A Taste of Social Media

A Taste of Social Media for Real Estate Agents “ Find Your Voice” Liz DeLoach Social Strategies February 8, 2011

Find Your Voice
Why
Mediums
Key Considerations
Questions
Resources

Why Social Media? It’s social, not self promotional No pressure involved – just the desire to connect with others Hundreds of millions are there – a potentially huge audience Ease of use

Approaching 600 million worldwide users
Fastest growing demographic is between ages 35-55, with women leading the way
You can have both a personal profile and business page
Lots of great organizational tools
Welcome to

Tips: Tagging other Facebook users
Adding Links, Notes, etc.
Setting up lists
Personal profile versus page
Facebook marketplace
Facebook Ads
Welcome to

Status updates have a limit of 420 characters
Ask questions, seek info.
Slice of life, humor, quotes, pearls of wisdom
Use mixed media: Pictures, video embeds, links to website and third party info
More ‘likes’ and comments

What is…..
A social networking and micro-blogging service enabling users to send and read brief updates
Tweets: Text based posts of up to 140 characters that display on users page and those of followers
Twitter is a great source of information. You can search topics of interest and follow users posting about them.

Awareness of Twitter has exploded from 5% of Americans 12+ in 2008 to 87% in 2010
190 million visitors per month generating 65 million Tweets a day.
Nearly two-thirds of active Twitter users access social networking sites using a mobile phone.
51% of active Twitter users follow companies, brands or products on social networks
Why should we use

What to do on
Listen first and foremost!
Follow people, businesses, and organizations and get important info about them.
You can post links, pictures, and send private messages.
It’s brevity is one of its best features, allowing you to cover more ground faster than with other social mediums.
Look for conversations on topics of interest

Brief: Be friendly, but get to your point quickly.
Conversational: Think “cocktail party” where you communicate with many people.
Humorous: Just be careful…keep it clean!
Informative: Did you just come across an article of interest? Link to it using a url shortener such as www.budurl.com . A basic account is free, and enables you to measure click-through traffic.
Inspirational: People love good quotes and are likely to Retweet them.
Great Tweets are…..

Twitterese & Twitterquette
RT: Retweet. Passing on information from another user in way that gives them credit as your source. A must of twitter-quette!
Hash tag: # symbol before a word that categorizes info for quick and easy searches.
@replies and @mentions mean you are addressing or replying directly to that user. A must so specific users know when you’re addressing them.

Who Do I Follow? How often do they tweet? Are their tweets of interest and value to you? Are they conversing and responsive to others? Do they have a good “mix” of tweets? Do they Retweet good info? That’ s a sure sign of a generous tweeter.

Who Do I Avoid Following?
Does the User:
Have a large number of unsolicited identical @mentions such as: “@lizdeloach: check out this great offer (link)!” to a lot of users? A sure sign of a spammer.
Have a skewed follower to followee ratio: If they follow a disproportionately large number of users compared to those following them, they’re likely boring, a spammer, or both.
Have many followers, but follow very few? If they don’t follow anyone,
why should you follow them?

Search Resources

Site management tools
Hootsuite is a great dashboard tool which allows you to view multiple social media feeds at once.
You can schedule tweets and Facebook updates
Other services of this type include Tweetdeck, Postling, and Social Oomph.
These services also have link shorteners and analytical/measurement tools
.

Broadcast yourself on:
A picture is worth 1000 words
In five years, YouTube has reached 2 billion views per day.
In the top three most visited sites with Facebook and Google
Channels are easy to set up
YouTube ready video cameras can be had for less than $200
You can friend other channels and favorite relevant interesting videos and make them available to your site

Broadcast yourself on:
Some ways you can use YouTube:
Customer testimonials
Scenic areas/attractions of the Lowcountry – “just because.”
Easy and inexpensive home staging ideas
Personal messages to Facebook friends and clients

Blogs Are short entries, usually 200-400 words, on a topic of interest or one about which you are knowledgable Should be attached to your existing website, or can be created on sites such as eblogger or Wordpress Allow you to establish yourself as a thought leader Can boost your site’s search rankings when updated with fresh content routinely – content is king!

Marketing Integration
Each site can be used to bring more inbound traffic to your Facebook Page, Blog, and Website.
Add graphic links to website to indicate social presences and vice versa.
Be sure to notify everyone on your newsletter ads, and email lists of all your social media presences.
Check into some of the available widgets to create routing of traffic between all your mediums.
Add Social presences to your business cards .

Finding online conversations
Markmail.org
Yacktrack
Seismic
Google Alerts

Why do this???
Here are some very telling statistics to consider:
93% of Americans believe that a company should have a presence on social media sites and 85 percent believe that these companies should use these services to interact with consumers.
60% of Americans regularly interact with companies on a social media site
43% of consumers say that companies should use social networks to solve the consumers' problems

Some telling statistics…
41% believe that companies should use social media tools to solicit feedback on products and services
Men are more likely to use social media tools to interact with a company than women (33% vs. 17%)
33% of younger consumers (18-34) and those with household incomes over $75,000 believe that companies should try to market to them through social networks
As more users are embracing social media (and often to the detriment of traditional media), companies have no choice but to follow them.

Final Thoughts
In social media, the goal is not to sell. The goal is to take your genuine interest in others online, conveying the sum total of who you are and what you can offer the world. It is through this process of meaningful engagement that you’ll develop the types of relationships and trust that will motivate others to seek you out to serve, or be served.

Questions??
Resources
www.readwriteweb.com Read Write Web
www.socialmediatoday.com Social Media Today
www.zdnet.com ZDNet
www.socialexaminer.com Social Examiner
www.mashable.com Mashable
www.hubspot.com Hubspot

Thank you!
Liz DeLoach
www.socialmediawiz.biz
[email_address]
Twitter: @LizDeLoach @socialstrateg
(843)532-9335

A Taste of Social Media

by Social Strategies on Feb 09, 2011

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