Century 21 leverages social listening to enhance its franchise recruitment and empower affiliated real estate professionals by identifying strategic opportunities from social conversations. Matt Gentile, the global director of social media, explains that this approach includes tracking conversations at events and integrating social data with CRM for personalized marketing. The company's emphasis on training brokers in social listening practices aims to help them identify potential sales opportunities based on local social interactions.

1. Selling Through Social: Century 21 Uses Listening
to Recruit Franchisees
AN INTERVIEW WITH:
Matt Gentile
Global Director, Social Media, Century 21 Real Estate
January 14, 2016
Century 21 Real Estate, which has an estimated 100,000 affiliated sales professionals across
the globe, employs social listening to help grow the company’s franchisees and empower them
with insight to sell at the local level. Matt Gentile, Century 21 Real Estate’s global director of
social media, spoke with eMarketer’s Jillian Ryan about how his team extracts opportunities
from social conversations.
eMarketer: How does Century 21 tap into insights from social conversations to grow its
business?
Matt Gentile: We have approximately 100,000 affiliated real estate sales professionals, from
Taipei to Tampa Bay—we are truly a global organization. Connecting our social listening really
benefits our organization’s overall objectives for quantifiable and measurable outcomes. It’s
essential for identifying strategic opportunities and insights that result from listening to ongoing
conversations about our brand throughout social media. So, by definition, understanding who
our audience is, who our customers are, who our potential franchisees are, and their affiliated
sales professionals, is incredibly important.
“At tradeshows and events, for example, we track
conversations by hashtag and display those conversations
on monitors at our booth.”
When we analyze all of the relevant conversations we uncover, we look at that at more of an
aggregate level because we can direct it via geography. We’re using it at the brand level to
look at specific marketplaces and understand conversations that are occurring as they relate to
the broader real estate industry.

2. eMarketer: How do you use social listening to grow the size of your franchise network?
Gentile: At tradeshows and events, for example, we track conversations by hashtag and
display those conversations on monitors at our booth. This gives an opportunity for us to have
conversations with targets both online and offline and connect the two. It provides us with an
opportunity to engage with prospective franchisees, with prospective recruits.
We’re not only being reactive, we’re being proactive by owning the digital conversation at these
conferences because we’re weighing in and playing a significant role in the feed. That’s not
something I’ve seen a lot of other brands engage in at this point, at least in our vertical.
“Listening and doing this research allows us to understand
where these potential franchisees are, who they are and
what they’re all about.”
Then after the event, we have the opportunity to go back later through our social listening
dashboard and really dig into the conversations that occurred during that specific time period.
By uncovering who attended and who said what, we can personalize further marketing
communications by coupling social data with our CRM.
Listening and doing this research allows us to understand where these potential franchisees
are, who they are and what they’re all about.
eMarketer: Do you have any sales-enablement practices for the local level that are centered
around social data?
Gentile: Training our brokers in social listening best practices is a big focus. We’re developing
programs for our system members to use our tool so they can find relevant social
conversations and understand what consumers are talking about in their local area.
We believe real estate transactions happen for happy reasons and sad reasons: birth, death,
divorce, graduation and marriage. For our brokers, understanding who in their geographic
region had a life-changing occurrence and then shared it on social media can help lead to a
potential sale.
We’re putting that tool set in the hands of our system members, our affiliated real estate sales
professionals who are on the ground transacting the business, so they can use social listening
data in opportunistic ways.
eMarketer: How does Century 21 use social listening to understand more macro moments and
trends in the real estate industry? What do you see for future applications?
Gentile: From the brand level, we’re really looking at social sentiment as it relates to home
buying or selling, in a particular marketplace, and then aligning that data up with other data by
other industry analysts like the Case-Shiller Index and Fannie Mae reports.
Interview conducted Jillian Ryan on January 14, 2016.
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