Social Media: A Resolution Worth Keeping

Provided By: Realty Times

For real estate agents, successfully using social media and blogging can be a significant challenge. The process is both time-consuming and potentially difficult to decipher. But, with the right tools to achieve these tasks, agents can transform their marketing and communications strategies.

This opportunity depends, however, on using the right service to perform three specific tasks: the ability to handle subscriptions, circulation tracking and testing, while also maintaining compatibility with all major blogging platforms and services such as Blogger, WordPress, FeedBurner, Joomla, Drupal and Typepad. And, in contrast to other options that offer some of these features, real estate agents need a user-friendly and reliable way of achieving this mission across all forms of social media. As I have stated before, the advantages for real estate agents are many, since this concept facilitates the way industry professionals can sift through breaking news, financial data, postings about recent transactions and customize the information they receive on a daily (or hourly, or up-to-the-minute) basis. Compare this approach with other models, where the real estate industry, with all due respect to the many fine agents and brokers who do an excellent job of representing their clients, is costly and unproductive: news is hard to decipher, opinions vary significantly, and technology (or its use as a means of distributing valuable content) is almost an afterthought. This situation worsens already serious problem for real estate agents who want to embrace the power of blogging, and need an efficient - and effective - resource to accomplish this mission. Fortunately, there is an easy way to improve this dynamic. Technology enables us to emphasize the benefits of transparency. In other words, real estate agents can reach their target readers (which include current and prospective clients), email newsletter campaigns, expand their reach with social media and increase sales. This option, which combines the convenience of the Internet with the opportunity for a multitude of agents and brokers to increase their name recognition among specific groups of people, is a proverbial win-win scenario. In fact, by applying this concept to the real estate industry - and through our shared interest in empowering these professionals and their colleagues - brokers can save money, facilitate a greater flow of deals and enjoy the ready availability of information, courtesy of the right brand of software. In addition, these benefits apply to other facets of the real estate industry, where developers, landlords and tenants have their own stake in social media. Giving these different groups a fast and easy way to measure the power of blogging, and to then receive news based on their own interests and timetables, is the very thing these busy professionals want and deserve. Consider the following: these individuals must make important decisions, with accurate information at their disposal, for which the Internet in general and the right software in particular can mean all the difference. This proposal is a chance for real estate agents and brokers to highlight the necessity of sending and receiving important data, complemented by new technology. The other beneficiaries - the firms that want a better way to identify, segment and analyze information - are part of this transformation, too. These events are worthy of our attention and adoption, since they promise to strengthen communications and make realtors more successful in their various forms of client outreach.