Confused by which social media sites work for real estate?
One major challenge that faces marketers in today’s social media landscape is, of course, choosing the appropriate site to use for marketing your company and listings. At one time, all that we needed to be familiar with was Facebook. Not anymore. Now you have Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Vine, among others. In the evolving social media world, we have a growing number of sites from which to choose. With that being said, there exist some basic problems to confront, such as understanding and knowing how and when to adjust your social media strategy in order to accommodate growth. Simply put, you basically have an inability to scale. Here are some challenges to consider while building a social media campaign:
1. How do you maintain control and security? You must be able to manage this across large numbers of people. With update statuses and Tweets going out instantly to millions of consumers, how do you correct an error? If you Tweet out the wrong date for an open house, or the incorrect price for listing, what happens next?
2. Are you consistent? As you navigate through various social media sites, you must strive for consistency. Based on the differences of the social platforms, this can be challenging. A comment that may be appropriate for one social media platform may be way off for another. Do you have time to evaluate and read the waters of each one?
3. Who’s managing your social media content? There should be a centralized base of operation, and how you manage this could present challenges. Providing training to in-house staff can be overwhelming, and time consuming, while outsourcing all of your needs may leave you out of the social media loop.
Without a doubt, the greatest advantage of social media marketing outweighs the risks involved. Remember when you had to make thousands of phone calls to reach potential consumers? With social media, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, millions of potential customers are just a click away. It’s a tremendous benefit to stay in touch with your customers, exposing them to your policies and providing them with useful information can be invaluable in customer retention. Contacts made through these outlets can show how much your customer is valued and allow new promotions to be had instantly by millions. In this way, you are not only going down the road to new customers, but also maintaining the road of your current customers.
This article appeared in REAL Trends Newsletter and is being reprinted with permission of REAL Trends, Copyright 2014.