Using Your iPhone to Take Pro Photographs

Posted on May 15, 2012 by Peter Fletcher

The iPhone offers great potential for quick and easy real estate photography. Here are five useful add-ons to take your iPhone’s camera from zero to hero.

In the main, I recommend hiring a professional photographer for property listings. But there are plenty of occasions where taking your own photos is acceptable.

Appraisals are one example. When you’re called on to do an appraisal, hiring a professional is out of the question. Instead, you generally rely on your own photography skills to enhance your listing presentation.

Property managers are also familiar with taking their own photos. During a rental inspection or initial property condition report, some quick photos can provide vital evidence or a reminder of work that needs to be done.

That’s where the iPhone comes in. Forget lugging around a big, clunky camera, or even the cheap point-and-shoot. With up to 8 megapixels, your iPhone’s built-in camera can get the job done just fine. And with a few add-ons, your smart phone can be just as good as a purpose-built camera.

The advantage of using your iPhone as your go-to camera for appraisals, inspections or even rental listings is that you’ve always got it with you. As the old saying goes: the best camera is the one you have on you.

What, then, is the best way to get your smart phone’s camera working as a functional part of your professional toolkit? Here I’ve compiled five iPhone add-ons to enhance your real estate photography:

1. Wide-angle lens

Purpose-built lenses that fit over your iPhone’s built-in camera can bring your mobile up to the level of most regular cameras. One such lens is the wide-angle lens, which is a rounded lens used to fit more into a photo. Useful for capturing bathrooms and other small spaces.

2. Telephoto lens

A telephoto lens gives your iPhone the zooming capability of a regular camera. Get up close and personal with a home’s features by giving your camera some extra zoom. A common photography trick is to stand far back from the subject and zoom in, to get better lighting and no warping effect from the rounded lens. If this sounds like what you need, have a look at Photojojo.com’s lens bundle – it includes a wide-angle/macro lens and a telephoto lens.

3. Tripod

There’s a range of tripods out there designed just for the iPhone. They are a great way to eliminate hand shake and get clearer photos – and they’re handy for 360-degree shots, too. Use a tripod to take some time and carefully set up shots, rather than snapping every photo from eye level. Try Amazon or eBay if you’re looking for a smart phone tripod.

4. Camera Plus

The Camera Plus iPhone app lets you easily edit your photos and video. The free version allows you to crop photos, set a self-timer and has a range of other simple features such as anti-shake. The $2 ‘Pro’ version boasts brightness and contrast controls, plus a range of filters and other useful features. Use it to enhance your photos, or to touch-up photos that are just that little too dark or washed out.

5. Adobe Photoshop Express

Download Photoshop Express and save valuable storage space by keeping up to 2GB of photos ‘in the cloud’ at Photoshop.com. Photoshop Express allows you to edit these right from your iPhone. A range of editing functionality is available, from altering the exposure to adding fancy filters and borders. A really handy feature is the paid ‘Reduce Noise’ option, which can remedy the grainy look that’s so common in mobile photos.

With these five iPhone add-ons, you can use your mobile to take some amazing photos. Of course, hardware isn’t everything, but these add-ons give you the ability to take pro photos with the most everyday tool – a mobile phone.

This article was originally posted in the Residential Settlements newsletter to agents.

Image by Jesus Leon via Flickr.

How to Build a Powerful Personal Brand Using LinkedIn: The Power of Recommendations

Posted on April 16, 2012 by Peter Fletcher

This is Part 4 of How to build a powerful personal brand using LinkedIn.

Your LinkedIn profile is a living resume.

On any good resume, you’ll find references, and on LinkedIn, those references are called recommendations.

Recommendations will serve to set you apart from your competitors and are yet another part of the jigsaw puzzle to help the reader of your profile build a comprehensive picture of just who you are as a real estate agent.

They’re even more powerful when the person reading them knows the person that wrote them.

Why recommendations work

Great recommendations will help you:

Build a powerful personal brand and construct an enviable reputation,
Show what you do for a living, and how you work as an agent, and
Highlight your strengths and help your cause.

In other words, they’re the perfect social proof.

When a prospective client visits your profile, they’ll be expecting to read recommendations from satisfied customers and clients, so don’t let them down!

Recommendations that work

Unlike humans, recommendations aren’t created equal. There are good ones, and not so good ones. The best recommendations are:

Specific – they’re laser-focused on a role or particular job, and they
Tell a story of a business relationship through words and emotions.

Bad recommendations are devoid of specifics, and full of platitutes that add little value to a LinkedIn profile.

How to obtain great quality recommendations

One of the most common newbie mistakes on LinkedIn is to ask too many people for recommendations.

Some agents, in a rush to complete their profile, use the “request recommendations function” to ask people who are barely familiar with their work for a reference. The few they receive add little or no value and reduce the impact gained from any good quality references displayed on their profile.

When it comes to LinkedIn recommendations, think quality, not quantity.

So what’s the best way to get LinkedIn recommendations?

Here’s a few tips:

Ask people who know your work really well.
Before sending a LinkedIn request, get on the phone! Let the person know why you want a recommendation, and why it’s important.
While on the phone, you may want to outline some of the specifics you’d like to see in the recommendation – these might include mentioning a great auction result or a clever piece of marketing that unearthed that unexpected buyer.
It’s not uncommon to offer to write a draft of the recommendation.
When you finally get around to sending the request for endorsement, take the time to delete the generic text that LinkedIn provides – write something personal in its place. By taking that little extra time, you’ll let the other person know how important a quality recommendation is to you.
Ask a range of people, not just clients. You might ask colleagues, partners, and suppliers – this will give prospective clients and employees a far more balanced picture of just who you are and what you’re like to work with.

Smart agents are always on the lookout for recommendations – and they don’t always come from LinkedIn. If a client send you an email thanking you for a job well done, check if they’re on LinkedIn. If they are, ask them to post it as an endorsement for your current role.

Delete the default text and write a custom request for recommendation.

The power of giving

The best recommendations you’ll ever receive will most likely come from someone returning the favour, after you’ve written them a powerful endorsement.

So while asking for recommendations works, the ultimate weapon is to give them!

Giving a recommendation that is:

glowing,
relevant, and
specific

will help make you a key influencer in their network. After all, your recommendation could be the very thing that helps someone land a good job or lucrative contract.

Be sure to focus on helping the other person get more business.

Manage your recommendations

Once you’ve received several recommendations for a role, it’s smart to surface only the best of them on your profile.

Some people choose to leave all recommendations visible, but this can lead to a prospective client missing the best and most powerful.

Using the ‘received recommendations’ tab, carefully remove those recommendations that don’t help to convey your personal brand story. If it doesn’t highlight your key strengths, remove it! (You can always add it back in later if you change your mind.)

LinkedIn recommendations are a key tool to making your LinkedIn profile tell a powerful brand story.

If you’ve followed my advice about building a solid foundation, building a profile that sells, optimising your profile to get found, and using recommendations throughout this series – congratulations!

You have a complete, carefully crafted LinkedIn profile that’s working for you by presenting a strong representation of your personal brand.

How to Build a Powerful Personal Brand Using LinkedIn: Optimise Your Profile to Get Found

Posted on April 12, 2012 by Peter Fletcher

Welcome to Part 3 of How to build a powerful personal brand using LinkedIn.

To network effectively on LinkedIn, you need to be easy to find.

We’ve already discovered how keywords can make your profile more likely to appear in search results, but there’s a few other things you can do to optimise your profile so you get found by even more people.

1. Make your profile visible to everyone

On LinkedIn, you have a number of profile options: profiles can be invisible, visible to everyone, or partially visible.

If you want to make the maximum use of LinkedIn for networking, I suggest making your entire profile visible to everyone, publicly – that will maximise your exposure.

2. Customise your public profile link

Every LinkedIn profile comes with a link (or URL) that others can use to get to your profile. When you first sign up to LinkedIn, that link will consist of a lot of letters and numbers.

Make it cleaner by customising the link to include your full name. Go to Edit Profile, click ‘Edit’ next to the Public Profile section, and click ‘Customise your public profile URL’.

Once you’ve got a custom link, you can share it on:

Your business cards,
Your website,
Property catalouges,
Home open brochures, and
Your email signature.

3. Customise ‘Websites’

On LinkedIn you can have a maximum of 3 websites, and it makes a lot of sense to customise these links.

To customise your websites:

Go to Edit Profile
Next to the ‘Websites’ section of your profile, click ‘Edit’
Enter the URLs of up to three websites.
Instead of choosing ‘Personal website’ or ‘Company website’ as the website type, choose the ‘other’ option so that you can type in a custom description for the site: for example, ‘Peter’s Real Estate Blog’.

Your newly-customised ‘websites’ section will almost certainly lead to traffic back to your site – which could mean new prospects and new leads. It will also help Google’s search robots get a better understanding of what your website is all about.

4. Link to your Twitter

Are you on Twitter? Link your profile to your Twitter account.

To add an account, click on Edit Profile, click ‘Edit’ next to the Twitter sections, and add one or more Twitter accounts.

There are a couple of benefits of linking your LinkedIn and Twitter profiles:

You can post your tweets as LinkedIn statuses automatically, and
Your professional contacts can easily find your Twitter profile.

Well done, you’re now super-connected and easy to find! In the next blog post, I’ll teach you how to build your credibility by giving and receiving LinkedIn recommendations.

3 Ways to Promote Your Real Estate Business on Facebook

Posted on April 3, 2012 by Peter Fletcher

With the average Australian spending over 5 hours on Facebook every month, Facebook is a powerful way for people in real estate to meet prospective clients.

The real estate agents who get the most out of their Facebook business pages tend to be the ones who:

make their details readily available,
showcase their local knowledge by sharing info, and
become known as credible and friendly by engaging in conversation.

Here’s three fundamental steps to take if you want to make the most of a Facebook business page:

1. Populate your profile

Once you’ve created a Facebook business page, the first step is to populate the page with vital details about yourself. Be sure to include:

Contact details,
A logo or picture of yourself,
A cover photo, and
An ‘About’ summary of what you do and how you help your clients.

The great thing about Facebook is that users know exactly where to look for this information – you just need to make sure it’s there.

2. Share useful content

Give people a reason to ‘like’ you (and keep liking you) by regularly sharing content that prospective clients will find useful. Sharing content like:

local news, and
links to real estate ‘How to‘ guides for buyers and sellers

can help you establish yourself as a reliable figure – whether you’ve written the content or not. In fact, sharing links to other people’s real estate websites is a great way to show you’re genuinely being helpful.

3. Engage in conversation

Sharing useful content is great, but don’t forget the most powerful aspect of social media: the social! That means you should:

Ask questions to promote conversation,
Engage in conversation on other people’s posts, and
Answer any questions your likers post on your wall.

Engaging in conversation is a great way to form relationships with potential clients – and Facebook is a great way to do this!

Have these methods worked for you? What other ways are there to promote yourself on Facebook?

Facebook image by Owen W Brown via Flickr.

How to Build a Powerful Personal Brand Using LinkedIn: Build a Profile that Sells

Posted on April 3, 2012 by Peter Fletcher

This is a Part 2 in a series of blog posts on building a powerful personal brand using LinkedIn. Read Part 1: Building a Solid Foundation.

If you’re on LinkedIn, you no doubt want to be found by other professionals in your field.

The first step in building a profile that comes up in search results it to decide how you want to be found. What keywords you want to be known for?

Ask yourself:

How do you want to be found?
What geographical area do you work in?
What are your specialities?

Then decide on a few keywords (2-4) that summarise your answers.

Once you’ve decided on these all-important keywords, you can start loading them into your profile – making it easier for other people to find you when they search for those keywords on LinkedIn.

The first thing you’ll want to do with those keywords is:

1. Draw people in with a headline

A good headline is your first strike point to be found on a LinkedIn search.

For a great headline:

Limit it to 120 characters,
Include your your keywords in the front end of the headline,
Make it compelling, and
Remember that it’s more than just your job title.

By that last point, I mean that the headline is what you do, not what you’re called. So instead of writing ‘Sales consultant at Company X’, you may write ‘Real estate sales consultant specialising in Maddington’.

See Pam Herron‘s profile for a great example:

Note that the term ‘real estate agent’ (a relevant keyword) is right at the front of her headline, and she also includes the suburbs in which she works.

2. Add your skills and expertise

Adding your skills and expertise will help you get found in search.

Remember your 2-4 keywords, and include them!

3. Review your summary

We’ve already done some work on your LinkedIn summary in Building a Solid Foundation. Now, take the opportunity to go back and ask yourself:

Does my summary include the keywords I want to be known for?

If not, tweak your summary to include them.

Now that you’ve optimised your profile with keywords, you’re much more likely to be found in search. However, there’s still work to be done! The next part in this series will help you to continue to optimise your profile to get found.

Can Sellers Help Agents Market Homes?

Posted on April 2, 2012 by Emily Murphy

Should sellers be able to market their own property?

An article on the Sold Magazine website over the weekend suggested that maybe they should.

Real estate agent Steve Basin, creator of the site iPostcodes.com.au, says there may be a gap in most agents’ advertising – a gap that can only be filled by sharing the seller’s perspective of the home.

“Agents can genuinely add value to their service. They will do their professional work with the vendor, but now with iPostcodes the homeowner can post fun and relevant facts about their home that no one but them would think to share. Why? Because people purchase a home for lifestyle not only shelter. We buy with emotion.” – Steve Basin

Despite being primarily promotional, the Sold Magazine article caught my attention because this isn’t the first time we’ve heard this idea – remember when a Melbourne home owner used social media to sell his home? He managed to auction it well above his reserve, and above market rate, by sharing all his favourite things about the property and its location.

Similarly, iPostcodes aims to make sharing inside info easy for sellers, who can add their knowledge and photos to online listings:

Yes, this video downplays the very important role of real estate agents. Further, iPostcodes probably doesn’t pose a serious threat to realestate.com.au and the other leading property portals.

But the existence of this site, coupled with other selling success stories, suggests that increased seller input may be a valuable, and increasingly prominent, way of marketing property.

What do you think – should sellers take a bigger role in marketing their home?

Photo by Casey Serin via Flickr.

How to Build a Powerful Personal Brand Using LinkedIn: Building a Solid Foundation

Posted on March 20, 2012 by Peter Fletcher

Having been involved with the real estate industry for 27 years, in many different roles including principal, manager, licensee and sales rep, I understand how important it is for agents to remain competitive.

In this four part series, I’m going to show you how you can use LinkedIn to get a competitive edge by connecting with other professionals – and to not only connect with them, but to develop relationships that are both enjoyable and mutually profitable. But first, you may be wondering:

Why use LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is a valuable social networking tool for real estate agents. It’s valuable because:

It gives you access to some truly exciting, valuable, business opportunities – opportunities that just weren’t available when I started my real estate career.
It gives you access to over 135 million LinkedIn users across the globe. That’s a fantastic way to extend your real life network!
And wonderfully: LinkedIn (unlike Facebook which can be on the trivial side) is targeted to business professionals. On LinkedIn, you’re talking with like-minded people.

Because of these factors, LinkedIn offers some important practical benefits. Notably:

LinkedIn is a recruiting opportunity. Countless principals and real estate agents across the world are now using LinkedIn to reach out and recruit top flight sales people, top flight administrative and support staff, and great property managers.
LinkedIn is also a fantastic way of building your credibility and becoming known as the expert in your marketing niche.

Creating a killer LinkedIn profile

The benefits of a completed and comprehensive LinkedIn profile are many:

It gives you a far greater chance for internet marketing success.
It showcases your:

talents,
experience, and
expertise.

It makes you look like a LinkedIn pro. A nicely completed profile will make you look professional, and it will change the shape of your personal brand.
It also gives you a great introduction to people that are trying to reach and and do business with you.

To build a solid foundation for a great LinkedIn profile, you’ll need to:

Add a professional image,
Share your job experience,
Summarise yourself, and
Add Interests, Groups and Associations.

I’ll go through each of these steps in detail below.

1. Add a professional image

Your first task in developing a professional LinkedIn profile is to add a professional image. Your profile image is important – without it, your online self is quite literally faceless.

Ensure you:

Make it recent. Your photo shouldn’t be more than three years old.
Make it head and shoulders only. Don’t have a photo with your face so far away that people can’t recognise you, but don’t be so close you’re staring down the camera, either.
Keep it real – no need for airbrushing here! Both this and my first point are intended to ensure you present an accurate and approachable version of yourself.
Be professional, yet friendly. A lot of agents are now trying to avoid the clichéd photo of a ‘smiling assassin’ with the left shoulder forward, white shirt, and red tie – in favour of something slightly more creative such as a photo of them with a favourite landmark.

Change your profile image by going to Edit Profile > Edit Photo

2. Share your job experience

A LinkedIn profile can be likened to an online resume – so show potential contacts your experience.

Ensure you:

List your current position,
Add past positions – it’s a great way to be found by your colleagues from the past, and
Describe what you did in each position, in as much detail as you can. In this case, more is more.

To alter your job experience, scroll down to the 'Experience' section of the Edit Profile page

3. Summarise yourself

The summary is an important part of any LinkedIn profile. By all means, avoid the stale third person bio. My tips:

Write in first person, but do it in a way without using lots of ‘I’s and ‘me’s.
Simply describe: Who you are, and what you can do for other people.
Imagine the reader is asking you “So, what is it that you can do for me?”.

But avoid the sales pitch! This is not the place to be asking people if they want a free market appraisal. This is a place where you consider “How is it that I can enrich another person’s life; how is it that I can help them enjoy living in their suburb even more?”.

To edit your summary, visit Edit Profile and click Edit next to your Summary section

4. Add Interests, Groups, and Associations

Groups and associations are a particularly good way for LinkedIn to help you connect with other people.

These certainly don’t have to be work-related – If you’re a member of one of your local institutes, add that, but if you’re a proud member of the Pigeon-Racing Club of Uluru, add that too.

To add your Interests, Groups, and Associations, edit your Additional Information section

Have you completed all four steps? Congratulations, you’re well on your way to having a killer LinkedIn profile!

In the next blog post, I’m going to show you how to really get your profile working for you using keywords.

How to Start Your Real Estate Blog with WordPress

Posted on February 27, 2012 by Emily Murphy

Since we’ve started running Digital Marketing Meetups, I’ve met a number of people in real estate who are eager to start blogging. And no wonder – writing and sharing insightful content on a blog is a great way to improve your credibility, and to improve your reputation as an expert in your area or speciality.

The good news is, it’s easy to get your blog started!

To do so, I recommend using WordPress. WordPress is blogging software – and in my opinion, it’s the best blogging software because it strikes a perfect balance between being highly customisable but also easy to use. In the following article, I’ll run you through how to set up a free WordPress blog using WordPress.com.

(Note: This article focuses on WordPress.com blogs, not self-hosted WordPress sites with software from WordPress.org. WordPress.org sites are a great idea if you don’t want ads, you want your blog to be part of your current website, and you’re prepared to pay hosting fees – but WordPress.com blogs are free and easier to set up, so I’ll be focusing on them for now.)

Step 1: Make an account

It’s easy to get started. Visit WordPress.com and click ‘Get started here‘.

Now, choose a blog address. This will be the address people type in to the browser bar to go to your site, so choose an address that is relevant. Good choices are your full name, or something to do with your area – for example, prominent Phoenix blogger Jay Thompson‘s address is phoenixrealestateguy.com.

At this point you can choose to purchase a .me, .com, .net, or .org address – but if you stick with the .wordpress.com address it’s always possible to purchase a different domain name later.

Once you’ve chosen a blog address, choose a username and password and hit ‘Create Blog‘.

After you confirm your account and log into your blog, give your blog a name and tagline under Settings > General. It’s also a good idea to fill out your profile by clicking your name > Edit My Profile.

Note: Now that you have a blog and an account, you have access to two new areas: your blog (yourblogname.wordpress.com), and the admin area (yourblogname.wordpress.com/wp-admin). Only you have access to the admin area, and this is where you’ll make all the changes and add new blog posts.

Step 2: Customise the appearance of your blog

WordPress allows you to completely change the look of your blog by changing the theme. You can change your blog’s theme under Appearance > Themes. Browse through the many themes there – both free and paid themes – and choose one that suits your purpose. Many themes allow you to change the colours and header image – you can check which ones let you customise various elements by clicking Details and looking for tags such as ‘custom-header’ or ‘yellow’, if you’re looking for a yellow theme.

Once you’ve chosen and installed the theme you like, you can play around with customising that theme if it has theme options. To do this, return to Appearance > Themes and and investigate the options the theme gives you – different themes allow you to change different elements. The theme ‘Fresh and Clean‘, for example, allows you to change the background or the header – other themes may have just one button that reads ‘theme options’, and others may have no options at all.

You can customise your blog’s appearance even more with widgets. Widgets are simply little pieces of functionality that you can choose to include in your blog’s sidebar or footer (widget areas). To add or change widgets, visit Appearance > Widgets and drag and drop the widgets you want into a widget area.

Example: Say that I want to add an image to my sidebar. I go to Appearance > Widgets, and find the Image widget under Available widgets. I then drag that image to the ‘Sidebar’ widget area and drop it in. Fill out the widget title (this is optional), the image URL, and any other required details, and click save. That image will now appear in your blog’s sidebar.

Widgets can be used to add all kinds of things to your sidebar or footer – including images, links, a bio, or a calendar of your posts.

Creating a page: You may want to add extra pages (not blog posts) to your blog – for example, and ‘About me’ page, or a ‘Featured listing’ page – click Pages > Add new. Adding content to this page is done in a similar way to writing a post (see step 3).

Step 3: Write your first blog post

To create a new blog post, go to Posts > Add new.

Enter a title for your blog post (see CopyBlogger’s How to Write Magnetic Headlines). WordPress will automatically insert this title into the permalink (web address) for your new post, or you can click the ‘Edit’ button to write your own address.

Next, write your blog post! Much like using Microsoft Word, you can edit the text you write in all the standard ways – highlighting text to make bold or italic, adding bullet points, or indenting paragraphs.

To add an image (or video, or sound file), click the small camera/musicnote icon above the main text box, next to the text ‘Upload/Insert’. A box will pop-up allowing you to ‘select files’ from your computer. Once you’ve chosen the image and uploaded to WordPress, add a title and other (optional) details, and ‘Insert into Post’.

Once you’re done writing, you should give your post a category and some tags. Both categories and tags are ways of organising your posts – posts usually have just one category and quite a few tags. For example, this post How to Start Your Real Estate Blog with WordPress, is under the category ‘Marketing’ and has the tags ‘wordpress’, ‘digital marketing’, and ‘blogging’. These categories and tags will appear above or below your posts and will help people find related posts.

Using the ‘Publish’ panel to the right, you can now save your draft, or release it into the world by hitting ‘Publish’!

To edit this post later, go to Posts > All posts, and click ‘Edit’ under the post you’d like to edit.

Congratulations – you’ve created a WordPress blog and written your first blog post! Keep the original content flowing, and work on building a following through social media. Here’s a couple of tips:

Don’t blog your listings. Have a page on your website that features your listings if it suits, but the blog posts themselves should have more ‘meaty’ content. Ask yourself: what will people, even those who aren’t looking for a home right now, find useful or interesting to read about? Try writing about lessons you’ve learned through your personal experiences (eg. tips for home open inspections)
Stuck for something to write about? Jot down a list of questions (silly or not) that clients have asked you. Each of those questions, and your detailed answer, can be a blog post of its own.

Happy blogging!

Were these instructions clear enough? If you need more help, leave your questions in the comments, tweet us @ressetts, or come along to our next Digital Marketing Workshop.

PS. I recommend having a clear blogging plan or goal. Jay Thompson has compiled a list of WordPress best practices for real estate websites:

WordCamp Phoenix 2012

View more presentations from Jay Thompson

Photo by Titanas via Flickr.

Why Content Marketing is Essential in Real Estate

Posted on February 13, 2012 by Emily Murphy

Putting yourself (or your company) out there on the web is important. Every business, and every real estate agent, needs to have the following information readily available online:

Your name, and photo,
Your contact details – phone, email etc,
Who you work for, and where the business is located (embedding a Google map is great),
What service you offer, and
Your listings, if you’re a sales rep.

Without this bare minimum, you do not exist as far as web users are concerned.

However, this information is the equivalent of a listing in the local directory – it allows people searching for you to find you, but it doesn’t prompt them to look for you in the first place. And every agent has their listings available. To stand out, you need to be doing more – you need to be using content to market yourself.

Content marketing – making content and putting it out there on the web, with some degree of strategy – is the best way to give people a deep understanding of what you do, and what you know. Content marketing can mean being active on social media channels, and creating unique articles for your blog. Content marketing means posting more than just “good morning, how are you?” - it means contributing content of value to potential clients and contacts.

Content marketing can help you improve business because:

Producing content that helps others (eg. “How to…” articles) shows potential clients and others in your field that you know your stuff,
Documenting your experiences online (ie. stories and case studies) proves that you’re experienced in your field and helps readers to relate to you as a person, and
Sharing other people’s content suggests connection between you and other people, and shows that you’re not just in it for yourself.

And because the content you’ve created is unique to you, readers will know that it’s you specifically that they need to hire to take advantage of that knowledge and those experiences. Real estate blogger Ardell DellaLoggia claims to have a steady flow of “blog-clients” who want her to represent them in the process of buying a home after becoming familiar with her blog.

So how do I know content marketing is the way to go? Jeff Bullas recently posted a great infographic showing how “everyone”, from small businesses to giants like Coca Cola and Google, are embracing content creation and sharing as a valuable marketing strategy.

(See the full infographic in Jeff Bullas’ blog post.)

Don’t underestimate content marketing as a way to get yourself known and respected.

How to Build Real Connections on Twitter

Posted on February 9, 2012 by Emily Murphy

Twitter’s a great medium for connecting with other people in the industry and for broadcasting to potential clients.

It’s a relatively new communication tool for many, and I would argue that a lot of people are still experimenting with how best to use it. While talking about Twitter with other social media users lately, I’ve ended up hearing a bit about what people do and don’t like about other Twitter users – and a few common peeves keep coming up. People just don’t warm to accounts that do things like:

Post useless, self promotional content
Ignore @replies and @mentions
Post only automated messages with a link back to the original Facebook post

Why do YOU think Aubergine Homes are the best agent in sproutsdale? We think its... fb.me/Z4fdPG

What not to tweet!

Instead, the best Twitter users come across as real people with valuable information to share. The key to forging strong connections on Twitter is not to repeatedly send out links to your own content and listings, but to engage with other real people.

Here’s a couple of key ways to be genuinely helpful to other Twitter users:

1. Share content of value.

It’s fine to have a self-promotion strategy for social media, but a great question to have in mind while using social networks is How can this information help other people? That’s why so many Twitter users share content that they found useful (even when it doesn’t directly promote them). By providing value to others, you’re benefiting by boosting your own credibility.

2. Engage in conversation.

In an interview last week, real estate agent Joe Mucci said this about succeeding in real estate:

“Relationship is probably the most important. People knowing who you are and what you stand for and you the agent knowing who your customers are.”

This is equally as true online! And building relationships require conversations. When you see a tweet that you could make an intelligent/funny/useful response to, or when someone mentions you, don’t hesitate to reply. Talking to other people is really the only way to make sincere connections.

Being successful is often about gaining trust and developing strong social networks. Those users who share content of value to others and engage in conversation, rather than treating Twitter as just a broadcasting tool, are the ones who come across as genuine individuals – not as marketing robots.

Image by David Carillet via Flickr.

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