Content 101: Content Types for Realtors

In the real estate industry, there are many misconceptions when it comes to social networking and the value of these tools. Understanding each tool is essential in leveraging it effectively. The same statement is true with regards to a Realtor's personal business website. If you take one tip from all the information in these posts, take this: The most value you can bring to your sphere of influence, friends, family and coworkers, is by creating unique, useful content.

Content is key!

Many of the following tips and tricks come directly from a sales book, The Ultimate Sales Machine. This book demonstrates and describes the best ways to market yourself in any sales position. As a real estate salesperson, you are in sales. You should embrace this, and then store it in your memory for every moment when you are interacting with anyone and everyone.

One of the most dominant themes in this book is the concept of 'education-based marketing'. This can be loosely described as a salesperson positioning his/herself as the expert in the market through education. This concept is imperative as you learn to market yourself on the Internet effectively. The bottom line: it is essential to show yourself as the expert in your local market.

How to be the expert?

Across all of the major social networks, specifically Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn, educating your followers is essential to keeping them interested and growing your base. Of course, many socialites have taken the leveraging of these networks to a whole other level, but we will start from square one.

From Realtor to Realtor, having a combination of news, market information, and interesting articles will help you establish yourself as an expert, and a human-being at the same time. Variety is important, but straying from real estate often might turn off the followers that expect you to have your finger on the pulse, so-to-speak. So, we have created a simple plan to help you get consistent and show the variety that your followers would expect. We will also introduce you to the tools that help get you there and save you time.

Types of Content:

There are four major types of content:

1. Pictures
2. Links
3. Videos
4. Status Updates

Let's talk about each of these individually (and shallowly), both regarding your listings and activity, and other. As time progresses, we will go in depth into each of these so you can get more understanding of how they work in your business.

Pictures:

As social sites such as Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, and many others become prominent and fade in and out, pictures becomes an essential way to convey feelings, activities, and data. For every article or link you can post, there is a picture that can be associated with it. Pictures are an easy, effective way to quickly give piece of information to an interested follower. The cliche, 'A picture is worth 1000 words', will never be more true. If you can create unique content, graphs, data, charts, about the local real estate market, your user base will grow. There is nobody creating the same content in your area, I guarantee that. You might think to post a picture of yourself at a charity event, on a nice day out with friends, or of your listing. The possibilities are endless.

Links:

Posting a link from an article that resonates with you is a great value-added way to provide content to your followers. When they see you posting articles that are relevant to real estate, they will associate you and your business with quality and intelligence. Beyond this, there are thousands of other reasons a link might be posted on your social networks. For example, you might post a link to your listings through Trulia, Zillow, or some other site.

​Videos:

Video is another prominent source of information. YouTube remains dominant as the second biggest social network, and of course, the biggest source for video. Just like you may find an interesting article that relates to real estate, the same can be true of videos. Word of caution: Make sure that if you are posting videos, that they are applicable content. The last thing you want is your follower finding your video boring and irrelevant to why they are on your page. Additionally, videos that excess a couple of minutes (unless they are incredible videos) will tend to lose follower interest quickly; a rule of thumb, 30 second videos will mostly get watched all the way through, but anything under 2 minutes, “ you should strive to make your content as short and punchy as possible to guarantee the highest engagement.” Wistia Blog

​Status Updates:

This type of post encompasses all other types of posting. It would not include any type of media, links, videos, or pictures. This type of post is text only. Get creative here, because if you post a lot without any links/videos/pictures, the content must be valuable to your followers.

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On a general level, these types of content will be present in all aspects of your marketing, including your blog. There are many different ways to promote yourself and your listings, but if we stay inline with the concept behind content, then a robust and varied blog might be the most useful tool you can use to keep top-of-mind awareness. Your blog can be incorporated into your marketing in a number of ways:

It can be the foundation of your website. In other words, when your website needs to be displayed, or you are giving your personal website to others, directing them to your blog is a perfect alternative. Not only do you give them the general information, but you centralize your marketing in one place. From here, your social networking profiles, contact information, and even listings can be displayed.

This is a shallow explanation of content, but certainly hits on many major parts of marketing yourself on the Internet. Stay tuned to learn more about social networks, blogs, and marketing yourself on the Internet.

Read on, Content 102 gives further, useful information about social networks and content!