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A lot is being said nowadays about the use of Facebook to grow and promote your business. Many people enter the social media fray with little or no experience/understanding on what constitutes acceptable or effective behavior/practices as it relates to social networking platforms like Facebook.

For most of us real estate professionals, it’s been ingrained into our marketing minds very early on to blatantly self-promote ourselves at every opportunity, shamelessly plastering our glamor shots and website addresses on bus benches, shopping carts, refrigerator magnets, and every conceivable vertical surface known to man, ad-nauseam.

Thus, when we first attempt to ride the popular wave of social media marketing, our initial feeble efforts tend to be rather ‘spammy’ (see definition of SPAM) and somewhat annoying to those who encounter our ‘interruption marketing’ (See Seth Godin’s books ‘Unleashing the Idea Virus‘ and ‘Permission Marketing‘).

Here’s just a few practical tips I’ve learned along the way that may help you better navigate the social media waters and avoid making any painful or unsightly belly flops:

Jump In – The Waters’ Fine!

1.   Jump In, the Water’s Fine!

It continues to amaze me how many people I encounter who are reluctant to use sites like Facebook for business purposes or refuse to engage in any social media platforms in general. One of the most basic fundamental elements of a successful real estate practice is to develop and expand an active SOI (Sphere of Influence), and make meaningful ‘touches’ with the people within your sphere. Social media simply offers you one more way to make those ‘touches,’ through digital means, faster and more efficiently than traditional methods. Social media should never supplant your tried and true traditional marketing methods, but serve to augment/compliment what you’ve used successfully in the past.

Separation of Church and State

2.   The Separation of Church and State

There are some purists out there who believe you should keep all of your business dealings completely separate from your personal life when it comes to your social network involvements like Facebook. While using a personal profile to promote a business is against the Facebook Terms of Service (The powers that be on Facebook have been known to boot members who do so), I find it difficult and unrealistic to completely remove my Realtor^® hat just because I happen to be engaging people socially in a virtual setting. Now that doesn’t mean that I post my website URL into every comment that I make or that I publish endless listings to my wall. On the contrary, any real estate related content is the exception, rather than the norm on my personal page. But the point being is that real estate is a huge part of my life and a natural extension of who I am. There is always going to be a certain amount of business bleed-over onto my Facebook personal profile page.

A Page By Any Other Name…

3.   Create a Facebook Business Page

For the purists and non-purists alike, the Facebook Page allows you to publish and promote your business to your heart’s content without fear of any TOS repercussions. The real key to achieving solid readership/traffic (Likes) is consistently posting good consumer-valued content to your page. Most of the time, people create a Facebook Page that is agent/broker specific, like ‘Bill Smith – Harper County Real Estate.’ Consider instead of making a Facebook Page that highlights your specific market area. A perfect example of this would be Dale Chumbley’s ‘365 Things to Do in Vancouver WA.’ One of the tools you can use to help efficiently syndicate content to your Facebook Page is Roost.

Go To Where the Conversations Are!

4.   Connections and Communication

At the turn of the century, everyone congregated down at the General Store, sitting around the pot belly stove, sharing their lives. Later, it became the office and gossip around the water cooler. These days, people connect and communicate through the use of social media and mobile technology. Some clients like to text, others tweet or poke.

In one of my former employments, I was responsible for export sales to customers in Japan and made several trips there. I made the point of learning some basics of the Japanese language which made a huge difference in the degree of my success in forging relationships with my foreign clients. The importance of communication never changes, but the way in which we communicate does. We must learn the language that newer generations are speaking.

The power of social media is something we cannot afford to ignore, but need to effectively leverage in order to grow our sphere and expand our digital footprint.

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Rich Jacobson is a licensed real estate professional with Windermere Real Estate, providing knowledgeable empowerment and relentless representation for his clients of residential properties and vacant land throughout all of Kitsap County WA and portions of Pierce, Mason, and Jefferson Counties. You can also find him at KitsapLife.com, ActiveRain, and Crabbing in the Hood, or e-mail: kitsapagent@gmail.com

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Tags: facebook for business, interruption marketing, social media marketing, social networks, spamming, traditional marketing

Welcome back to the 8th episode of our informative series,

“Developing a Social Media Strategy”

If you’ve missed out on the previous installments, here they are:

“Social Media is a Conversation, not an Advertisement!”     “The ‘WHY’ of Social Media?“

“Taking AIM”      “Social Media Sushi“      “5 Keys to Having a Killer Blog!“

“Top 10 Ways to Feed Your Blog.”      “What’s in Your Social Media Tool Belt?“

In this next part of our series, we’re going to take a bold step….

“Beyond The Blog”

At this point, we’re going to assume that you have a blog and that you’ve been diligently posting good quality content there on a regular basis. The content that you generate can be one of the most valuable and effective marketing resources that you have. Think of your blog as the publishing house where your wealth of professional knowledge, advice, and experience is skillfully formatted and attractively packaged for consumption by your intended audience.

Your Blog Content is Like Cow Manure

In order for your valued blog content to be most effective and achieve its fullest impact, it needs to be spread around. The next successive step or key in your social media strategy is selecting the best tools/methods to spread/push/distribute/syndicate links to your prized content, thereby exposing it to the largest audience possible. Fortunately, given the tremendous amount of inter-connectivity being offered across multiple platforms, we have an abundance of viable venues to choose from.

Before we identify a few of those venues, allow me to make a couple of helpful suggestions as you’re evaluating potential sites:

Push Come to Shove

Don’t push or syndicate your content to a site unless you intend on actively participating on that site. In other words, don’t just automatically post a link from your blog article to your Twitter account if you never or rarely engage in actual conversations there. As with traditional ‘Interruption-Style’ marketing/advertising, your links simply become elevator noise to be ignored.

If You Blogged in the Woods, Would Anyone Listen?

Ensure that the platforms you choose are relevant for your content subject matter as well as your intended audience. Few things can be more frustrating than spending an inordinate amount of time and energy attempting to converse with a brick wall. Do the people you’re hoping to attract through your writing frequent the targeted site regularly? Are they actually being exposed to your articles? Obviously, this is where some good analytics need to be consistently employed and evaluated. We’ll discuss that in more detail later.

Go to Where the Conversations Are

While there are the obvious choices of highly popular social networks like Facebook and Twitter. there may be other smaller regional or even local platforms you can access as well. Does your local newspaper have a web presence with community bloggers? Or perhaps the Chamber of Commerce or Regional Visitors/Convention Bureau? Even hyper-local Neighborhood Blogs/networks are becoming more and more popular. You need to have an intimate knowledge of the ‘webscape’ of your specific market area and know what platforms/networks people are frequenting to connect and converse.

Stay Focused and Disciplined

When accessing social networks, it’s very easy to become sidetracked and lured away into time-consuming activities that offer very little, if any, return on your investment, i.e., Mafia Wars, Farmville, etc.. Even on networks such as ActiveRain we can become overly absorbed in chasing points or engaged in heated debates over politics/religion. Develop a consistent daily time-frame and task schedule for your social media involvements. Being focused and disciplined will allow you the time necessary to accomplish all of your traditional methods of marketing.

The Usual Suspects

It’s relatively easy to identify the more popular sites currently being used for effectively expanding one’s digital footprint and engaging in meaningful connections/conversations with your Sphere and potential clients. I’m going to name a few here, and in our next installment, I’ll begin to break each of them down individually, demonstrate how they can be incorporated into your social media strategy, and used  to effectively grow your business.

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DISCLAIMER: The author of this series is not a social media guru. Any similarity to such title, character or history of any said individual is entirely coincidental and unintentional.

An avid blogger since 2005, Rich has published over 1000 articles, most related to real estate. He enjoys using the tools of social media to brag/boast about the quality of Life on the picturesque Kitsap Peninsula in scenic WA State. He is a licensed real estate professional providing knowledgeable empowerment and relentless representation for his clients of residential properties and vacant land throughout all of Kitsap County WA and portions of Pierce, Mason, and Jefferson Counties. You can also find him at KitsapLife.com, ActiveRain, Crabbing in the Hood, Everyday CK, Facebook, Twitter, or e-mail:  kitsapagent@gmail.com

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Tags: SMO, Social Media for Small Business, social media optimization, social media strategy, social networks

Have you jumped on the Twitter bandwagon yet? It’s one of the more popular social networks populating the Internet these days.

I have to confess, when it first came out, I wasn’t all that motivated to check it out. I mean, seriously, what value is there in letting people know that I’m going to the bathroom, what I ate for lunch, or what movie I’m going watch this weekend? All I could think was that people really need to get a life!

Well, Twitter IS life. It allows us to quickly connect within our sphere of fellow Twits by offering up short snippets (limited to 140 characters) into our lives. Conversations on Twitter can also be sent directly to your mobile device.

As a local real estate professional who is fully immersed in today’s social media technology, Twitter offers yet one more viable platform for promoting my business, and expanding my sphere of influence.

In order to relate and interact in our Net Savvy culture, you have to go where the conversations are.

So Ride the Wave of Social Networking, and join Twitter today! It’s fun and it’s FREE!

• Follow SoundBiteBlog on Twitter @soundbiteblog
• Follow Sparky on Twitter @ActiveRich
• Follow Buckwheat on Twitter @frog_blogger

Added by Mark …

Just like Rich, I wondered what the fascination with Twitter was at first. My original question? How can I say anything meaningful in 140 characters? Well, ask yourself this. Have you ever been involved in a series of emails back and forth to a friend when the emails consisted of one or two lines of text?

That’s the niche Twitter fills so well. It’s much quicker to post a short Twitter update than it is to write an email in response to a friend. And, other friends can jump in with their comments as well if they are following you. It’s kind of fun and it’s more efficient than the way I used to do things. I think of it as online text messages.

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Tags: social networks, twitter, web 2.0