Don’t be the loud-talker at the social media dinner table

Think about the last time you engaged someone to perform a professional service for you. Perhaps you were looking for a plumber, an accountant or, say, a digital marketing agency. How did you find them? In the case of the latter, I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that you probably did a search online and came across us that way. This is how the vast majority of people search for professional services these days and, as I’ve mentioned before, it’s how you’ll get your next listing, providing you’re technology savvy.

By technology savvy, I don’t just mean that you know how to use an iPhone or iPad. You’re not even technology savvy if you also know how to use a smart watch. To be technology savvy, you need to be shrewd in the way you use technology, and when it comes to finding and winning new listings, this means you’re using technology to market yourself and grow your online profile in ways other agents in your local area aren’t.

Technology savvy agents start with content marketing

To be technology savvy, you must build your profile online. Many people erroneously believe that building your profile online means creating a website, getting a Facebook account, and then that’s it. What they overlook is that a website needs stuff on it; that is, text, images, videos — in order to make it a website. That stuff is called content, and content is the same stuff that you post on Facebook that your friends like, share and comment on. Content marketing, then, is the publishing of stuff on your website, social media platforms, and elsewhere that you contacts will like, share and comment on, but which also markets you and your services.

The technology savvy part comes in when you determine precisely the kind of content you need to publishing in order to achieve your conversion goals. A conversion goal can be anything that results in the user taking a specific action — whether it’s signing up to receive a newsletter, downloading a market report, contacting you for a property appraisal.

If you have your own, personal Facebook account, think about the kind of content you publish there on a regular basis. It’s typically content that means something to you — typically, you either empathise with the message or you don’t — and that you know will also resonate with your friends and family and greater social network. This is how you need to approach the content you publish in a professional capacity. There is literally no exception to this rule. You must always publish content that is relevant to you and your customers (your vendors and buyers).

Publish original content across multiple platforms

Emphasis here on the word ‘original’. Don’t make the mistake of retweet or republishing content created by other people on your social media platforms. All this does is send all your hard earned traffic to an online behemoth, like realestate.com.au or smh.com.au or the like. Let them get their own traffic. Instead, you should create your own original content, by writing and publishing one or two blog posts a week or uploading a video blog or both. This way, when you push it out through social media and your friends and followers share it among their own social networks, you’re sending that traffic back to your website, not someone else’s.

If you’re going to use social media and, although I caution you to select your social media platforms wisely, I strongly advise you do use social media, you need to ensure you’re using it correctly, otherwise you needed bother. I’ll go into this in more detail some other time in a separate blog post, but the general rule of social media is to be social.

Think of it as a dinner party. You’re sitting around a dinner table with a few friends, acquaintances, and a few other people you’ve never met before. Everyone is chatting and getting along merrily, until some loud-talker enters the equation. All he’s interested in doing is talking about himself. He doesn’t engage with others when they try to engage with him. Instead, he constantly pushes his own agenda, on myriad irrelevant topics, often talking over others as they try to speak. Eventually, everyone gets up and moves somewhere else, leaving loud talker on his own.

Don’t be antisocial on social media

That’s the dinner party equivalent to someone on Twitter or Facebook publishing the same irrelevant tweets or posts over and over and over, without stopping to see if anyone actually cares or finds the content relevant. It’s the Facebook user that never responds to comments left on their page, or makes an effort to connect with others on Facebook. It’s the Twitter user, who doesn’t retweet or like tweets by their followers, because they’re too busy pushing out spammy tweets about their business.

Whatever you do, don’t be that guy; don’t be the loud-talker at the dinner party everybody runs away and hides from. Remember that social media’s primary reason for existence is as a way for people to communicate and keep in touch with each other — to be social. Use social media and your content to start conversations with people, and then make an active effort to keep those conversations going.

Master all that, and you’re well on your way to being the technology savvy real estate agent who gets the most listings. If you’re looking to build your online presence to gain new listings, get in touch with our team to discuss the ways you can begin building your online brand. Alternatively, to learn more about digital technologies that help real estate agents build an online presence, subscribe to our blog.