You need to start blogging, but about what?

One of the biggest mistakes people make is not blogging. Blogging is one of the purest forms of social media, but it is currently neglected by so many agents. The biggest issues that agents face when it comes to blogging, is 'what to write about?' Here are some sure fired ways to get you blogging and sharing your opinions.

Start with what you know.

You should be blogging about things that you know well, really well. Start by working general and then become super specific. The best way to look at that is to start with the suburbs you service, and then drill down to the streets that you sell homes in. You may think that people don't really want to know about the streets that you have listings in, but you are wrong. People value hyper-local data more than you can imagine, especially when you can provide insights that no-one else has. Commence blogging about these locations to build your brand up.

Expand to what people, somewhat know.

You know that new cafe that opened up recently that people have heard about but maybe have not been? Blog about it! People value hyper local information, especially from trusted sources. If you can generate your content around topics that are trending, you already know there is a large audience that is keen to hear what you have to say. You should be writing reviews on new amenities that come to your area, such as new cafes, new gyms and other destinations, as these are what people want to know about, but lack a centralised hub of content.

Push further in to providing advice.

Once you have begun generally, you need to start adding value. You should be writing about topics that provides advice for people who are looking at investing in property. Your blog content should ALWAYS be about your target market. There is no point writing blogs about buying your first home, if you are entrenched in an established market where people are spending four or five million dollars per home. You just won't be speaking their language. Find your niche and write content around it.

If you are selling home to people in an established market, ideas such as, 'How to use your superannuation to invest in property' or case studies from established property investors and the key points they look for in making any investment, are good ideas, as they will generate a captive audience and demonstrate you understand their market. 

So, that's great, but now what?

The biggest issues that people have when blogging is finding what to write about, therefore we have put together 10 topics that you as agents, can use to start writing blogs. These are just guides, but they are in incredibly valuable topics that people desperately want to know about.

• Why (the suburb you service) is set to boom.
• The 10 best cafes in (the suburb you service)
• Which streets have the best amenities in (your suburb)
• What the next 12 months holds for your suburb.
• The best bargains in your suburb.
• The core factors that make your suburb appealing.
• The best hidden treasures no-one knows (in your suburb)
• What the trend for developments are in your suburb.
• The things your suburb has (that no other one does)
• Draw cards and appealing events your suburb puts on.

Commence with writing content around this. It is a good way to build your brand, and the best part is, you can't go wrong. You will underestimate how much you actually know about your suburb, and the value you can provide to locals. 

Facebook marketing is more essential than you think.

Lots of clients ask us to handle their social media. Whilst we are flattered, we feel we need to get one thing straight. Marketing on social media should be looked at like a stream of water, you will put content in to the stream, and unless you put some really strong rocks to stop the flow of water, the tide will just wash it away and it will fall in to oblivion.

It amazes us how many clients put up great content, but don't allocated the budget to get it seen. Facebook is a business, and it rewards people that spend money with their business. You could have the best content in the world, but if you aren't ensuring that it is getting 'stalled' in the stream, and getting eyeballs on the page, you are wasting your time.

Enter....... Boosted Posts.

A boosted post is a post from your business Page that, for a fee, can appear higher up on your audience’s News Feeds. The fee depends on how many people you want the post to reach—the payment depends on the number of impressions the post gets with time.

When setting up a boosted post, you can set specific demographic constraints to drill down who sees your content. When starting to grow your audience, the main focus is on bringing in new users, boosted posts can be set to people that we target (who don't currently follow you)

We will be looking to engage people that live in the localities that you service, as they are the most valuable customer to you. When setting our parameters we can select their location, age, gender and up to 10 interests. Imagine how specific this can be for you as an agent. We can target your listing content to people who live in your area, are members of the local school and are involved in parenting groups. These kind of people are great prospects as their living arrangements change constantly, and thus their housing requirements change as well. 

When boosted posts are implemented, we run more detailed reports and watch the performance, coming back to you with the results for your analysis. Whilst you'd like to believe that having gorgeous homes, posting interesting articles and being informative will grow your Facebook audience, we are here to say it won't! (Well, most likely not to the standards you require/ or deserve!)

Therefore, have your account manager start implementing some tested Facebook posts, we can't think of one agent that wouldn't be happy with local users, being targeted their listings for an incredibly small cost. In many cases, boosted posts have been the most cost-effective form of online advertising, a recent experiment we ran found that Facebook boosted posts generated just under 4% of clicks upon impression, the highest other is nowhere near with Google adwords getting a click 2.5% of the time. A boosted post on Facebook cost in this campaign 0.18c and on Google Adwords cost $1.80 per click. That is ten times more!

Do the math!

88% of Companies Using Social Media Have No Idea What They Are Doing

The bad news I’m about to tell you is going to HELP you in the long run.  If your company is using social media to propel your business to the next level, there’s an 88% chance that the people behind that push have no idea what they are doing.  That’s a tough thing to hear for a couple of reasons.  First, it’s a fairly large percentage.  Secondly, paying social media gurus can be expensive, so you expect them to know what they are doing.

Social media is the future of marketing, networking, and getting businesses seen, so when we see companies that are all over Facebook and Twitter, they must have vast amounts of social media genius behind them, right?  Surely they all have some sort of data to scientifically tell them what’s working and what is absolutely NOT working, right?  WRONG.

The truth is that, according to the Harvard Business Review, only 12% of companies feel that they are using social media effectively to reach their online audiences. That means that 88% know they are not doing a good job of effectively harnessing the power of social media and using it to positively impact their brand.

Hope Is Not a Strategy

Many businesses today are using hope as a strategy for success, and successful businessmen and women everywhere will tell you that hope is NOT a strategy.  It’s time to get smart about social media.  If your company is flinging things onto your social platform and relying on the “fingers-crossed” method, it’s likely you won’t see a lot of success.  While social media may seem like a daunting mountain for those who have not attempted it or for those who are only used to the bunny slopes, it’s time to gear up and tackle the tougher runs.

The Good News

Now that I've given you the bad news, it’s time for a little good news.  If 88% of companies truly don’t know what they are doing when it comes to social media, it means this is your chance!  By jumping in and learning everything you can about how to make your business and your brand successful with social media, you will be well on your way to joining the 12% that are already leveraging the power of social media.  You’ll be ahead of the game and ahead of all the others who are still hanging out in the 88%.

Get in the game and learn about the tools that can help your business as you start to use social media to its fullest.  Check out a few of the common best practices below:

Choose your playground.  There is an abundance of social media sites out there, and you can’t be in all of them at once—not effectively anyway.  Choose the places where you are going to play, and post regularly.

Plan your posts.  Don’t just post randomly, but think things through and engage your consumers in relevant ways.

Use analytics and data.  These tools are available to you, so take a look at who is checking out your posts, when they are looking, and what they like.

Interact with your followers.  Ask questions, throw out a fun quiz or survey every now and then, ask for funny pics or captions…you get the idea.  Your followers will enjoy knowing you are available to interact with them.

Visual media rules.  Your followers will enjoy videos and pictures more than just words.  Entertain with a variety of mediums.

It’s not all about selling.  Let your followers get to know you, and post relevant and timely updates.

Do your research.  Social media changes as fast as you can blink, so stay up-to-date with what’s going on.  (Here’s a hint:  let Google be your best friend.)

Bad news is no fun, but luckily this time it comes with good news, too.  Many companies find themselves lost in the 88% that don’t know what they are doing, so make sure you are using social media to your best advantage.  It’s a powerful tool that can set you miles ahead of your competition if used correctly.  It’s much better to hang out with the 12% of social media gurus who are making social work wonders for their brands!

Why we are about to put your Instagram account on steroids

Instagram is your most underutilised platform, plain and simple. It is one of the most rapidly growing platforms, and unlike the other social platforms, easily syndicates content to the other social sites without needing any visual change. When you send out a tweet, it doesn't look great on Facebook and can’t be viewed on Twitter, when you send out a Facebook post, it gets truncated at 140 characters on Twitter and can’t be sent out to Facebook.

Solution

Use Instagram as your primary platform.

To commence in building your strategy we will focus on two things: Your audience and your content. There is no point having great content but not targeting the right audience or having content that is average and sending it to the people you want to engage. Therefore, after a market analysis, we will be able to target your ideal user base, and give them content they want.

What will this do?

• Generate repeat contact, making you sit at the top of the consumers mind
• Build your brand, you will be personally attached to every photo posts, they will think of you when they see the content.
• Start conversations, Instagram easily allows tagging and social discussions on posts.

So what next?

To get started we need to know who your audience is, and what content you have access to that is personal and relevant to your brand. Once we know this, we will develop a strategy based around attracting your ideal users and making sure the posts go out at the time they are likely to use the channel. We will also do this, whilst staying in conversations that you NEED to know about. There are conversations on Instagram about anything and everything in your local area. It’s our job to get you apart of these conversations, provide an opinion, and offer a solution if it is anything property related.

The primary purpose of the social channels: Social 101

 

Why do social?

• There are just under 14,000,000 active Facebook Users
• There are 4,000,000 active Instagram users
• There are 3,300,000 active users on LinkedIn
• There are 2,800,000 active users on Twitter

In the last month alone, there were almost 60 million unique visits in Australia to social content. (Source, Socialmedianews.com.au)

Who ever your audience is, they are out there, looking for content, wanting to find things to engage on, and every day you don't engage with them, is another day wasted.

A lot of people get confused when it comes to social media and the requirements to keep the channel running successfully. Whilst there are challenger brands, when starting your social presence it’s important to work on building a strong brand on fewer rather than more social streams. It is not possible to state enough, you are better off being strong on one channel, than mediocre on three.

So what are the channels and how do you use them?

Instagram

This is a hidden gold mine, more so for the SEO attributed content that exists that a lot of people seem to miss. Many people look at instagram as a place to just post photos and like them. Instagram should be used as a search engine, and you should be constantly updating on the new content in your relevant searches. You need to drill down who your audience is and the places they would likely go, and the hashtags they would likely use. Start by focusing on broader ones, and drill down to specialised ones. Find ones where you can offer your services e.g #bondihome will return 55 posts. These are hyperlocal posts and relevant to a specific market. Start with your market.

Twitter

Twitter is all about syndication and branching out to other portals. Your goal is not to keep people on your twitter feed, but to provide a short and sharp enough tweet that entices them to want to do more. The biggest mistake people leave off their tweets is providing a call to action. You are better off with tweets that are short and describe where the content will lead, than making them guess. Tweets such as “Finding a new school can be hard when moving, here is how to make it easy. (insert link) primes the reader to know exactly what they will get. Whilst you can tweet other content, the idea is to bring them to your primary page and build SEO and engagement on your content (have them comment on your blogs etc)

Facebook

Facebook is more so about conversations and generating discussions. Facebook has a built in mechanism to allow comments and engagement on posts quite easily. Every post should have a call to action and ask the user something or spark their curiosity. Posts that just state “read this” doesn't entice them, the post needs to make the reader think about the topic and want to know more. Focusing on relevant content to their market is incredibly valuable as well. If you are an agent in Hawthorn, Victoria for example, doing a featured post on a weird or wonderful home and what makes it unique will get engagement. Make sure you leave some element of curiosity to the reader on the post so they have to click more to find out. 

Blogging

You should constantly update and maintain a blog, and there should be some form of theme behind it. Using a specific theme primes your audience to know what to expect, and this provides content for you to syndicate through your email marketing. Your blogs should focus on the following topics:

• Market Updates
• New places in the neighbourhood
• Recent property prices
• New Listings
• Featured profiles on places in the area

Social is all about engagement, people are putting content out there, not expecting you to engage on it. But if you do:

• You build your brand
• Start conversations
• Build rapport
• Demonstrate knowledge
• Increase your presence

So what are you waiting for?  Let us start helping you build your brand today. Enquire here so we can have a chat and build a strategy for you. 

• You build your brand
• Start conversations
• Build rapport
• Demonstrate knowledge
• Increase your presence

So what are you waiting for?