Social Media SUCKS you in………..

I found this today while surfing around and found it very interesting….I thought it worthy of a re-blog! I hope you find it interesting too!  It was originally written by Vicki Berry!

Are you finding yourself being sucked into the Social Media Vortex?

Many people find that adding online social networking to their business activities can affect their efficiency and challenge their time management skills.

Although social media is free for the most part, it is not necessarily true that using it for marketing purposes is going to be free if you consider that it can become a huge time hog.

We all know that business is about relationships. And marketing online increases our exposure and widens our warm market.

But with social media it might seem like you’ve gone down the rabbit hole into a wonderland of new information, experiences, relationships and business opportunities. Entertainment begins to wind its way into your business activities.

You might begin to feel overwhelmed to the point of distraction, following every interesting Tweet and blog you find, until your distraction outweighs your productivity.

As it has been said, the best thing about working for yourself is that you have no one to tell you what to do. But the worst thing about working for yourself is that you have no one to tell you what to do.

Here are some tips and reminders for you if you feel yourself sliding down that slippery slope:

Limit Your Marketing Efforts to Your Target Market

Once you have determined what your what your target market is, join the social networks where you are most likely to connect with these people, and join groups or participate in forum discussions providing value over promotion. Limit your activities to this market.

Keep it Simple

Start with just one to three social networks, so that you begin to build relationships rather than just numbers.

Stay away from the likes of Facebook applications and games, they are time wasters and can be addictive. Attend only the most interesting and applicable event invitations that you receive, for eventually you’ll find you get several per week.

And budget your time in Twitter, YouTube, or social bookmarking sites, which can be an attention magnet as well. While it is very tempting to look at a dozen links, videos and pages, the next thing you know an hour or two is lost (although you may find an occasional nugget to use to add value for an upcoming post or video).

Of course it is cordial and builds relationships to respond to every friend request, @ reply or DM Tweet, and email, this quickly becomes burdensome. Learn to prioritize your response messaging according to contacts you have qualified as being in your most targeted market.

It’s also tempting to check out every link you are sent, but limit the ones that you follow to those from people you have built a relationship with first. These can  not only be distracting but even hazardous!

Use Tools that Increase Productivity

Do use social bookmarking sites such as StumbleUpon.com, Digg.com, and Del.icio.us to increase your exposure and SEO.Just be careful of surfing the always interesting content there, and if you do make sure it’s something that feeds into your ideas for your own content. Make tagging your blog to these sites easy using clickable buttons (plugins often provide these).

Learn about and use account management application sites such as Socialoomph.com (previously TweetLater.com), which can be used (free or paid for more options) to schedule poats to various social accounts.

Sites like FriendFeed.com and Ping.fm can be used to consolidate your postings, as can SocialPoster.com, to name a few. Twitter can be set to post directly to FriendFeed (I can’t get Facebook to do that any longer), but I found that I didn’t want Twitter updates to post to Facebook since due to a much larger number of followers on Twitter, I create more updates on my Twitter account.  It seemed it would be a nuisance on the slower paced Facebook to have my Twitter updates post there. The last thing I want to do is annoy my target market audience!

And as a side note, since Socialoomph.com no longer posts directly to Twitter for scheduled updates, you can post to ping.fm and have it’s updates posted to Twitter. There are also software tools that you can run locally on your computer for this purpose, but I’ve not yet tried any.

Listen

Remember you are in a relationship business first, which means your primary focus should be on your prospects, your potential customers or business partners. Don’t be a ‘false networker’ or just accumulate friends for the sake of gaining numbers.

Your most important skill when face to face, listening, carries into the realm of social media. Learn about your contacts, and find out what it is that they need. Spend just a few minutes a day perusing the updates of your contacts to learn their current interests and needs. They also may be posting content that you’d like to incorporate into your own, so bookmark sites that you’ll want to return to later.

Continue Writing

If your communication skills are lacking in the area of writing, or ad copy, work on that at least to the extent that you can be concise (yes, I do have a bit of work to do here ), and keep your readers interested. Writing is not an impossible skill for someone even if they are currently poor at writing. I’ve seen someone not use correct grammar and spelling and yet write an enjoyable and compelling post! As long as you are enthusiastic, educational and/or entertaining, you’ll have an audience.

Writing a catchy headline is even more important than interesting content in a post. Headlines should grab attention and the post should be interesting enough to hold the reader’s attention, but not overly wordy or disjoint. A great little tool is the marketing headline analyzer – it will rate your headlines for readers’ appeal – http://www.aminstitute.com/headline/index.htm

Just be yourself and let people get to know, like and trust you you while you get to know them and understand their needs, and if you master your social media marketing schedule, and you can’t go wrong!

Vicki Berry

Social Media and Real Estate

Social Networking sites like Twitter and Facebook are used widely as marketing tools in  business.  How is it used in Real Estate? Do YOU use it and if so , how effective is it for you and your clients?

Attending a seminar these days you will hear mention of Twitter and Facebook, among other things, as a way to market your business.  So just how effective can these 2 networking sites really be for your business?

Twitter.com is a site that anyone can join and create a profile. After which they can update their status as many times in one day as they like. It is basically micro-blogging!  You can “tweet” about  anything as long as it is in 140 characters or less!  Thus the “mico-blogging” !  The beauty of Twitter is that  as you Tweet and others Tweet and you follow them and they follow you then eventually your status updates or “Tweets” are being seen by more and more people. They even have a “Follow Friday” which, if you are privy as to how it works, can add many more followers each week to your followers list, which in turn grows your field of readers or your reach to other cities and states, therefore giving you more potential clients!  Whew!

Now what about Facebook?  Well, facebook is another animal completely! While Twitter is just a micro-blog which you can update with little one line updates a few times a day, Facebook is an entire community! You can create a “group” on Facebook and invite friends and have friends invite friends and so on, which after awhile will get quite a bit of exposure for your “group” and all you have to do is maintain this “group” with relevant info and hopefully enough interesting data to cause people to start talking about you and visiting your group more often. There are many things you can do to grow your group and get more exposure for your business and for your clients homes. And again….growing your busienss exposure and getting more clients…at least that is the hope.

I guess the bottom line here is do you think getting more exposure for your clients homes as well as for your business, in general, is a good thing? And do you think it is worth your time? How much time, you may ask? I would post, at a minimum, 1 status update a day on Twitter and a relevant article, picture or status update daily on FB. That may turn out to be 30 minutes, MAX a day! It should be alot less if you do not become addicted to doing it. Yes,yes,yes……I KNOW! Facebook can get you a bit distracted, this is where some self discipline will have to be exerted!  JUST DO IT!

Do you think it is worth it? I do.  Whether your selling Real Estate in Hendricks County, Indiana or in San Diego, Californina everyone wants the same thing! We, as Realtors, want good clients and Clients want good Realtors! Social Marketing sites is one way to get that.

OH! and probably the most important thing to remember in any type of Social Marketing is, it is NOT about you! It is about your CLIENTS. And you need to be real….your readers need to hear things Real Estate specific but interesting. And if it is not necessarily about Real Estate but is interesting to others, that is ok too! Make people want to come back and read what you have to say, make people feel as though you care about others…No, it s not a game, you need to be genuine. You really do need to make it about others needs and let it show in your updates. Attraction marketing is a whole other ballgame, which I will talk about in a later blog!