December 10 2013
This post comes to us from the Market Leader blog:
One of the major goals of any social media strategy is to get more visitors to your website. It is a long process, often referred to as the tortoise of marketing (slow and steady wins the race!), because you have to take the time to grow your follower base and build a strong bond with them.
Pinterest and Google+ are goldmines of website traffic because their target audiences (home décor fanatics and web-savvy professionals) are more likely to enjoy and interact with real estate-related posts. Oddly enough, Pinterest and Google+ are two of the most underrated social media sites for real estate agents. This article explores why you should beef up your online marketing strategy by using these two powerful social networks.
Here are some pointers for agents interested in using Google Plus:
Set up Google Authorship on your Google+ profile and your blog to link the two together. The primary benefit of Google Authorship is that your Google+ profile picture shows up next to your blog posts in search results. This leads to a much higher click-through rate; having images next to your blog posts in search results will attract users' eyes and can garner as high as a 38 percent uptick in the number of times your posts get clicked!
There is a right way and a wrong way of using social media for real estate. In fact, one of the biggest social media mistakes Realtors® make is just blogging about real estate listings on Google+.
As a social community, Google+ happens to be one of the most intelligent. The conversations you see on Google+ are a little different than those on Facebook. Those that get the most engagement on Google+ are sharing awe-inspiring content. A humdrum post about a real estate listing is not the kind of content that is going to make people want to interact with you.
Pinterest users are crazy about interior decorating, home improvement projects, and other home-related topics. This makes them the perfect audience for real estate agents using social media to generate traffic to their websites.
A great feature of Pinterest is that its posts, called "pins," are easy for Pinterest users – and even search engine browsers – to find weeks or even months after they are originally posted. Compared to Twitter, where tweets get buried in your followers' feeds in minutes and are rarely seen in search results, Pinterest has the potential to drive a lot more traffic to your website.
Follow these simple tips to drive traffic to your website from Pinterest:
Click here to read more Pinterest tips for real estate agents.
Here's why you should use both Pinterest and Google+:
There are many different strategies to use when combining Pinterest and Google+. Here are a few:
Rock the simultaneous post. Apps like Everypost allow social media users to simultaneously create and publish posts on all their accounts with major social media platforms. These applications are great time-savers and are ideal for posting on Google+ and Pinterest because images and hashtags operate in similar fashions on both networks.
Have Pinterest be your guinea pig. Test images on Pinterest to see how popular they have the potential to be. If your images don't get any interaction on Pinterest, skip posting them on Google+ and test other images instead. Why use Pinterest as a guinea pig? Pinterest users are barraged with images the moment they log in; any image that inspires interaction on Pinterest will likely do the same on Google+!
This guest blog post was written by Bill Gassett, a nationally recognized Realtor® who has worked in the MetroWest Massachusetts area for the past 26 years. Gassett was named the No. 1 RE/MAX real estate agent in all of New England in 2012.