Real estate investing is tailor made for social media. The best leads for your business come from networking in your area. The more contacts you have, the more chances:
-
Someone will bring you a killer deal
-
You will find a buyer
-
You will find a mentor, private lender or someone else who can help you out in your business
Trouble is, social media can be very time consuming. You can literally spend all day, every day, updating profiles, following people, retweeting or doing whatever new verb gets introduced into our vocabulary as a result of social media.
Social media is a means to an end. It’s a way to get you leads. But you can’t spend all your time finding leads. Because you also need to spend your time buying, selling, rehabbing and/or renting. Oh, and maybe taking that vacation to the South of France with your earnings!
In other words, you need to spend your time as a real estate investor making money.
Lots of money.
Max. Social Media Gains, Min. Effort
There is a way to run your social media campaign from one website. It’s called Hootsuite. Hootsuite provides a dashboard for all your social media sites and lets you run your campaigns from one spot.
Hootsuite can link up your Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Linked In, Foursquare, MySpace, Wordpress, and Mixi into one website.
(And by the way, we weren’t sure what Mixi was either. Apparently it is the largest social networking site in Japan. Who knew?! So when you are ready to find great deals in Japanese real estate, feel free to set up your Mixi profile.)
Sure it’s convenient to be able to link all your accounts in one website, but Hootsuite offers so much more.
By linking all your accounts, it means you can write one message, and have them posted on all your social media accounts. No more copying and pasting into all your different profiles.
One and done.
With each message you can also add attachments, pictures and links that you want people to see.
Not only could you just send out one message to all your social media profiles, but you can schedule when that message goes out. Hootsuite has a feature called ‘Autoschedule’ that figures out the best time to post your message. Don’t ask us how it figures out the best time. It has something to do with your followers, times that you post other messages (and maybe the phase of the moon).
If you don’t want to autoschedule, you can turn autoscheduling off and schedule a date and time manually.
Scheduling all your social media updates from just one spot can save an enormous amount of time and effort. You can sit on the couch Sunday night, schedule everything for the next week and not touch social media until it’s time to schedule more.
Maybe it makes sense to have a VA schedule all of this for you? With Hootsuite, your VA would be able to update all your social media in record time and save you money.
With Hootsuite you can create a dashboard with several columns to track several aspects of each site. Take Twitter for example. You can set up columns to see:
-
Who reTweets your Tweets
-
Who is using a keyword your specify (like your name, your business, motivated seller in your town)
-
What people you are following have to say
These are just some examples, and each social media page will have different options.
You can even use a function called ‘App Directory’ that lets you know what is going on in the world. It will set up a column on your dashboard to show you what is trending on social media. That way, when you write an email to your buyer’s list or a letter to potential sellers, you can incorporate recent events to make the correspondence fresh and timely.
Hootsuite also provides analytics for all your social media campaigns. With analytics, you can tell which parts of your social media campaigns are growing, and which, quite frankly…suck. Then you can dump the bad ones and ramp up the good ones.
The analytics can also tell you demographics about a certain region that can help you tailor your marketing efforts. To obtain an even better view of what is working, you can integrate your Facebook Insights and your Google Analytics right into your Hootsuite dashboard.
Hootsuite even has a blog to learn how to best use the site. There are articles on the blog that are industry specific – including the real estate industry.
For all this service does, it would seem like you would have to pay for it. Like many other subscription websites, they have a variety of plans. One of them is free and gives you three profiles. To ramp up your marketing efforts with them, it only costs $9.99/month.
When evaluating your choices, think how much your time is worth. If Hootsuite saves you at least an hour each month, then hopefully your time is worth a little more than $10 bucks!
Tell Us about It
Have you had success with Hootsuite? Tell us below.
Get Social – Whether it’s social media, a blog or offline meetings with people, get your name out there and let people know you’re a real estate investor. You never know what deal someone will have for you.
Investigate Social Media – It’s not just for kids anymore. Big business uses social media to promote their product – so should your business. The more you learn about it, the more effective you will be at finding deals.
Stay In Touch – Don’t just go out and meet new people. Follow up with the ones you have met.
Offer Value - Don’t just contact people when you need something. Send them articles that might help them. Make a connection for them if it would be beneficial. That way, when they have something good, they will think of you.
JP Moses
is a real estate investor in Memphis, TN, with experience ranging from land lording to note buying, rehabbing, and wholesaling. However, wholesaling is the area that he enjoys most and where he bring the most experience and expertise to his students.