If you're not leveraging the internet to grow your real estate investing business, you're really missing out. There is a lot you can do in the internet marketing space, but this article specifically discusses how to leverage social networking for real estate investing. Many social networking applications enjoy widespread use and best of all, they are free! Below are 10 quick tips on how you can use popular social networking tools.
Twitter:
(1) Use Twellow to identify real estate investors in your local areas and follow each one of them. This tool is like the Twitter Yellow Pages and categorizes Twitter users by industry. You can quickly do a search on the Real Estate category and put the name of your city in the search box. You'll find a lot of people I'm sure! Also, a new feature called Twellowhood also allows you to find people based on location so check that out as well.
(2) Use a free tool such as TweetLater to set up automatic direct message responses to all of your followers that includes a URL to your website or squeeze page. (On a related note, be sure to turn off all email notifications on your Twitter account...unless you actually want your email inbox to be completely swamped!)
(3) If you're a wholesaler, tweet about any real estate deals you're looking to sell. Be sure to include a link to more information on the property. I suggest using bit.ly a simple to use URL shortener because tweets can only be 140 characters long and URLs can be quite lengthy. Bit.ly is also great because it provides real time click tracking.
(4) Be sure to retweet "RT" other investors tweets that have useful information...this helps you build trust and credibility and will grow your followers. Here's how it works...let's say a local investor @BobLocalREI has a great tweet that says "Great article about how to profit with real estate in declining market " To retweet this, you would simply tweet the following: "RT @BobLocalREI Great article about how to profit with real estate in declining market ."
Facebook:
(5) Join existing Facebook groups with real estate investors from your local area. You can do this by clicking on "Groups" and then searching groups for terms such as "Chicago real estate investors","Boston foreclosure investors", or "Orange county real estate investors" Be sure to introduce yourself to the group and post your offerings on the group's public wall.
(6) Create your own Facebook group for real estate investors in your local area. Invite the members of the other groups to join your group. Encourage other wholesalers to join as well and post their deals to the group as well. Don't make it a private group - make it open to all. This will create an excellent buyers list for you and will also connect you to other investors you can do joint ventures with.
(7) Add a form to your Facebook profile that allows people to opt-in to your newsletter that provides tips, news, and details of your wholesale/retail deals. There's a great blog post from Return on Subscriber that walks you through how to add the form.
(8) Use the "update status" feature on Facebook. Your status can be about the everyday happenings with your real estate investing, it can mention a specific deal, it can be whatever you want. Also there are multiple tools that will integrate your Twitter and Facebook accounts which is a major time saver for those using both applications.
YouTube.com and other Social networking video sites:
(9) Search engines love video! Create videos with useful "How to" tips or information that is relevant to real estate investing (could be focused on buyers, sellers, or both). Consider using the Annotations feature within your videos in order to highlight important points in your video. With Annotations you can make thought bubbles, text in boxes, or links to other videos (but not to external websites).
Be sure that your video title and description are very well written and full of keywords that will help people find your videos. Before you get started, think about who your target audience is and make a list of a few real estate investing related topics that you can create videos for.
(10) Duplicating your video content is ok! You can post the same exact video in multiple content sharing sites (use TubeMogul for free!) and get maximum exposure from the search engines.
One last bonus tip for social networking....
I am really happy because I will have to get started with the social media marketing of my business but I think that bulk SMS services are also beneficial. I have also been using real estate texting service for a very long time and have always got satisfactory results.
ReplyDelete