All this theory I’ve been learning about Social Media – well it works!
As a small business owner of a real estate company in provincial New Zealand we had been dabbling with Social Media. We had utilised a couple of Social Media consultants to give us some pointers and decided to jump on board by establishing a presence on Facebook.
Like most businesses, to stay in the competition you have to keep ahead and differentiate yourself in the market. In real estate this is fairly difficult to do as everyone pretty much offers a similar service.
We created our page and then got our wonderful admin support team to start thinking about how to make this work. Knowing the importance of keeping regular and building a “Like” database of people we can network with, we started posting community based information along with links to house listings and latest promotions or advertising we were undertaking.
Facebook Go marketing also contacted us inviting us to join a programme designed to educate us in ad promotion and better utilisation of Facebook marketing. We started some minimal paid advertising and could see some increase in traffic on our Facebook page and our Website.
From here the admin girls took over…..they have come up with awesome ideas, creative posts and were getting really excited about connecting with our customers. One of our team spotted a great Easter promotion being run by another real estate company in Australia and suggested we give it a go. What a huge success, we have increased our “Like” base by over 300 per week, the comments and positive feedback from customers has been amazing and we have even got some ideas about our next marketing promotion.
Our Sales Agents are also starting to see how excited the team are about this and are keen to get involved. Someone the other day commented “Not many places you come to work and they want you on Facebook telling everyone what you are doing!”
All in all, over the last couple of months the potential benefits of Social Media for us are:
- building some brand loyalty and community buy-in
- expanding our customer reach
- offering new marketing options for our customers
- developing our staff and identifying skills we didn’t know existed
- and hopefully positioning our business for the future.
Excuse my little detour from my study blogs but I really wanted to share. You know it hasn’t cost much but the pay-back is potentially huge. Maybe you have a story too or maybe this will encourage you to have a go, either way I’m sold!
Social Media for Business 