Direct Marketing

As home prices drop nation-wide, real estate agents are working harder to establish relationships with new clients and many are using social media marketing to reach out.

Marketing on sites like Myspace or Facebook can be rewarding, but it tends to be more time consuming and involved than traditional marketing. People use social networks to keep in touch with friends, not for buying and selling, so the approach must be more subtle and sincere than simply adding thousands of friends or mass messaging. However, by slowly building a large network of friends and clients on one of these sites, you are creating a forum with unparalleled power for communication.

Video marketing is also an incredible opportunity for real estate agents. Uploading home tours to sites like Youtube and then linking them on social bookmarking sites or social networks can provide the kind of visibility that once took hundreds of hours and as many tanks of gasoline. People expect the world at their fingertips and the agent who is willing to provide it is the one who gets the sale.

Social media marketing is far from a magic, untapped stream of revenue. You can’t expect to sign up, start spamming, and watch the dollars roll in, but you also can’t afford to be left out of these important avenues of contact. Though it may take some time and effort to build a base to work from, getting involved in social networks and video marketing will eventually save the savvy real estate agent precious time and provide new avenues for communication with clients and potential clients.

The minutiae of our lives is becoming increasingly and for some terrifyingly public. Now that we’re constantly publishing, sharing, microsharing, updating, vlogging, there are fewer boundaries between public and private, business and personal. Social media marketing has become indispensable for business, but do you really want a client checking out photos of your 4th of July BBQ or your day at the beach?

In this day and age it’s extremely important to live your life in a way that reflects positively of you, because you never know who’s capturing what image, sound file or video and posting it on the web. Social bookmarking tracks our web browsing habits, and the line between video marketing and user-generated content is not only blurred but erased.

From  Michael Richards’ racist rant caught on a celphone to Brett Michaels’ onstage spill, public image can turn on a dime and everyone is always watching. But how does this apply to us non-celebrities? Every tweet, every blog, every video – it all adds up to showing people who you are. You need to make sure that a Google search shows people an image of you or your company that you want people to see.

Every blog, every minute of video, every word you say can make up someone’s mind about you. It may be a potential customer, employer, or even a family member. It seems there’s no way around this heightened visibility but to embrace it, and use it to show the world who you really are.