The value put on social media…
Clearly, social media is no longer simply a place to share friendly updates with family and friends anymore. Nowadays there is a value / currency behind it all with every update, like, Tweet, Followers adding value to individual accounts and the people / businesses that own them. You can even find out how much your social media accounts are worth now with some online companies, rightly or wrongly (against the rules for most social media platforms), offering to purchase active accounts with strong numbers… You can also obviously purchase such accounts yourself to instantly have sizeable numbers behind your name, you can also purchase likes, followers, members etc.
This shows us the increasing value that social media is accumulating and that you are indeed increasing value of your accounts by simply working on building your numbers and activity from your updates.
For myself, social media does show a return on my time invested as the hours I spend to understand and build the presence of accounts on each of my businesses pays me back with quality web traffic and enquiries / leads. Another way that my social media accounts have value is that they attract interest from other businesses within the same sector. By this I will use an example with regards to a wine magazine I publish in such that we already have a sizeable following on Twitter where we now are seen as a strong voice in the industry and are frequently invited to taste wines, eat food and stay over at venues across London looking to gain extra PR – always for free (if you are a friend of mine on Facebook you’ll usually see food or wine being tasted on my timeline)! We also are sent many bottles of wine to taste and to hopefully highlight on our social media accounts… For the price of sending one bottle including postage to a wine label is well worth it in their minds, to then receive compliments from us on our social media channels where there is a target audience of 1,000’s following that may see that message.
In the property industry, the estate agent that has the biggest number of followers locally which are genuine and target, ie local or home owners / seekers, then they have the biggest voice to communicate a new valuation surely? Just like the estate agent who may have the biggest or most well placed shop front, the first page or most amount of pages in the local newspaper property section, the most boards up or pays Rightmove / Zoopla to highlight their listings will be the most likely to get the attention of the person looking to buy or sell, then surely social media runs along the same path… The one with the biggest audience is likely to reach the biggest audience? Though social media is still very much untested in the marketing power it can give by most estate agents, signs show us that it is an increasing trend and sooner or later will play a big or possibly the biggest part in the way we market homes in the future… Who will have most power then?