Over the last few years, real estate professionals took to the internet as a means to acquire business. And why not? The majority of prospects looking to buy a home go online to search for pertinent information as well as properties. Realtors know the level of traffic seen by social media sites like Facebook, twitter and more, and act to tap into their resources. However, the realm of social media continues to move and grow at a rapid rate, keeping up with everything can be overwhelming. So, how do you keep up with your social media prospecting efforts? The short answer is HootSuite.
HootSuite is a tool by which you can manage all of your social media related activities. The tool easily integrates with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Foursquare, and Google+, and consists of a dashboard that allows you to monitor all of your different social media accounts. HootSuite users can post updates to all, or as many as they’d like, of their networks from one place and by only doing it once. No need to agonize over the time it takes to jump from one site to the next, putting in your login details, and going through the update process each time.
Uploading or updating you property listings can now be done and disseminated throughout your networks quickly and easily. The same goes for any of your blog post, photos, virtual tours, and so forth. Just do it once on your HootSuite dashboard and you’re done. This is an extremely efficient way to streamline your online marketing efforts and free up time for other activities.
HootSuite also allows you to track your marketing efforts. Through the use of URL shorteners (a built-in feature of HootSuite) as redirect links, you are able to produce analytical data for all traffic coming through these links, such as who clicked on each link that you sent out as well as the number of those who did. This will give you the opportunity to tweak your prospecting efforts accordingly.
Generally, what works for one individual may not necessarily work for another, this is true for social media channels in particular, being able to measure which is producing the best results for your efforts can be invaluable. It will allow you to ramp up your efforts on the producing channels, and modify your approach on the others.
Another wonderful feature of HootSuite is the Klout tool. It gives you the ability to measure the influence, as it relates to social reach, of those participating in conversations that you are following. This provides a means by which to prioritize who you engage in conversations and optimize your time for maximum results. Not only that, but the tool also allows you to zero in on conversations taking place in specific geographical locations; this is huge for real estate agents. Joining in on local conversations can be a tremendous way to generate leads in your local market.
HootSuite offers free and paid versions. Depending on your needs you may find the free version to be plenty enough to cover the essentials. If not, the paid version is $5.99 a month.
Article provided by tech savvy Realtor Kimberley Kelly. Kim is a La Quinta California Realtor specializing in helping La quinta home sellers with short sales. You can learn more about Kim by viewing her Palm Desert California real estate website.