Using the Web and social media to sell real estate

Being out of the game of today Web 2.0 can be quite deadly but you can also die in the effort of doing it the wrong way and wasting a lot of time and energy in the process. Like every other activity, also your social media presence must have a plan and must be aimed at obtaining a specific result that will benefit you an your business.

Using social media to sell directly is a bad idea and it will eventually recoil back, you can instead use it for creating the connections and setting the stage that will then allow you to continue the conversation elsewhere and the do business.

Occasionally you can also sell directly from Facebook, Twitter or other similar platforms, but you shouldn’t count on it as a direct channel because these environments were created to foster conversations and not direct sales. They can definitely bring traffic to your site or your blog and can keep you on top of other people’s minds, which is of great value. Remember, social media marketing is not supposed to sell, it is supposed to influence.

So how do you go about setting a strategy for your presence on web 2.0? Here are some tips that I have gathered along the way:

1. Start by creating an account with your full name in all the major Web 2.0 platforms. The following five are definitely a must: Linked In, Facebook, Twitter, Gizapage and Skype.

2. Visit the blogs of people that can give you some good advice on blogging in general. You can find some general guidance on Technorati.com.

3. Decide the frequency of your updates and the general content of them and stick to it. Don’t go to daily updates if you can’t keep up. Try to be as regular as you can. This is a game that requires persistence.

4. Produce content that is useful to other people. You can also tell stories, provided they contain some kind of tutorial or entertainment value. Remember, entertainment comes first.

5. Try to build relationships and engage other people. Remember though that you must be good at relationships building offline as well otherwise you’ll get nowhere.

6. People are important, not technology. You can be the best geek in the world and know all the best tricks to drive traffic to your site but you’ll get nowhere if you can’t honestly talk to people.

I have been working with some very successful Internet Marketers since I have arrived in the US and I realize that you have great opportunities and also very strong competition in this country. Most of them advise you to choose a very well defined niche, that people are searching.

How deep you want to go, is up to you. It is demonstrable though that by working on yourself, who you are, your personal and family stories you’ll get more attention. If you care about people and are consistent and stable in your presence you can make it without wasting a lot of time.

The only danger: pretend you are networking while you are simply wasting time. I have seen this happen over and over, also to very experienced and successful business people: they get sucked into a hole and waste a huge amount of time playing on some site or dabbling with Facebook. This can kill you just as not being there at all can kill you as well.

Roberto Mazzoni