Part 1 of this series provided definitions of Social Media, Social Networking, Social Networking websites, and Social Bookmarking websites. It also provided a description of what social media is not. In this post we lay out some reasons why it is important to consider adopting a social media and networking strategy, some interesting statistics, and some ways to get started.
Starting a Social Media Strategy
It is important to note that there are different types of social media strategies, ranging from simple to moderate to comprehensive. A comprehensive social media strategy consists of a combination of social media tools, social networking sites, bookmarking sites, and video and photo communities. And it is often coordinated with advanced sharing and status tools. This may seem overwhelming to any one new to social media and social networking. So for purposes of this article, I will focus on simple and moderate social media strategies. The good news is that even relatively simple strategies can be very effective and reap rewards for your business.
There are many benefits to adopting a simple or moderate strategy. Throughout the course of this article we will discuss different ways you can employ a relatively modest strategy to create and share information, reach a broader audience, help with your search engine optimization, and hopefully generate quality leads.
Why Should You Get Involved?
Realtor.org recently noted that in 2009, 90% of home buyers have used the internet for their home search. There is no doubt that home buyers, sellers, and renters are using information found on the internet to make decisions. Social Networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter represent a new way that customers are searching for information. By not getting involved you may be falling behind your competition in establishing your brand and promoting your business. As you know, Real Estate agents face tough competition and it is very important to do whatever you can to enhance marketing yourself or your company and to reach as many prospective clients as possible.
For purposes of this article we will focus on Facebook and Twitter. As I mentioned in part 1 of this series, by no means are Facebook and Twitter the extent of the social networking websites that are available, nor do these represent the extent of a social networking strategy. However, they are currently the most popular.
Recent statistics indicate that Facebook has just reached 500 million users. And on any given day it’s estimated that 50% of those users log into their Facebook account. It is estimated that Twitter has roughly 75 million users. Clearly, both of these sites provide a huge audience. Remember, this audience is global, and individuals do relocate so they are quite relevant to any local real estate market. For example, Verdeschi Realty, an IMISoftware client, recently received a lead through its website from an individual who was relocating from the west coast to the east coast.
To help tie social media and your website together I'd like to point out the results of an interesting analysis recently published (2010) by online marketing firm, HubSpot. The analysis was aimed at defining the overall online activity related to various industries. The result of this analysis for the real estate industry showed that for the keyword search term 'Real Estate', the overall online activity was roughly split 50 / 50 between search engines and social media. The 50% that is defined as social media includes blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. This information shows that by not establishing a social media presence at some level you are not taking part in roughly 50% of the online activity related to real estate. The other 50% represents general search engine usage, pointing out that it is important to have a professional website that incorporates a search engine optimization strategy to help your website be relevant in those searches.
In addition, HubSpot also discovered that for the real estate industry there was a minor difference between the effectiveness of online marketing reach between Facebook and Twitter. In fact the real estate industry was one of the few that showed only a minor difference between the two. This highlights the importance of incorporating both Facebook and Twitter in your online marketing strategy.
Your Website
Though you can certainly embark on a social media and networking strategy without having a website, it is probably not the most effective approach. There are many reasons why you should have a modern, functional, search engine optimized website. However, we are not going to focus on this here. Rather, we will discuss where and how your website fits within your social media strategy.
Your website should function as a hub, or focal point, in an online communication tool. Information should be regularly flowing into it and out of it. How do you establish and maintain this flow of information? Here are a few ways to accomplish this.
Adding Content
Manual
The manual input of information is the most obvious and common way to input information on your website. You can write and publish a blog, add recent news and announcements about your company, or perhaps the communities that you serve. You can add events to an event calendar. This could be company events that you may be sponsoring, or community events such as meetings, parades, concerts, or town hall meetings. If your website provides a private database for you to manage your listings, your listings can be added and now become syndicated, shareable, and indexed by search engines. If you do not have a property listing database you can add new property listings, recent sales, and open houses to your blog or your news and announcements. Most robust blogging platforms allow for image and attachment uploads so you can publish property photos and marketing flyers with your post. You can also look to third party sites that focus on real estate marketing.
If your website supports a community forum, you can use it to generate discussions about a broad range of topics relevant to your business as a real estate agent. For example, you can start discussions about the community or the school district, or start discussions about community political events or perhaps zoning laws. I am not going to sugar coat this; starting a forum and getting individuals to contribute is not easy. It takes time, commitment, and a continued involvement on your part. Community forums may be best left to a second or third phase of a social networking strategy; perhaps after you have established a strong following with your blog or on your Facebook fan page where you can invite people to join.
Writing your own blog provides a number of benefits. Blogging is a topic unto itself and is beyond the scope of this article. Blogging provides a vehicle for you to share your knowledge on a particular subject or range of subjects, market your product and/or services and position yourself as an expert in your field. Blogging is a primary way to create and establish discussions around your content. You can open up your blogs to comments and ratings. You can also provide email notifications to users who want to be kept updated on new comments. Look for future blog posts on the blogging topic.
By no means are we saying that you must employ all of these tactics to add content to your site. Even just one will provide you with some benefit. If your website provides this functionality you are well on your way. If it does not, contact your website administrator or design company and ask if these features are available. There are also many popular and very robust blogging platforms such as Blogger, WordPress and TypePad that you can employ within your social media, or more specifically, blogging strategy.
Automated
The second way of regularly adding fresh content to your site is through an automated process. Once established, this requires very minimal effort on your part. Many blogging services and platforms also serve as an RSS Reader. If your website includes an integrated blogging platform, this functionality will enable you to import external RSS Feeds which dynamically adds frequently updated content to your site. RSS, commonly known as Really Simple Syndication, is a widely available and recognized web standard for publishing frequently updated information, such as blogs, news articles, and events. An RSS document is also commonly referred to as a “feed”.
The RSS reader checks the RSS feed regularly for new content. The RSS reader then automatically downloads any relevant updates that it finds, and displays that information in your RSS Reader. Do a search using your favorite search engine on RSS Readers and you will see just how many are available to you. By subscribing to an RSS feed, you are continuously receiving updates to your website. All you need to do is look for and click the RSS symbol - 
, copy the URL, and paste into your RSS reader. The feed commonly contains a title, summary, authorship, and often published dates. The item also contains a link back to the full article on the originating site. There are many RSS Feeds available and we advise our clients to look for syndicated content available from sources within the communities you serve as a real estate agent.
For example, in many communities, local politicians, schools, religious leaders, the chamber of commerce, or various professional organizations publish blogs about local news, events and community politics. Often local businesses provide syndicated content on their websites.
Remember that by subscribing to content from other sources, you are helping your site as well as theirs. You are adding regular, relevant content to your site and providing links back to their site. You are certainly not trying to plagiarize or claim the information is yours; you are just sharing something that you feel is relevant to your audience. This is a very important and active part of using social media to take part in social networking.
The process of subscribing to others’ content certainly provides its benefits, but it is important to stress that this is not meant to replace you writing your own blogs or providing your own news articles. It is critical that you continue to use a blog or other means to share your knowledge, market your services and position yourself as an expert in your field.
What Does This Accomplish?
Adding all this information to your website accomplishes a few things. First, it positively impacts Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Because your site contains a broad range of information that is regularly being added, the better chance you have of your site being returned in a broad range of search results. SEO itself is quite vast and in order to do it justice, it would take its own series of articles, but it is important to note that there is a direct and critical SEO benefit related to adding fresh, new content to your website.
Second, the RSS feeds benefit the publisher because it allows him to automatically syndicate content, reach a broader audience, and create quality back links to his site. Quality back links are links on a web page back to another website. Quality back links are also a very important SEO component.
Conclusion of Part 2
Now that we have established the various tools that may be used and ways to add content to your website, we need to examine how you can begin to share this information and hopefully generate some discussions around it. This is the focus of part 3. We will provide examples of how you can share your content on Facebook and Twitter, both manually and automatically. We are also going to take a deeper look into the social bookmarking toolbars, what they accomplish, and how you can use bookmarking analytics to keep abreast of the sharing that is taking place on your site.