Expert offers ‘secret sauce’ for engaging clients with social media

More than 50 percent of the reasons why Facebook pages and blogs fail are because of lack of engagement, according to Katie Lance, director of social media for Inman News.

“It’s not enough to have tons of fans or followers,” said Lance. “I would rather have 300 fans engaged in my conversation than thousands not engaged.”

Lance recently conducted on a webinar on how Realtors® can better engage their clients through social media. She says that social media is all about the “like,” the share or the re-tweet and Facebook accounts for 85 percent of all user reactions. She said it is important for real estate professionals to understand this because when they engage their community with social media they are creating more web traffic and clients will be more likely to share their content.

“To be successful, you really need to learn how to create and get feedback from your clients and fans,” she said. “We are in a business laced with emotion and buying a home is one of the most emotional things you can do. The easiest thing you can do in real estate is evoke emotion.”

Lance offered these seven ingredients to her “secret sauce” for creating engagement:

• Ask questions. Social media is not a one-way street. It is an opportunity to ask questions and get fans and followers involved. Social media is all about telling a story. Post a video or story of the home seller.  Engage by creating quick polls or brainstorm a list of questions about your community, local market, etc.
• Keep it simple and fun. Tweet tips and post photos and video to help create engagement. This will generate more likes and comments. Keeping it simple will help build and maintain relationships.
• Keep an editorial calendar. You must plan with social media. You need to have a calendar so you won’t run out of ideas to post. When you are consistent with postings, you keep the audience engaged and readership will increase. Google Calendar is a standard easy to use tool.
• Create a content grid. This is not as specific as a calendar. It’s a simple table or graphs that talk about content you want to address. The content can include your site, real estate, local information and anything else you feel is interesting enough to share.
• Reply to every “like” or comment. Post an article and ask a question about it. Afterwards, thank the audience for their “likes.” This interaction is how you build relationships with people. It’s as simple as a thank you.
• Reply to every share. Using the free site Kurrently.com, track who is talking about your page or brand. The site can pull up anyone who has shared your content from your page. It is important because when you share comments, those comments go out to followers.
• Analyze the results. Use the “insights” application on your Facebook to track the activity of your followers or use Google Alerts to track the level of engagements. Google Alerts is a great tool for keeping up to date on the industry or to find out what is being said about you on the web.

“To be successful in social media, you have to make time to pay attention to your site,” she said. “Use your smartphone to get back to your audience immediately. When someone responds to something, they want a response right away. If time is money than attention is gold.”