Being Social...Digitally

I honestly don't even know why I am writing this post. There are probably a million posts out there on using social media to build your real estate business. This post is going to concentrate on three things: measuring your return on investment, what to/not to do, and using social media to build actual relationships.

Measuring Your Return on Investment

The raging debate is whether or not social media actually gets you business or is just for branding. I can tell you without question that I have gotten both business and branding from social media. A couple of quick thoughts from a branding standpoint are that, especially as a new agent, you can never do enough branding (if done correctly, see below) and social media is an excellent way, as you progress in your career, to give social proof to your expertise and level of service. This can be done through posts about awards, publications, survey results, etc.

Social media can also be a valuable source for mining referrals. See my post on using your sphere of influence to build your referral business for more details.

What To Do and What Not To Do

It seems like every day there is a new social media tool out there for sharing content or photos or videos or information. It can be overwhelming. It's one of the reasons I debated even writing this. It will probably be outdated tomorrow. Here's my advice: find what your good at, comfortable with, and able to manage and stick with. For me, personally, it's Facebook and LinkedIn. Twitter confounds me and I just link my Facebook page with it. I don't do Instagram except personally and even then sparingly. Find your niche and work it. Make sure you connect with past clients.

Post meaningfully and sparingly. Nobody wants you blowing up their feed all day with boring things that they don't care about. If you're posting news stories, make sure they will resonate with a good chunk of your audience. Photos should be of things that people will find interesting, not 100 photos of your new listing. Announcements should be meaningful and for branding purposes. Show your personality. I try not to post more than three times a day and I usually don't even do that.

Building Real Relationships

The crux of the debate on ROI in social media is that you aren't building a virtual business. Skeptics would argue that you are going to be dealing with real people, not virtual friends. So, using the link above, use your social media platforms to build real relationships with those real people. Remember, your sphere of influence, which includes those fake friends on Facebook, should yield you 1.5-2 referrals per person a year. Granted, not everyone you are friends with on Facebook will be included in that sphere. That ex from high school that you haven't talked to in 20 years is likely not a good prospect, but you know the ones that will work for you. Use our plan to get those referrals.

So, there you have it. It's pretty elementary and simple, but this plan took me from an upstart with no business to doing $12 million a year in production. I am a huge advocate for social media. Use it wisely, young Jedi.