InfiNET Marketing

Know Your Social Media Marketing Goals

How do we measure success in using social media? We are in the real estate business to earn a living. The bottom line has to be that our business is prospering and growing financially. Anything that doesn’t support this effort or takes time, energy and money away from activities that do, has to go.

The biggest mistakes most business people are making with implementing social media marketing is not understanding the medium and having no strategic business goals for it.

Social media marketing is not about the numbers. Measuring success in social media cannot be based solely on metrics. I can have 5000 friends on Facebook, but if I can’t directly associate one closed transaction with my Facebook activities, is Facebook worth my efforts?

We see it every day. Someone finally gets it – they need to be on Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn – and the first thing they do is invite everybody they have bumped into since childhood to join their network. This is not a strategic business strategy that will help us invest our time, attention and energy effectively to produce new clients and new profitable relationships.

So, the first social questions that need to be addressed in developing a social media business strategy are:

• Do we want a massive following, or do we want new business?
• Do we want to add to our workload or make it more efficient?

Our observation is that when real estate agents finally jump on the Facebook (same is true for Twitter) bandwagon, the first thing most seem to do is invite all the other agents in the office (the competition) to be their friends. Consider this:

When we populate our Facebook friend list with all the real estate agents we know and our business sphere of influence – Facebook will eventually start recommending to each of those “friends” that they may want to connect directly. Do we really want our past client list in the hands of all the real estate agents in the area?

The second thing many social media novices do is to start posting all sorts of inane content to their page.

So, the second set of questions that need addressing in regards to a social media business strategy are:

• How much business have the agents in the office sent our way in the past?
• Does the content we are posting attract potential clients and effectively build our branding?

Next Post on Using Social Media to Dominate Your Real Estate Niche Market:

• Social Media’s Law of Attraction

(Read the entire series on Niche Marketing in Real Estate)