The words ‘Social Media’ seems to leave most estate agents cold, bored or both! This is usually due to a misunderstanding of social media and how it affects the property business. Here’s the simplified version…

Social media for beginners (the nursery slopes…Green/Blue runs!) – Your website is fitted with buttons that allow your visitors to ‘share’ your properties or news articles to their OWN ‘Walls’ – a bit of free viral marketing for you! Their Facebook friends then see the posting and hopefully click through to your website to find out more; Happy days. Maybe they’ll want to view the property their friend shared with them!

Intermediate (Red runs!) – Ok you’ve wired in sharing (as mentioned above) but you want to do more…become a ‘voice’ in the Industry. You decide to set up your own Twitter, Facebook & Google+ accounts and start writing interesting articles that others may wish to read and share with their contacts. There are shortcuts you can use (software which copies your article to multiple social media accounts) but duplicated content has much less value. Don’t start this unless you intend to stay the course.

Advanced (Black & Black Diamonds!) – You have the time or resources necessary to compose original and compelling articles that many others will read. You will interact regularly each day with those commenting on your articles with a view to the viral interest this can generate. This is great for brand awareness but can be very costly and time-consuming so the question of ROI and opportunity cost must be carefully considered