Social Media for Real Estate Professionals Part 1 of 5 – The Intro
The message ringing out loud and clear is that old marketing tactics are not as effective as in the past. It’s not the advertiser’s fault. It’s not the advertising agency’s fault. It’s just the evolution of communication. Malcolm Gladwell calls it “Immunity” in his national bestselling book The Tipping Point. Gladwell’s theory is that once a communication gets adapted and used as a standard for communication, it also reaches a point where it becomes a nuisance. Once it become a nuisance, people learn, or become immune, to its interruption.
Gladwell uses the example of telemarketing. Back in the 1970s marketers realized the phone was cheap and efficient way to reach potential customers. But over the past 25 years, telemarketing effectiveness has dropped 50%. Once everyone had a phone, the industry of filtering the communication began. Caller ID, no call lists and now we are seeing people actually not have “land based” phone lines. Now think about other forms of communication this way. Television, newspaper, email all are becoming less and less viable options to broadcast a message.
So what do you do as a professional or business attempting to market your product? Look forward. Marketers need to adjust and adapt to the new rules of marketing and the internet is at the leading edge of innovating communication. It is being labeled as social media, but there are several other tools that would be highly beneficial to anyone willing to embrace it.
First, to understand why social media is so effective, you must understand a little bit about Search Engine Optimization. Search Engine Optimization or SEO is how to improve your website visibility when people search for your company, industry or subject. 64% of the world uses Google to search because at the moment, it’s the best product. Google’s algorithms for search results are based on 3 things: 1. How often a web page changes (the more active the better) 2. The sum of other influential websites that are linking to it and 3. How old the website is (not much you can do about this).
What does that mean? Have a website that is highly targeted, yet changes from time to time. And have content that other people online want to link to. That means you have to start with having a blog on your website. Blogs are easy for search engines to read, easy to update and actually very fun to use if you are passionate about your business. If you are new to blogging, start with a 3rd party service like Blogger or Wordpress. Make sure you back up your postings so when you are ready to make a small investment and add a blog to your web page, you will have easy content to transfer.
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