Given the importance of new and social media on every aspect of real estate business, I have created a list of predictions and trends on 2012. I hope you find these expert predictions informative, educational and actionable.
Real Time
Social media gives us the ability to communicate instantly, yet most real estate agents have not developed the communication skills to address real time. We now need the ability to react instantly to breaking news, changes on our websites and negative customer feedback. Agents and brokers need a new mentality, infrastructure and workflows to meaningfully participate in real time.
Social Real Estate Evolution
Real Estate brokerages of all sizes will need to transform their business and existing infrastructure, and reverse engineer the impact of business objectives and metrics. New York Brokerages have to embrace all of the disruptive elements, such as mobile and social technology, in a new, cohesive organization that is focused outward and inward.
Ubiquity
Powerbrokers will have enough experience with social media marketing under their belts to act more strategically and better integrate social media into their overall marketing and operations. Brokers will start looking more carefully at the tools and many will make changes informed by their experience.
Mobile as a Game-Changer
The continued growth of mobile, smart phones as the primary device to access the web and use social will totally change the game for social real estate marketing.
Judging ‘Influence’
Every real estate brokerage has its own ‘secret sauce’ for measuring influence. Brokerages that are able to standardize influence measurement will be the winners going forward.
Socialization of Existing Web Properties
New York brokerages websites will be better and more deeply integrated with social media properties. It will also mean a greater emphasis on creating community, with content.
Marketing Tools
More brokers and agents will actively engage with all the stages of inbound marketing. Right now there’s too much focus on social media marketing and content marketing. True inbound marketing involves knowing which tactics work, which pieces of content, calls to action, forms and emails generated the most leads. It’s integrating your SEO efforts together with your content generation and sharing, with your advertising, your lead nurturing, your analytics, measurement and A/B testing, with every tool you use and everything you do to market your properties.
Measurement
2012 will be about unified measurement for social activities and consistent ways to measure real estate social activities on platforms such as Facebook. Twitter will launch company pages that brokers can take advantage and LinkedIn will offer new opportunities for deeper engagement between you and your real estate brokerage.
Better Budget Allocation
More brokerages will move to the next stage, having a more innate understanding of what they need to do in social media, and being more specific about where they allocate budgets within social media.
All about Marketing
Social real estate marketing will become pure marketing. It will just be what you need to do, when you’re trying to sell a property, development or simply trying to engage with your niche.
Advocacy
We will see the practice of ‘influencer broker’ give way to building advocates throughout a community or network, bottom-to-top and in all directions. We can no longer bet Success on the volume of one person’s followers, connections and propensity to share content.
Online Recommendation Culture
Potential buyers and sellers rapid embrace of social media translates into blogs, Facebook, and Twitter becoming the new ‘picket fence,’ where they connect with groups to hear trusted recommendations, and gain first-person perspective.
Mass “Unfollowing” and “Unliking”
The biggest development will be in the mass ‘unfollowing’ and ‘unliking’ of real estate brokers that do not demonstrate and communicate value to their fans and followers. Too many brokers think that social media marketing consists of reposting or forwarding an interesting article.
Integration
Real-time social will push brokers to form better internal collaborations and deeper partnerships with their clients. Collaboration will increase advocacy and better customer value.
By David Ramos, Digital Marketing Strategist | davidr@citinsider.com
