3 Best Practices for Social Media
Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn, oh my! Social media has quickly became a marketing mainstay. As an industry, real estate is increasingly relying on social media to both attract and engage home buyers. It’s nearly impossible to succeed in real estate today without a presence in social media. In fact, according to the National Association of REALTORS® (NAR), 91% of real estate professionals use social media to some extent.
While most real estate agents take advantage of social media, not all are successful. Social media success takes planning and commitment. Below are 3 best practices to take your social media marketing to the next level:
1. Connect with potential clients
According to Mark Zuckerberg, “The thing that we are trying to do at Facebook is just help people connect and communicate more efficiently.”
Just like Facebook, other social networking sites (i.e. Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram) are all built to connect. The benefit of social media is that it makes it easy to build relationships with friends, family and even clients.
When making your connections, it’s important to also remember to engage with brand influencers, people who can help you increase the awareness of your brand such as real estate figures and even home renovators and decorators—anyone who could have a positive influence on your brand. And when a brand influencer does decided to “follow” or “like” you, be sure to return the favor.
2. Automate your timeline
Building a strong social media presence doesn’t happen overnight. It takes a lot of dedication and hard work. As on-the-go real estate professionals, you may not have the time to dedicate to social media. With automation services like Paradym’s Social Automation Manager (SAM), you can save the time and give your social media the attention it needs.
A free benefit for Paradym members, SAM automatically shares your latest video tours to your favorite social networking sites. Simply connect your social media accounts to your Paradym Dashboard and every tour you create will automatically be shared at the optimal time/day with SAM’s Smart Schedule. SAM goes a step further and even adds custom Smart Comments based on the specifics of your tours. With SAM, you can build your timeline without doing a thing.
3. Respond to negative feedback
When you’re in the process of building up your social media, receiving negative feedback is inevitable. It’s not a question of if, it’s a questions of when. The important thing is how you handle it. Be authentic and apologetic when responding. Don’t leave the discussion on social media, ask your commenter to private message you. Let your followers see that you responded, but it’s best to hash out the complaint in private. You should always respond to feedback, negative or positive. The only exception is feedback that is vulgar and profane, in which case you have the option of deleting the comments altogether.
Social media is hard. But when you connect, automate and respond, you’ll be surprised how quickly your brand will grow.