10 Ways Real Estate Investors Can Use Social Media
Written on July 29, 2008 by Peter- REBB Founder
Over the past week, I wrote 2 blog posts that discussed real estate social media and outlined strategies showing how real estate professionals can use it for their real estate internet marketing purposes.
In the first post, I spoke about Top 7 Real Estate Social Media Sites that real estate investors and agents can use to gain advantage over their competition.
Next, after receiving some great feedback from my readers, I wrote a post titled “Real Estate Social Media- When Time is of The Essence“. That post focused on sites you could integrate into your real estate social media marketing funnel when you are strapped for time.
Since those 2 blog posts were so successful, I decided to continue on with real estate social media marketing. Today, I will talk to you about 10 different ways you can use social media to improve your real estate marketing on the internet.
Feel free to share this with others, post it on your own blog, bookmark it, or whatever else you want to do with. All I ask is that you don’t change anything and link back to RealEstateBlackBook.com as a source.
10 Ways Real Estate Investors Can Use Social Media
1.
Start a group on social media sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace or Google Groups. You can start a group called “Save my house” to help homeowners in trouble. Since people feel that they’re anonymous on the internet, you’ll be surprised how many people will come and ask for help.
Once you start the group, provide quality information for your readers. They will value, respect you and see you as an expert in your area of expertise. There are dozens of groups on all those social media sites. Here’s an example of a Facebook group Real Estate Internet Marketing Domination that focuses on real estate professionals.
2.
Create a blog using a free platform such as Wordpress.com, Blogger.com, or TypePad.com. This blog can be your own value-driven lead generation vehicle. Wordpress is my favorite platform as it has many valuable themes, plugins, and optimization tools that you can use to help you rank high in search engines.
3.
Add social bookmarking tools to your blog posts, articles, and web pages to help your readers share your valuable content. One such tool you can use is addthis.com. The tool is extremely useful and easy to implement.
4.
Check your incoming links to your blog and/or website. Start forming relationships with sites that link to your site by commenting on their blogs and bookmarking their web pages. And don’t spam their blogs with poor comments.
5.
Create informative videos to help homeowners in trouble and post them to video hosting sites such as Youtube.com, Google Video, Revver, and many more. Once people see the quality content you provide them for free, they’ll come to you for help.
6.
Build relationships with other professionals on your LinkedIn profile. Offer your services to them without asking anything in return. Ask them if they need anyone with certain expertise. Then, if you know of someone within your network that fits that criteria, recommend that person to them.
7.
Write a press release about your company and any new developments that your target audience will want to know about but don’t know about it yet. Use services such as prweb.com (for best results), webwire.com and prleap.com. For the ultimate Web 2.0 press release, follow the social media press release template format.
8.
Use early social media sites such as Yahoo Groups and Google Groups to join communities already engaged in conversation. Become a contributor, help others and don’t pitch yourself in there. Do an advanced search in Google Groups and filter out groups by date to weed out the most recent conversations.
9.
Form relationships with people interested in real estate and/or your target audience on sites such a digg.com, del.icio.us, technorati.com, puurple.com and/or other social bookmarking sites. Then, while browsing the internet, bookmark pages that are of interest to you and your friends.
10.
Finally, and this last point refers back to all previous 9 ways. Remember that the main core of social media sites is the fact that they are build by and around people, just like you and me.
These people have likely been there for a while, have already build relationships, and might know each other. They will know that you are new. Earn their friendship and respect. Don’t go in with selfish reasons because the community will see right through you.
So there you have it. 10 ways real estate investors can use social media to improve their marketing and gain competitive advantage over their competition.
Now, its your turn. Pick 2-3 strategies I outlined above and use them in your own marketing. Then come back here and share your success stories with us.
One more thing, post your comments below and tell me:
Are you using any of those techniques in your marketing?
Do you want me to elaborate more on any of the above techniques? Just write it in your comments, point out which technique you want me to elaborate on and I’ll create a post that will give you a more in depth picture on that technique.
To Your Success,
Peter K.
Founder of RealEstateBlackBook
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Great advice! I also like to use the website SocialMarker.com to submit pages from my websites to many different social media sites at once. A great time saver!
Bryan Ellis
http://www.FreeRealEstateTraining.com
Socialmarker.com is pretty good Bryan but I would be careful submitting through that site. When you submit your websites, pages, blog posts, through that site, you end up submitting to multiple bookmarking sites at once.
These bookmarking sites monitor who/what/when/what submits to their sites. After certain point, they’ll see a trend of the same IP submitting the same sites and they might view that ip in a negative light.
I know many internet marketers praise that site but I would be careful not to use it too much. That’s why you’ll see me say that you should keep bookmarking other sites. That way you contribute to the wellbeing of the overall community.
Peter
Founder of Real Estate Black Book
[...] expand even more on the subject, I went ahead and gave you some action items in my 10 Ways Real Estate Investors Can Use Social Media post. The ideas in there are very powerful, even Washington Post doesn’t mention it in [...]