Social Media In Property week:Basic Social Media Strategy

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!)

Pulling it all together

Over the last 3 days, we’ve looked at creating a free portfolio site (using wordpress.com), optimising your site/images (increasing its visibility) and yesterday we looked at where people are talking and what they’re ‘roughly’ talking about.

Today I want to show you how put all this together to produce a basic social media strategy for property developers. But it’s format can be used for other business.

The setup

Once you’ve identified where the online conversation is taking place formulating a strategy is really the ‘easy’ bit – in that you know which platforms to use in order to engage with people. Without that key information it would be like talking to a group of people in the wrong language and not about the correct topics! In other words … A waste of your time and theirs…

Whenever I write social strategies for clients I like to map everything out, as it helps with the focus of the bigger picture and of course implementation. The following flowchart shows how to take everything that we’ve discussed this week and produce a ‘what to do next’

(NOTE: the above ‘assumes’ that you’ve identified specific objectives that you want to achieve. I can’t do this for you, only you can only do that… For more information on how to do that read my blog on ‘How to start using social media for business‘.)

Always start at the middle of the flowchart – ‘Portfolio Site (PS)’ like the propertydeveloping.wordpress.com I set up.

Micromedia – Twitter/identi.ca

After you’ve created some content (Pages/Posts) you’ll want to let people know, so follow the ‘dashed lines’ to the right and post a link to it on you’re Micromedia sites like Twitter or identi.ca

Other blogs

We identified that Blogs are more popular than other mediums for discussions relating to ‘Property’ – so you’ll need to subscribe to few to keep up-to-date. So over on the left side you’ll see ‘other blog site’, register on the sites that are relevant to you. Take the time to complete ALL the information they ask for – including your website address, as every time you post a comment your name/picture is a direct link back to your site. (NOTE: you don’t need to put an additional link in the comment that you leave – it’s not good etiquette unless it adds to the conversation.)

Forums

Forums play an important part, and we saw that ‘Forum Relplies’ are used a lot. So, as you did with registering on blogs, you should register on forums that you feel discuss topics related to you. Again, complete all the registration details including, if available, the ‘Signature’ as this will act as a link back to your site if you put the link within in it.

Other platforms

At the bottom of the flowchart I’ve suggested creating PDFs of the properties that you want to promote – whether selling or renting. Sites like slideshare.net and scribd.com are indexed by search engines like Google frequently – so don’t be surprised if any documents you publish there start to appear in search results very quickly. So register on these platforms – they’re free! (NOTE: Remember to optimise these i.e. The document title should include the address of the property/postcode, price, for sale or rental. In the description put the full details including your name and a link back to the specific page/post on your portfolio site)

Optimise, optimise, optimise

For all the above, think SEO! You’re content won’t be visible unless you include key phrases that align with what people are searching for: address details, house for sale/to rent etc and also remeber to optimise your images as described in Monday’s post.

…And finally

Certain platforms will drive traffic or increase awareness of what you’re trying to achieve more than others. So as well as the above review your website stats – e.g. google analytics – to see which of your pages, posts, blog comments, forum comments and twitter posts drive the most traffic/have the greater number of replies or ReTweets – as this will start to show you what people are more inclined to take notice of – which moving forward will help you when your creating future posts, comments etc.

Don’t forget to tryout other social media/networking platforms out as this should form part of your strategy once you’ve got to grips with developing, implementing, monitoring and tweaking your own.

If you have any questions relating to any of the articles posted over the last 4 days post them in the comments sections.

Let’s keep on touch …

Editors Note:

If you would like to meet Lee in person he will be speaking for us at the first be2campeast event on April 29th in Essex. This has been an amazing learning curve for us all this week I think. It’s been great to be shown an ‘idiots guide’ to using it for Property people. Please feel free to comment on this or any other posts.

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