Social media can offer a number of benefits for real estate agents. It can help you expand your network through positive word of mouth, promote your position in the market, and stay in touch with your past clients. Even though the benefits are many and the monetary cost to using these tools is low you still need to be cautious. You need to be careful because to use these tactics effectively you have to invest a lot of time.  Before making this investment there are a couple of things that I suggest that you consider carefully:

  1. Ask yourself why you want to get involved in social media. This will allow you to develop some goals that you can evaluate your efforts against. I would suggest you schedule a monthly review to evaluate what it is that you accomplished with social media over the last month and whether you are on track to achieving the goals that you set out.
  2. Identify your target market: who are you targeting, which social media sites are they likely to use, what sort of message will they associate with. Social media is here to help you build relationships. You need to target who it is on the social media sites that you want to spend your time building relationships otherwise you run the risk of getting distracted and wasting your time and effort.
  3. Develop an online brand. Ideally, this would be consistent with your offline brand and help you achieve your end goal. It is important to spend time up front figuring out exactly how you want to position yourself on these sites and make sure that you keep it consistent throughout your different social media profiles. I will be going into more detail about this important element in my next post.
  4. Familiarizing yourself with the different social media sites and identifying which ones will help you reach your target market and achieve your goal. The general rule of thumb is: ‘Be where your clients are’. The following list of sites is by no means inclusive, but includes the sites on which we feel Toronto real estate  agents should focus their attention: Blogging (WordPress self hosted), LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube. It’s important to know how to conduct yourself on these social media sites. As you decide on which sites you want to get involved with, it’s important to understand what the culture is like on the site and be sure to follow the proper etiquette for that specific network. Some useful universal rules includes: Giving more than you take, Showing respect to others on the site, listening to feedback and reading comments, respond when someone provides you with feedback or comments, build relationships, be transparent, always strive to add value

In the next post of this series i will be discussing the importance of building a consistent online brand and developing content that supports that positioning.