The Secret Real Estate Marketing Tool!

The 'Secret Real Estate Marketing Tool' is not really a secret for a few agents. However, for many using the internet, it still is a secret in the sense that they know it exists, but have no idea how to harness the power of it for their business.

To establish a point of reference, let's look back at the real estate industry and its evolution.

Before the Internet, properties were listed on MLS where access was controlled by Brokers and Agents. Information about these properties was 'networked' within the real estate community exclusively. The exclusivity of the listing information was a real estate marketing tool that every company and agent wielded at that time.

Today, listings are no longer a unique or proprietary function of the industry. Listings are on MLS and the Internet with public access and the property information is now 'marketed'.

  80% of home buyers use the Internet to search for a home.

  A homebuyer is nearly 5 times more likely to find the home they purchase on the Internet than in a newspaper.

  61% of homebuyers will walk through a home they first viewed online.

  40% of REALTORS now generate more business from online real estate marketing than offline.

  67% of all Internet homebuyers expect a response from their agent within 4 hours or less.

  Internet homebuyers spend 4.8 weeks researching online before contacting an agent.

  Internet homebuyers only spend 2.2 weeks searching for homes with an agent compared to non Internet buyers who spend 7.1 weeks in their search.

  69% of all Internet homebuyers only interviewed one agent, while 79% of traditional buyers interviewed 3 or more agents.

The changing nature of information flow and consumer expectations requires new approaches in order to demonstrate value.

First, you must understand, web users are looking for increasingly sophisticated content. They turn to social networks for user generated content and information through multimedia channels.

In order to keep pace with consumer demand, Realtors will have to develop a social media mindset and learn to harness the power of social media to achieve powerful marketing results.

These are known as the three E's of social media. As humans, these are the three things that we always look for in everyday interaction with people. Social media networks are just an extension of our natural human characteristics.

Evaluate your real estate social media marketing content.

  Is it educating anybody?

  Is it enlightening anybody as to a new possibility or a solution for a problem?

   Does it entertain the reader?

You need to turn your focus away from everything else and put it solely on community driven quality content. Try to get as many of those "E"s in there as possible because your mandate is to deliver appropriate, valuable and/or entertaining information for web users to interact with.

If your content doesn't do any of those 3 essential things, then your real estate content is probably not going to get crowdsourced (shared by others).

Crowdsourcing is the key, because that is what aggregates your content automatically to the far reaches of the social sphere, through other people.

So as long as you're paying attention to those 3 E's, you'll do just fine. You'll achieve high search engine visibility (and rankings) by simply creating content (text, audio or video) that follows the 3 E's. Your content becomes valuable and it WILL get shared.

This sharing leads to your real estate business success through search engines, people and money in the bank.

There is an excellent enlightening and educational program online that will definitely help you succeed using the secret real estate marketing tool called Social Media. I have been applying the principals and tools provided and can honestly say that Social Media Science is truly remarkable. It has increased traffic to all of my sites within a very short time frame (literally days). Let me know what you think about the social media phenomenon in real estate.