Targeting Local Social Media Followers

Social media is a powerful tool that some don’t quite utilize correctly, or at least that’s what I often see within the real estate industry. Both real estate agents and mortgage brokers are, for the most part, targeting local clients and social media has made that nearly too easy these days. I want to show you folks a few tricks and tips to target local followers and make your social media marketing experience worth the while. I also wanted to bring something fresh to the table as this is my first post on Wanna Network.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with a lot of great agents and mortgage brokers in North America, which has lead to a lot of experimenting. Since Google and Bing incorporate social media participation in their algorithms, it’s a route you should no longer ignore. I also like to remind businesses to not keep all their eggs in one basket, and by that I mean don’t trust your business to Google alone. I’ve seen too many people get burned by this mantra, which leads not only to terrible sales, but can effect your mental health and well being.

Lastly, before I end up writing too much and boring you all prior to getting into the goods, I want to mention branding. Not only is branding yourself the key to online and offline marketing success, it also helps build authority with the search engines, something that is key to being trusted by Google. Being great at social media will lead to a reputation that won’t do you wrong! I’ve seen agents get followers from ReTweets, through great blog content and links from guest blog posts and interviews. If you’re the most aggressive in your geographical area, good chances are that your competitors are going to have a very hard time catching up. Don’t let them steal your thunder!

Getting Local With Twitter

I’ll start with Twitter because most agents we work with are very reluctant to get things going on this social platform. I will agree and admit that it can be a huge waste of time, but only if you’re catching up on the latest celebrity gossip. Luckily for you and I, Twitter makes people declare their location which is something we’ll definitely take advantage of! I’m going to show you just two methods, but that should be enough to get the juices of creativity flowing and hopefully inspire your own methods.

The reason I like getting our clients involved with Twitter is for the networking opportunities. We like to build quality links, and making connections in your industry is the best (and most authoritative) way of doing this. ReTweeting other local and influential users will get you noticed and could lead to, at the very least, a ReTweet back. More often than not, we get our clients guest blogging opportunities and links just by being friendly. Relationships like these are hard for your competitors to copy. Lastly, but not even close to least, your content can easily rank in Google’s top 10 for your followers, so long as they’re logged into Google. If you have thousands of followers, that could potentially lead to a lot of very targeted business!

Finding Local Twitter Users With WeFollow.com:

Wefollow is essentially a Twitter directory, and is constantly a very useful resource for myself and my team. The directory is absolutely beaming with Twitter users, but best of all, they can be defined by location and influence. I highly recommend signing into Twitter and then adding yourself to the directory. This should help attract local users to follow you, and as a bonus you’ll get a link to your website and Twitter account via your WeFollow profile. After you’ve done this, go check out the listings for people in your city and from there you can start following people. It’s going to be a slow start, but you’ll notice follow backs at a decent rate for as long as you are active on Twitter.

Using Google To Find Local Twitter Users:

Google is such a useful tool and its advanced operators allow us to pinpoint the most active local users with ease. This is most likely the best tip of the bunch and I recommend following 100 local people a week… assuming there are enough people in your city. You can also play with this search command, tweak it to go even deeper down the rabbit hole and hopefully come out with a solid Twitter list after a few months of moderately easy work. I’m using the site: command to make sure I’m only getting Twitter profiles and a + “city name” does a darn fine job of getting those locals into the search index. You can see in the picture below my results for Manhattan are quite promising;

This should be all the followers you need to find, but remember, there is a ratio in place with Twitter so don’t go following 2000 people in a couple of days. Instead, slowly add a hundred or two per week. That tactic combined with actually being active, and the followers should start to snowball. Just keep ReTweeting great local content and being involved in a non spammy, positive manor.

Building Your Facebook Page Locally

Facebook is without a doubt the best thing to happen to marketing since Google. Your Facebook Page for your business is a fantastic way to interact with your clients, as well show them a more personal side to your business. It also acts as a news pipeline to your followers at any given time. Once those people are following your page, all your updates will be constantly in their face.. so make sure your updates are awesome! I like to think of these business pages as basically a 2.0 newsletter, and you can mark my words, email as we know it is a dying trend.

Our clients who have been rocking the Facebook approach for more than a year are seeing results that rival organic search traffic. This is due in part to the branding, and of course how they’ve interacted with their followers over that time period. The branding power of doing this has turned out to be a hit for many agents, so hopefully this gets your chops wet. Another positive marketing aspect of having a lot of Facebook Page fans is the ability to “Like” your content, which I mentioned is now apart of both the Google and Bing Algorithms.

Using Contests To Get The Masses To Follow:

My favorite technique is giving away cool free stuff to attract the hoards of local people just waiting to like your page. Everyone loves free stuff, and everyone will follow your page if you have a good enough prize. There are two ways our team usually goes about this, the first of which being the iPad route. We recently helped Realtor Aloha Tony organize and run his iPad giveaway to attract Facebook fans from all over the world and locally as well. An area like Hawaii attracts a lot of non-local buyers, so in this case, it was open to everyone that heard about it. While we simply advised him on how to go about the giveaway (he’s a personal friend) we didn’t go all out and submit the news via Press Release to contest sites or even a few iPad/Apple blogs. Despite that, he seemed to attract a lot of success, followers and my personal favorite… tons of links!

Now that method is all fine and dandy, but there are ways of digging deeper and fishing out locals only with contests. I’m all about building relationships online and so should you be if you’re wanting to stick around for the next 5 years. For our social contests we’ve looked to local restaurants and hotels for partnering opportunities and it has been a major success. The main idea is to find a restaurant and hotel (B&B, resort, etc.) in your local area that has a decently active social media presence. We usually design a “romantic evening” for couples which involves dinner out at the restaurant, and then a night in a nice hotel. You’ll want to steer clear of the seedy motels by the highway please! We want these customers to return. I love this route because it’s not only cheaper than an iPad (usually), it gets the local community involved and will lead to all sorts of goodies including branding, social media followers and hopefully links from the businesses.

The most important thing to remember is to ensure that to be eligible to win the contest involves the potential winners to post something to their wall or at least giving your business’ page a “like”. We like to reach out to local bloggers and Twitter followers to drum up some buzz through the client’s blog. There are also places where you can submit your contest on the web, and of course, I always recommend doing a press release for the extra links and exposure.

Using Your Blog To Drive Facebook Followers:

When it comes to the real estate industry, I tend to find a lot of boring blogs that don’t do very much at all for the owner. Forgive me for sounding harsh, but a blog should be fun and engaging with some business sprinkled in between the good stuff. Your company blog is also a great place to drive Facebook followers from your awesome content. This means make sure your follow buttons are front and center, in the sidebar and you might even a few different calls to action after your content.

The main reason I’m talking about your company blog is because of two things: local long-tail searches and link bait. There is always local news and events going on, making them a great blog topic that you know local people will be searching for. While it might not be the most exciting, and it may not have to do with your line of work, you may attract some ReTweets, links, blog comments and a Facebook follow here and there. This type of content also shows that you are a part of your local community and will give readers the incentive to follow you for future information. You can also use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to find what local people are searching for, and then try and rank a blog post for that long-tail term.

When it comes to using link bait to attract links and social followers, lists still do a damn fine job of getting the task done. There are tons of really cool ways of going about it, and even using a client’s property is an option I’d never throw away. If you ever have a crazy-awesome property for sale, go in and take some unique video and high def pictures. If a celebrity home goes up on the market, there’s another brilliant angle that people seem to spread like a common cold. I’ll throw you folks a bone and list off a few topic ideas that have worked for our clients in the local arena:

- 25 Places to Find Deals In $yourcity
- 10 Fun Facts About $yourcity
- 15 Things To Do In $yourcity When You’re Bored
- The 10 Best Blogs In $yourcity

You may not get the best results at first, but you will start to build your fan-base and the better that gets, the further your link bait will go. I also recommend submitting your content to the usual social bookmarking sites for the extra kick they provide. At the very least, this type of magnetic content will help with the overall authority of your site in general and set the stage for many more link bait pieces in the future.

I know some of you found this post useful, or at least gave you rationalization behind the idea that you need to jump all over your local social media scene. I promise great things will come of it. I also love answering questions, so please keep the conversation going below and I will do my best to answer them all!