Online marketing for real estate agents

There are thousands of real estate agencies and agents now using Facebook and Twitter to market their businesses. Most small businesses know that online marketing is so much more now than just having a website.

What I see on Facebook in particular though is real estate agents getting social media very wrong and wasting their precious time with an ineffective strategy. We know that the power of Facebook and Twitter for small business comes from the ability to interact with people which no other marketing platform allows.

We also know that businesses who try to use Facebook and Twitter to directly sell are putting people off. For example many real estate agents will post up houses for sale or show photos of houses they have sold in order to give a message of either 'Please buy from me' or 'Look how good I am at selling, let me sell your house.'

A much more effective way for real estate agents to use Facebook would be to showcase their knowledge and expertise. Lets say your a real estate agent that specialises in selling units. Well a good strategy would be to write an article on why units are good investments, or what to look for when buying a unit.

Submit articles to Hubpages or other platforms then post a link to it on your Facebook profile. When considering a real estate agent people also want to know what knowledge they have of their own backyard. So why not consider posting links to changes occurring in the area you sell e.g. infrastructure development, and then comment on how this might affect the property market.

Online marketing is all about trust marketing, that is building rapport and credibility in the Facebook and Twitter worlds that you are an expert in your field, not the best salesperson.

Other online marketing ideas for real estate agencies would be to include a blog on your website, having video on your website which you can post to Facebook (growing area for credibility), and using Twitter to post links to relevant articles such as property market reports that get released.

The world of online marketing for real estate agents and agencies is ripe for the picking you just have to know what works and what doesn't. The problem is real estate agents and agencies have been so used to traditional property marketing platforms such as print and common real estate sites used by all real estate agencies to sell (e.g. realestate.com.au) that they perhaps aren't aware that social media works very differently.

Thankfully the solution to effective online marketing for real estate agents is easy.