In the last couple of weeks I have been conducting a very extensive research on the web presence of Realtors and in particular of their use of Social media. I have looked literally at thousands of profiles. One of the most interesting areas for creating a dialog with potential customers or with other Realtors and investors can be Twitter.

Realtors with empty social media profiles have also empty hands.

Not everybody understands it and not everybody cares, but what I found out is astonishing. At least half of the Realtors who have an account on Twitter have not been publishing a single message for one year! Could you imagine, registering your account, putting your face out there along with a bio that clearly state you are a Realtor or a real estate investor and then don’t say a word for the following 12 months?

These people evidently don’t understand that a bad presence on the web is going to recoil on them. It would be much better for them to consolidate their presence, removing the profiles they can’t keep active and reducing their actions to what they really care to maintain updated, if anything. If myou can’t be there every day you can at least automate some content publishing so that you don’t seem to be totally devoid of things to say. There are free tools can do it for you.

Evidently the old approach of placing a sign near the property and wait for someone to call stays with them also in the on line world. Investors are a bit more active better, but not much. You can find some very big names, some “guru” or real estate investing let’s say, that with account that have been silent for months.

We all know that Twitter ha still to prove itself as a money making platform, pretty much like most of social media when it comes to pure selling, but it is also proven by now that most of the activity you do on social media and blogging is aimed at procuring leads and contacts.

Once you have the leads, you then develop business through a regular personal contact. What would you think if a customer was coming by your office every day, for one year, and always saw the sign “Ill be right back?”

I guess he would stop passing by pretty soon and would know that you really don’t care for your business.

Nobody is forced to be on social media. As a matter of fact, there are investors and Realtors who are doing perfectly fine with old style referral systems; but at least they have the good sense of not even trying to pretend to be there.

Possibly some people might even figure that they would not be found out, but today your have software and services that can give you the whole history of a person’s presence on social media. A complete picture of his activity and “value”. And it is like having a personal score that anybody can look at in a few minutes and build an idea about us even before they get in touch with us.

So possibly some of these Realtors that have a totally empty and dead account might wonder how comes nobody is calling them and that they are not getting so many leads as it used to be. They could believe that social media is not working for them. Well actually it does, but in reverse, shifting people away from them and into the hands of their competitors who maintain a decent social media presence.

This subject is important for any marketing positioning strategy in the real estate field and other business fields. Today people look much more at who your are and can immediately find out by resorting to the master of all referral systems: Google and see what comes up about you. If nothing comes up at all or if they don’t like what they see, you have gotten bad publicity right thene and you have lost business. Something to think about if you want to survive the crisis.

Roberto Mazzoni