Social marketing is all the rage, but do you have any idea how to use it for promoting your real estate business?
While it may not be obvious that social networking sites are a valuable resource when it comes to attracting buyers and sellers, but a quick peek under the hood will uncover several ways to use social networks to find contacts that have homes to sell, are relocating or looking to buy.
Here are a few simple steps to get you started on LinkedIn.com, a social network that is the khaki pants of social marketing sites. Almost completely dominated by business professionals, LinkedIn offers a great opportunity for both commercial and residential brokers and agents to find prospective clients. The main thing it is good for is helping people find you when they type in your name.
You give out a lot of cards and send out direct mail and your name is your business, so it pays to make sure people can find you when they search. LinkedIn results score extremely high. Even though I maintain a blog and have hundreds of articles I have written since 1997, the first listing that comes up for my name “Jim Lillig” is my LinkedIn profile.
First thing you need to establish an account. Make sure to fill out your profile using loads of local keyword references regarding the areas you sell in and the markets you service like residential and commercial. So putting text for “Your Professional Headline” such as “Orange County Commercial Real Estate Broker” or “Green Bay Residential Real Estate Agent”. The key is to identify the top keywords end users type in that will get you seen, then put that into your current position title.
Next you will need to fill in the Primary Industry as Real Estate. This will make you very searchable in LinkedIn and also to search engines. Next you will fill in your “Professional Experience and goals”. This is where you can also load in keywords that will help you get searched. Make sure that you use all the city names and regions you are able to sell into and if possible use the zip codes, so if you sell real estate in Chicago, you would do “I am a Chicago residential real estate agent serving the Chicago market (60632,60645, 60601)”. Remember in this section you will want to make the text be in sentence form.
The next field is the “What specialties do you have in your industries of expertise?”. This is where you can really go hog wild with the keywords. Make sure you know what keywords are hot for your area in terms of real estate. If you are not sure, use the Google External Keywords Tool (just paste it into Google and it is the first result) for your area.
TRICK: Do a search in Google for the terms you want people to find you on, and see which sites come up first. Right click on the page to View Source of the page. Examine the meta tag data for “keywords” and “description” as well as title. Use those same keywords in your LinkedIn profile. Use the tool above to ensure that these are high trafficked keywords.
Now you will then spend some time filling out your Current and Past Positions (Job History). Once again, pack this with keywords as well. For sure use the name of your Agency as this will also get searched as well. When I type in the name of my company “Synergy Intermedia” of course my site comes up first, but the next couple of entries are for Naymz (a social network of professionals like LinkedIN) and then my LinkedIn listings. It all counts.
Once you have taken care of the housekeeping, you will want to spend an hour or so uploading your contact list from Outlook or any of your email contact list sources such as Gmail or Yahoo. Once you have your list uploaded then you will want to invite those contacts into your network. YOU MUST DO THIS. Since social networks are all about connecting people.
My next post will cover what you need to do within LinkedIn to find people who may need your services or can spread the word about you.
If you have questions, feel free to contact me at jim@synergyintermedia.com.
