Social Media Marketing for Realtors
Social Media Marketing for Realtor
I thought I'd post a step by step guide for Realtors to start using Social Media today to enhance their current marketing efforts. This step by step approach is SIMPLE and can be put in place IMMEDIATELY for quick results. Each step includes estimated time to complete and how difficult it may be to set up.
The premise: Realtors can ENHANCE their existing email marketing strategy or BEGIN an email marketing strategy using ONLINE VIDEO, BLOGGING, and FACEBOOK. It's not as scary or difficult as you might think.
STEP 1 - Choose your email marketing platform. www.verticleresponse.com or www.mailchimp.com are 2 that seem to work well. 1-2 hours, call each company for a walk through, pick the one you like best. It really doesn't matter. Pricing should be pretty similary.
STEP 2 - Begin importing all your email contacts into their database. 1-2 hours. This is not rocket science, just takes time to cut and paste. If you have email in the right format you can simply export and import.
STEP 3 - Choose a blogging platform. Free sites like blogger and wordpress are available. I recommend wordpress over blogger. In addition, www.ubertor.com has a $10/month site that allows for blogging and additional real estate website functionality that you may be interested in. It won the Inman News most innovative web platform award. 1-2 hours of research.
STEP 4 - Set up your blog. Start with at least 5 entries. You can back date the entries to give it the look and feel of being around for more than a day. I would think about 5 things you can quickly and professionally talk about. You can elect to write your blog and/or video for your blog. Then, find 5 people that you've done business with in the last 6 months and ask if they'll give you a testimonial. And these 5 testimonials to your blog, either as a separate blog entry or separate video testimonials. This is where some customization and web knowledge will come in handy depending on your platform. I'd plan on 5-10 hours and maybe more if you're not comfortable with the platform. Alternatively, for 200-500 you may find someone to help you with the setup (ELIFY?).
If you don't want to write your own blog. You can use a source like elance. For $25/blog someone will write one for you. For $50/blog we have local writers that will interview you and write it for you in your own "voice". The blogosphere can tell the difference, trust me. For $50/video you can have a professional come take your video for you and upload it on your behalf.
STEP 5 - Link you blog to your Facebook page. This assumes you have Facebook. If you don't have a Facebook account you can set that up at this time as well. This will take approximately 1 hour to set up and link. Relatively easy. You may want to consider a Fan Page too if you want to differentiate your business and your personal accounts. However with real estate, I think you are the brand.
STEP 6 - Send out an email blast. Customize your email blast with a picture of yourself, a short description of your blog and a link to your website. Use the email platform to blast the email so you can track where the emails are going and who is opening them, clicking on your link, etc. You will learn lots from seeing who is opening your email and what they are looking at. This setup should take 1 hour max.
STEP 7 - Repeat 1/week with a new blog entry and email blast. It shouldn't take more than 1 hour of your time per week.
Now, all those steps are easy to say, but may be harder to do weekly. Alternatively you could hire someone to do it all for you. There are companies out there that charge $1500 setup fee and $400/month to do this work for you. ELIFY could do all or a portion for a whole lot less if you're interested.