Blog / Prospecting
Karl Lardner, Adrian Reed and Mat Steinwede, Build Your Relationships with Social Media
Social media is a very effective tool real estate agents can use when building those all-important relationships that turn into business over time.
Twitter and Facebook are the most common social media platforms, but others include LinkedIn, YouTube, foursquare and SlideShare. While these are all different, each can be used to connect with your community.
Become the tribal leader
PriceFinder COO Kent Lardner said social media was the ideal way for agents to share interesting information and data with communities. He said PriceFinder has been looking at ways to empower agents to better use property information and become community leaders.
“We do know that local communities are interested in property information. They may not necessarily be interested in properties you’ve listed or what you’ve particularly sold, but they’re interested in their street, or their suburb, or their house,” Mr Lardner said, adding social media could be used to connect, engage with and lead the community, or “tribe”.
“Real estate agents can make better use of social media as a tribal leader,” he explained and said agents should be thinking along the lines of 'What I want to do as the service area leader, or the leader of that tribe, is upset that market. I want to be the only one they think of when it comes to the property market. And how do I do that? Social media helps me, but I need to offer something of interest and of value'.
Think about using social media to ask the community questions and interact with people in your service area. Mr Lardner suggested questions like: have we got too many listings? Are prices too high? Look at these record prices – do you think you could get a record price like that for your house? How can you improve the value of your home? “All these things are interesting to the local community, rather than what you’ve sold last week,” he said.
"As a method or tool to connect and converse with people, Twitter and Facebook are fantastic," Mr Lardner said. He also suggested using video content on SlideShare or YouTube, but advised agents to be aware of the advertising on Google-based services because competitors' ads could pop up. Videos and market reports can be embedded on an agency's website, encouraging people to go back to the site where you can engage with them further. “All these things are going to make you the tribal leader,” Mr Lardner explained.
Building an online community
One agent who understands the concept of community is Adrian Reed from TaylorReed. Mr Reed launched a Facebook account not for himself or the agency, but for his service area - ‘Avoca Beach NSW’. It was launched in February and quickly built to a community of more than 800 ‘friends’ within six weeks. But none of these people know who is behind the account.
“I don’t want to focus this on real estate - it needs to be a community-based site, and that’s what I did. I put a surf report on it daily; I do ‘Did You Know?’ with information about the area and a load of diverse stuff. I haven’t even mentioned that I’m a real estate agent,” Mr Reed said.
The page also includes posts on new Avoca Beach listings and sales from agents in the area, not just TaylorReed. If someone comments on a property, Mr Reed asks them to send him a message if they would like a market report. Business and school news is also included but Mr Reed has spoken with the contact before allowing them to include their updates in his feed. “That way I’m building some great relationships,” he explained.
To build his friendship base initially Mr Reed offered a $500 gift voucher for one of the local restaurants and all friends were entered in the draw. He is now approaching other businesses for gift vouchers to give away in future promotions.
Once he has 1000 friends Mr Reed will reveal he is the person behind the account and will then start uploading more videos involving him. These will include daily surf reports, plus quick two-minute video tours of houses for sale, whether they are listed with TaylorReed or not.
“It’s a pretty quick way of getting my head out there. It’s about giving people great information; it doesn’t have to be real estate, it could be the school fete day on the weekend, the Avoca Beach Masters on the Saturday,” he said.
“When you’re doing good things for people, obviously good things come back. Someone asked 'what are you getting out it?' and I’m not even looking at that, but the listings will come in the next 12-24 months.”
Connecting via tweets
Mat Steinwede from McGrath has been using Twitter for 18 months and is looking closer at Facebook and LinkedIn now he has mastered tweeting. Understanding your target market is the secret to using social media effectively, Mr Steinwede
explained. “I think the key to social media and networking is to make sure whatever you are doing is interesting to the people who are connecting with you,” he said. “I see a lot of real estate agents sending out houses all the time and that’s great, but they’re not really communicating with anybody, they’re just using it like a megaphone. Before you use social media you’ve really got to think what image do I want to build?”
Posting a mix of real estate news, blogs, motivational quotes, articles and personal updates has given Mr Steinwede a good base on which to build his social media presence. “I find you’ve got to create a really nice rhythm with what you put out there. I tried thinking about what I would like to receive and that’s the way I like to feed the information,” he said.
Spending between 30-45 minutes a day, Mr Steinwede has set his social media use as a KPI. Ideally he will post 3-5 tweets daily, and sometimes this rises to 7.
Social media has enabled Mr Steinwede to speed up the pace at which he builds relationships in his community. “It allows people to get a feel for who you are quite quickly,” he said and predicted, “Any agent who uses social networking in their area within the next five years will own the market”.
Follow Kent and Mat on Twitter: http://twitter.com/kentlardner http://twitter.com/matsteinwede
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