Social Media In Property: Increasing your digital footprint

This week we have a very special week of blogs from  just one guest blogger - Lee Smallwood – media and marketing genius.

We have had some fantastic guests.Today I would like to introduce you to Lee Smallwood. Lee was one of the first people I met on Twitter, and the one who encouraged me to set up this blog. (Boy, what a find!)

His help and advice have been invaluable to me over the past months. He is one of the few people that really ‘gets’ social media marketing and can find an angle to make it work for any business. (He’s a top chap and curry fanatic too!)

Increasing Your Digital Footprint

Social Media and the communication tools that fall under that ‘umbrella, ella, ella – ay- ay- ay… under my umbrella..’ (ahem, cough… sorry couldn’t resist…) under that umbrella term can be compared to eating out:

If you and your friends/family have arranged to go to a restaurant for the evening – it would take care of the whole night I’d expect (or at least for a few hours). You all study the menu, choose the wine to accompany the food, sit and chat, laugh and put the world to rights. It would be a memorable evening – which certain people would talk about from time to time…

Not quite the same for fast-food places is it? Where you go to grab something to eat as quickly as you can on your way to some other engagement, and the only thing that’s memorable is the sound of the cashier asking, “Do you want fries with that…”

Loosely put, certain social media tools (like blogs and forums) are more like eating at a restaurant than a fast-food type place: if it goes well, the content that you write or post will be around for quite some time to come, and could be talked about or referenced at different times in the future simply because you took the time to find out what the ’best wine would be to accompany the meal’ – the content. Whilst micro blogging platforms (like twitter, plurk, tumblr and identi.ca) are more like you fast-food places.

But where and what are people talking about?

But knowing which ones to invest your time on can be challenging to identify… so let me help you out

Radian6 graph showing where discussions have taken place over last 30 days

The above shows where 8418 posts were made – just in the UK – over the last 30 days talking about specific things like:

• Property
• “House” and “buy”
• “House” and “rent”
• “Fixer upper”

Then the conversations taking place around those keywords can be shown using a “conversation cloud” where the larger the word (red) it’s being talked about the most and the small words in (back) are being talked about the least:

Conversation cloud-what's being discussed in social media platforms

Obviously these will change over time (sometimes daily) and would need to be monitored and I use Radian6 to monitor the Social Eco space (see First came sliced bread and then came Radian6) to understand about it. There are other tools out there, some are free some are not free – I chose Radian6 – not free but fab! – because of what it can do. But put ‘Social Media Monitoring’ into Google and you’ll get a list to try.

So now you know where people are talking and roughly ‘what topics’ are being discussed… and if you’re prepared to write content on what people are talking about and where they are talking then you’re on to a good thing

Increasing Awareness

But it doesn’t stop there, other platforms are a great help to promote your online portfolio by:

• Driving relevant traffic
• Adding links back to your site
• Increasing awareness to who you are and what you do

Sites like:

• Flickr.com – to upload image galleries of your properties
• YouTube.com – video ‘snippits’ of your work
• Scribd.com – upload PDF details of your property
• Slideshare.com – Upload details of property as a PowerPoint, PDF, worddoc (with/without commentary)

…And Finally

Personally, if I was want to sell or rent out my property, by writing my own ‘particulars’ with images and links to videos of the property and then posting them online to say slideshare.com – then make people aware they were there (e.g. reading blog posts and commenting or taking part in online forums or by posting a link out to you network on Twitter..) will help increase awareness and drive traffic.

The important thing to remember is ‘Think pull … not push’. Engaging with people online WILL create awareness of what you’re doing, whereas if you use a traditional ‘Push’ message’ it has a tendency to have an effect similar to running into a country field full of sheep – yelling and screaming…!

See you tomorrow where I’ll finish off on a little bit of SEO and show you how to take the above and start you off on your own social media strategy.

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