. It is usually the first place your potential customers would search for you. One of the easiest ways to brand yourself on the internet is through the first pillar of social media marketing; declaration of identity. Google Profiles makes it easy for REALTORs to "rank" on the bottom of the first page, for their name.
The personal profiles are not new. I did share some of my thoughts on this in Unchained in Seattle.
They’ve been around for a while now, it just seems that every time I
take a look at them they add more features. First with a curious name
verification process, then just last week with custom URLs.
They now support a pretty good amount of info on someone depending on
your settings. Numerous links to sites, an ‘about me’, contacts, and a
Flickr or Picassa feed for photos.
None of this might be relevant except for the fact that Googling you
is what people do. Even my wife (against my personal preference) told
someone to just look me up on Google the other day. That person found
me in a heart beat.
Watch this video from Lorna Li to learn how to set up a Google Profile:
Any and all forms of Social Media Marketing tactics fall under at
least one of these five forms of action. Often the same channel will
incorporate two or more of these:
