Thread: Using Social Media to Gain Leads and Authority.

Hello Everyone -

I am not a realtor. I'm not going to pretend to be a realtor or even an expert in the business. But what I do know is SEO and Social Marketing.

First let me talk about SEO: There is nothing that you can do that is more important for good ranking in Google than finding the right keywords and back links. All the on-page SEO is going to be wasted effort if you can't get links to your site. And even with that you need to have the right keywords in the link anchor text (the text you click on) for you to rank for those keywords. Google is a popularity contest and they feed off of what other websites are saying about your site.

Now here is a great tip on using social media that might help some people. In social media you not only want to promote your products or properties but also yourself. Self branding is more important now than ever!

First: If you haven't done so already head over to Google and set up an alert for your own name, your company name, and even your competition. When ever Google finds your name (your company name, competitor name, etc...) it will send you an email. This is good to monitor the online reputation of yourself and online activities of competitors. ( google.com/alerts ).

Now that you have done this you need to position yourself so you can be seen as an 'authority' in your field. This is especially good if you focus on one particular niche of the Real Estate market. How you do this is by providing quality information via blogs and social media. I'll explain more about the social media aspect in a moment, let's focus on being an authority first.

The information you provide needs to be quality. Yes, you can have some fluff, but providing accurate and quality information is the key. For example: I have never bought a house. I would love to find a realtor with their own website that fully explained the process of buying a house, finding a lender, etc... The more I know and feel comfortable about their knowledge, the more I am willing to pick up a phone or send an email. I'm sure that the same would go with commercial real estate. If someone is looking for a property, they are going to call the people they feel will be most knowledgeable about what their looking for. Even if people aren't looking to buy you could put out information about:

• Making the right repairs now to sell a home later
• Taking care of a home for sale later
• Neighborhoods that are doing well
• How the market is effecting their home value
• What to do after a fire
• etc...

These are just some ideas. Of course I bet you can think of millions of ideas on information to put out when people are looking to buy or sell.

So how do you get the information out there? How do take what's in your head and put it all over the internet with your good name attached? This is how:

1. Write the information as an article (no, this isn't article marketing)

2. Get a blog. Use software like Wordpress that already has a proven track record. You could use blogger.com or wordpress.com if you are low on cash, but I'll talk about these later.

3. Become familiar with RSS (real simple syndication). This allows you to take information posted and distribute it through the internet. This is a KEY CONCEPT to understand. This forum has RSS (typically called an RSS FEED because it is a constant feed of information from the website). RSS will typically feed the title of the content, an excerpt of the content, and a link back to the original website (plus publish dates, author info, etc...).

4. Wordpress, blogger, and wordpress.com all provide an RSS feed of content. Now you can take this feed and post it to RSS directories AND twitter.

5. Twitter will be your friend during this process. Let's talk about this for a second: How you get followers on twitter is by following other people. You follow other people in the hopes to get noticed and they, in turn, will follow you back. You follow people based on the subject matter they are talking about. You can look here (trendsmap.com) to see what people are talking about in your area. There are many tools to automate the following of people on twitter. Make sure you use one that allows you to search people by the subject (#hashtags) of what they are talking about. No need to follow someone who is talking about that movie on friday when you're trying to sell a property. A GREAT website to learn more about this is mashable.com They are one of the leading sources for news and education on social media.

6. So now that you have your blog, you know about RSS feed, and you know how to get followers on twitter, it's time to start the magic. Here we go:

- We're going to take the title of your blog posts (from the RSS feed) and turn them into tweets while linking to your website;
- We're going to take tidbits of information, filler information, and 'personal' tweets and schedule them to be tweeted in the future;
- Then we are going to take all this and push it to Facebook. You can also take your twitter tweets (posts) and push them to Bebo, Friendster, and a host of other places.

First, get an account on twitterfeed.com (twitterfeed.com). This is a free service that takes the RSS feed from your blog and posts it to twitter. This is pretty self-explanitory so I'll let you figure this out.

Then go to SocialOomph.com (socialoomph.com). This will allow you to schedule tweets in the future. This is great because you don't JUST want only post your blog posts and this will be boring to your followers. You can use this to schedule tweets with little tidbits of information here and there. Just a couple or so a day. Maybe post about a house, or about the market, or that your looking forward to an upcoming open house. Make it personable to your niche. Also post about holidays (Merry Christmas, it's my wife's birthday, etc...) because this gives it a personal touch. People want to know that there is a person behind the tweet and not a machine. Every once and a while do a manual tweet at twitter.com about something that's going on at that time (like it's cold out side or you just ate a great lunch at a certain restaurant).

Always make sure you #hashtag the subject of what you're talking about. Example:
"Looking forward to an open house saturday at 1234 5th st in #grandrapids. I love #realestate"

People search twitter and twitter keeps track of those #hashtags. You'll be surprised how many people will watch for certain ones! You can read more about it at Mashable.com.

You can also post new listings through twitter also, reminders of older listings, etc... Possibilities are endless.

So now that we have TwitterFeed posting our blog titles to twitter, SocialOomph posting our 'filler' tweets to twitter, it's now time to drop the tweets to facebook:

- First step is to go here - apps.facebook.com/twitter]. It's pretty self explanatory just make sure you follow the directions and EDIT the app preferences to give twitter permission to post to facebook.

- Do a test tweet. Post on twitter to see if it goes to facebook. If not, check your facebook preferences to make sure you're page allows twitter to post on it. I also think some of the privacy settings might stop twitter from posting as well.

Let's take a few steps back for a moment. Remember when I said blogger, wordpress.com, etc... has RSS feeds? Well so does youtube and a host of other websites. In face, most websites have RSS feeds. Why not take the feed from your YouTube account and put it into twitterfeed to post to your twitter account?

Since you are using twitter to pull all these feeds together, you can now submit the RSS feed from your twitter account to RSS directories throughout the web. And while your at it, submit the RSS from your blog to the RSS directories also. Great for back linking.

One very important thing here: Make sure you log into twitter and facebook every day and answer questions and post comments. Today people are using any way and all ways possible to communicate. I used to make a little fun of people who used to contact me via facebook for work, now I understand why they do it...because it's easy!

Hopefully this helps a little.

Kevin Althaus

One thing I forgot: Make sure your content is engaging and also ASK for feedback on things. Ask people if they like or don't like something. Don't ask about the quality of your information, but ask for opinions on issues or things you might not be sure about. This will prompt conversation which leads to trust which leads to hopefully sales.

If you have any questions about this, feel free to post them here.