During OREA’s recent REGeneration event (held on March 12th), Richard Silver moderated a panel talk called: Mail Drops, Door Knocks and Social Media. Three REALTORS® shared their marketing techniques and weighed old school methods against newer practices. Marketing talk naturally led to discussions on social media, which neatly segued into social media management tools. The real estate professionals agreed that when you’re short on time you want to coordinate and manage your social media as simply as possible.
The following five platforms repeatedly top lists of social media management tools, and two come highly rated by the REGeneration panel.
Jacqueline Pennington, a broker with Remax Rouge River Realty Ltd, uses Hootsuite to coordinate her marketing activities. Hootsuite allows users to execute campaigns across over 35 social media networks including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram – and all from one dashboard. The platform is integrated with both Google Analytics and Facebook Insights which makes measuring your results easy and accurate. It also offers advanced media monitoring tools so you can track any chatter about your property or brand and engage.
Century 21 broker, Einas Makki praised the service offered by If This Then That (IFTTT). While Hootsuite centres on scheduling, IFTTT allows you to connect social media network and automate tasks. For instance, you could automatically post on Facebook each time you publish a blog post. Or when you post a photo to Instagram you could simultaneously save the image to Dropbox. IFTTT plays well with other tools including Hootsuite so you could also use it to enhance another platform.
Buffer also relies on scheduling. You basically fill it up with content then schedule the content to roll out across platforms throughout the day. The scheduling options are the most flexible out there and you can vary up your posting patterns so it’s handy for maintaining a regular social media presence without it looking rigid and automated. Buffer also offers rich analytics so there’s no issues with calculating clicks, reach and engagement.
MavSocial is great for those who like to share more visual content. Studies show photos and videos garner the big clicks online so any tool that encourages this is a must-have. MavSocial offers fast upload of large files, usually the stumbling block for other platforms. Plus, it allows you to securely store and organise your digital assets so you can repurpose and reuse them later. It also offers access to stock photographs from the big image agencies and lets you edit images within the platform. What more could you ask for?
This application offers an assortment of free and paid-for enhancements for social media. There are function boosts for Twitter, WordPress, LinkedIn, Facebook etc. Everything from tracking keywords on Twitter, to scheduling page wall updates on Facebook to creating automatic RSS feeds for your WordPress blog posts. It’s the kind of uber-helpful companion that you set up then forget all about because it’s so intuitive and efficient that it simply gets on with the task.
Leave a Reply