Social Media Managing
for Realtors
Colin Marcum
February 4, 2019
Social Media Managing
for Realtors
Colin Marcum
February 4, 2019
As a Realtor, you are in charge of managing your own business, and that means managing your time. Spending your time on non-result producing activities, as opposed to actions that actually generate clientele, can be seen as a waste of potential. You want to optimize the time you have to focus on those few actions that generate leads. Activities like passing out flyers and door hangers in neighborhoods, paying for ad space on signs and in papers, and being engaged in your local community are all things that may help generate leads for you, but have you thought of generating a social media presence?
Sundance Realty LLC
SUNDANCE REALTY
Social Media Managing
for Realtors
Colin Marcum
January 21, 2019
As a Realtor, you are in charge of managing your own business, and that means managing your time. Spending your time on non-result producing activities, as opposed to actions that actually generate clientele, can be seen as a waste of potential. You want to optimize the time you have to focus on those few actions that generate leads. Activities like passing out flyers and door hangers in neighborhoods, paying for ad space on signs and in papers, and being engaged in your local community are all things that may help generate leads for you, but have you thought of generating a social media presence?
No doubt, social media engagements within the real estate industry are mainly geared towards generating dialogue amongst others within the industry itself; Realtors, property managers, contractors, etc. Other than the occasional real estate investor you may be fortunate enough to partner with, your one-off clientele is not necessarily going to be perusing through social media to find you for your services. They will simply do an internet search for keywords, or simply walk into a local real estate brokerage office. Also, they aren't going to be searching through your pages for any potential listings you may have as they will either go through the MLS or use third-party sites like Zillow. So why, as a Realtor trying to gain clients, should you take time away from other activities to build up your social media presence? The answer is two-fold; 1) its build the strength of your other sites, and 2) it actually doesn’t take much time to manage if you use social media management tools.
In other articles, we previously discussed the importance of links, keywords, and reviews, but now we will talk about the next phase in building your online presence and increasing the likelihood of clients stumbling upon your business; social media. It’s not just the fact that our clientele also operates within these mediums, but having an active social media presence also increases the domain authority of your other sites. The odd thing about social media is that you don't necessarily need to be that committed to constant engagement on different social media platforms to benefit.
Social Media and Domain Authority
Social Media and Domain Authority
Google and Bing, through the use of web-crawlers, determine the network of links that build the web itself. The World Wide Web is a web because of the links generated between pages. A website may be linked to review pages, which are linked to the blogs of partners and satisfied customers, which are in turn linked to social media pages. These links give domain authority to individual pages and communicate to Google and Bing that your page is a valuable source of information to a user of their respective search engines. The more popular the webpage that links to your webpages the greater the authority that is imparted onto your site. Meaning that the more links you receive, and the more popular the sites they are linked from, the stronger your site becomes, and therefore, the more likely a client is to be shown your site; pending your site is dense in keywords that your client is likely to use.
So why build a social media presence? Because you can control it. You can keep it active with content that not only clients may like, but that show those search engines that a social media account which is linked to your business page is actively engaged with the internet community. Search engines algorithms like this type of activity. You can use your social media platforms to link to your blogs, to link to your business site, to link to your YouTube page, to link to your reviews, to link to your listings, to link to each other, and in turn all these other sites can link back to your social media platforms. You are, in simple terms, creating your own web within the web. Except that this web is built around your business. Each additional site that you are able to add to this web can act as a multiplier, adding another node which can link to all others and be linked back to. As a Realtor, this concept can be a powerful online strategy, but it takes time to initially develop. Which bring us to the next issue: how to manage your social media platforms.
Managing Social Media Platforms Effectively
Managing Social Media Platforms Effectively
The more social media platforms you have the more you can link, but the search engines prefer more active profiles and keeping them active requires significant time… or does it? There are a few ways to keep a social media account active that doesn’t require actually making “new” content.
- Posting links to existing blogs/articles you already wrote.
- Links to blogs/articles of other influencers in the real estate industry.
- Links to your property listings.
- Posting photos of meetings with lenders/partners.
- Linking REA statements and changes to real estate regulations.
A post or two a week can provide enough activity to apply a boost in domain authority when linked with your other sites. If you read a lot of real estate articles focused on either Oregon, or at the national level, or write a lot of blogs/articles throughout the week, then simply linking what you already do will be sufficient. But naturally, you have to get these links posted to your various platforms, and there is a way make this process efficient too.
HOOTSUITE
HOOTSUITE
Hootsuite is an online-based Social Media Marketing and Management Tool that helps business owners and social media managers tackle multiple social media platforms from a single dashboard. This means that if you manage a Facebook business page, a LinkedIn company page, and a twitter feed; as we do at Sundance Realty, then you don’t need to make three separate posts on all three sites. Instead, Hootsuite allows you to post to all sites from its own dashboard. After linking your Hootsuite account to your social media accounts you will be able to view the feeds, respond to inquiries, and make posts to all without actually having to go to those platforms.
Here is an example of us posting a link to this very article on Sundance Realty's three social media platforms at once from Hootsuite. We can either post it immediately or schedule the post to be made at a time in the future we would deem it to be most effective for audience engagements.
Hootsuite has a free account option that will allow you to manage three separate social media accounts at no cost, but there are service plans that will allow you to manage many more. This is an additional benefit if you have multiple businesses, as you can link all the social media platforms to your Hootsuite, and manage all their activities from one location.
Hootsuite can link to these social media platforms:
- YouTube
- WordPress
Social media management may be difficult for those professions that need to stay engaged with their audience constantly, but for us in the real estate business; especially Realtors looking for clients, there isn’t that much of a requirement. The biggest benefit is that it boosts your main business pages, and helps improve your online presence so that your website or your business listings appear before others when potential clients are surfing for real estate services. As we have shown, it isn’t at all that time consuming, and in fact can be easier to manage with social media management tools; such as Hootsuite.