Marketing makeover: 3 steps to social media success

Marketing departments all over the world are rapidly shifting their budgets and priorities online. The so-called “digital marketing” is no longer a buzzword from Silicon Valley—it’s an organizational reality that businesses ignore at their peril.

Realtors®, though, have been more insulated from these shifts than most, as traditional advertising and word of mouth have shown themselves to be surprisingly resilient marketing channels among independent contractors. This explains, in part, why social media marketing has been a slower sell in real estate quarters. Why pull resources from a marketing channel that’s still working to invest in something new?

At Paradym, we invite Realtors® to look at social media marketing from another angle. Set aside all the hype about building an online brand and creating an audience out of thin air for a second. You don’t have to be a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) expert or a Twitter junkie to have a social media strategy—and you don’t have to forfeit your sales strategy. In fact, a well laid social media strategy can become a foundation for organically growing your leads, referrals and listings for years to come.

So where do we begin? Here are three small steps you can take that will amount to a giant leap toward social media success:

1. Open some accounts.

First things first: you need to have the means to connect with your friends, neighbors and clients online. Set yourself a goal over the next work week to take the top four or five social platforms for agents and start one account a day. If you’re new to this, it’s going to take some deep breathing and a little discipline, but remember—social media is an investment, not a life sentence. You’re opening these accounts to make your existing service more readily available. And if you start feeling lost, visit the Success Academy. You’ll be glad you did.

2. Give your accounts the MLS treatment.

With all the exposure you’re already getting just through your listings­­—whether by MLS, ListHub or portals like Homes.com, Realtor.com, Trulia and Zillow—it’s crucial that you convert your new social accounts into distribution hubs for your listings. In the past this has been a painstaking process of manually updating your home page or newsfeed one account at a time, but social media automation is an emerging opportunity for Realtors®, as Paradym Edge members already know. Facebook’s app functionality has also made it possible—with the right tools—to display dynamic, automated inventory of your listings or tours directly from your Facebook page.

3. Notify your friends.

A lot of experts will suggest you wait to share your pages until they’re beefed up with content­­­­—that’s great advice for bigger teams with marketing staff to spare, but our first goal is to make your service readily available online. Now that you’ve done all the work to start your social accounts, it’s important to reach out to friends, clients and professional contacts on those platforms just as you would at a social event. Once users start hopping “organically” from one of your social sites to your web page, some good things can start to happen at a pretty fast pace. So, hold on!