Applying social media trends to your business

I attended a session at the AE Institute in Colorado Springs this week called “Applied Social Media Trends.”

During the panel discussion with REALTORS®, they discussed how social media is a way of exponentially increasing your opportunities to connect with people and has always been around in some form or another.

An easy visual representation of the various Internet communication approaches is:

• Static website = one dimensional
• Blogs = two dimensional
• Social Media = three dimensional

Real estate professionals have to have a way of injecting themselves into the housing conversation and social media is one way of doing that. It takes everything you do offline and moves it, and your brand, online. It increases your reach at a cost, free except for your time, that nothing else can match.

Many professionals are rethinking how to calculate Return on Investment (ROI). They create spreadsheets and track the number of leads and closings based on their blog posts and tweets. They can make a direct connection to social media efforts and dollars earned and can assign true dollars made to each post.

The key to these efforts is to take time periodically and assess the community you have built. Often you will have to adjust the core community or niche you serve to remain relevant to your group as it evolves.