Upward trend in Social Media Marketing.
Social media as a topic is as simple or complicated as you make it out to be in your mind. The rules that I tell people are that social media comes in two forms, good news and bad news. The good news is that it is Free to use and that you do not need a degree in marketing to use it successfully. The bad news is that it requires effort, time and financial commitment as there is no quick route to success.
Today, there are many statistics that are all on social media and it’s positioning within our current world of marketing. You will generally see figures that are mind blowing with the likes of billions of updates a day or billions of uses active every month etc. Importantly, you will generally see reporting on social media that shows upward and increasing trends and more and more reports on success stories from businesses using it.
If we are in the business of marketing, then we will know that numbers are great, but more important are target numbers that engage with our brands that really count for more. There is very little point to have social media accounts with tens of thousands of followers when you either do not post/update or the numbers that follow you are totally dis-interested in your brand and products/services.
With no magic formula for success in social media, we have to commit careful study to the topic to be paid off later in the day, we need to realise that though simple as stated previously, the subject is quite complex when we study it thoroughly to determine the best ways it can be used to help our businesses. It could very well be that one post on Facebook every week of high quality will be worth much more that say 5 posts per day of average quality, those following may prefer to wait for an exciting WOW factor post per week than average posts daily merely showing that you are ‘active’.
What works for one industry sector may have a negative effect in another, audiences respond in different ways, not only it what they like, but also by their age groups, finances, careers, locations, male or female, Twitter or Facebook etc, etc.
How do I find out the best way to use Social Media?
It’s quite simple to be honest, experiment and explore. Think outside the box, be more adventurous, look at the results your updates receive and the numbers that follow you. There is little point, unless you want to tick the ‘Yes, we are on social media‘ box on your new instruction forms, that you maintain an inactive social media presence.
I see many estate agents who get great activity from their social media efforts from the likes of questions, comments and even new instructions. Other estate agents have no doubt given little thought to or outsourced their social media management to an external agency whose job it is to merely post on their accounts daily no matter whatever relevant news they can find… A slow upward trend of new followers yet with no increase in engagement.
To be different, spend some time looking at your social media accounts compared to your local rival agency’s, are you really entertaining / educating / engaging the audiences that follow you? Are your follower numbers increasing and are they target, ie local? Do not forget that despite the current market difficulties for some buyers, young professionals are purchasing and renting property across the UK and many of them would have only just a few years ago been young teenagers brought up with the likes of Facebook, Youtube, Skype, Twitter, Instagram as their main news / communication channels and many will continue with that trend in their current lives, so think these channels when targeting their attention to your agency / property listings.
Though it may sound incorrect or against what I sometimes say, but you could very well get more success from one social media post per year that may carry a budget of say £1,000 (photography, video, bespoke cartoon, voiceovers etc) over posting basic content each day… Yes, you may not appear present or active all that frequently, but your one post per year could stand a chance of going viral, especially within a target community and the results it gives you far outweigh what would be achieved with daily posting.
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