Why You Absolutely Must Have A Social Media Strategy as a Real Estate Agent

I was reading Joel Burslem’s “The Death of the Real Estate Blog” post the other day and one of the comments stood out like a sore thumb to me. It was a comment left by Jay Thompson, also known as the Phoenix Real Estate Guy, talking about the differences between blogging a few years ago and today and the SEO implications of those differences. Here’s the comment (it’s somewhat long, but I encourage you to read the whole thing):

Speaking of linkage, here’s something I’ve been pondering a lot lately.

“Back in the day”, say as little as a year ago, I could write a “linkworthy” post on TPREG and almost guarantee you that 10 or 20 real estate blogs would link to it. That’s why my blog enjoys the power of 50 – 80K backlinks (depending on whose numbers you believe). And Google loves backlinks.

Today, I’m lucky to get one or two. My most recent article on deleting my ActiveRain posts is a perfect example. A year ago, dozens of people would have linked to that. Today, two have, and one did it with a nofollow link.

But that post did get 48 Facebook “likes” and 23 retweets. 767 people visited that post yesterday.

But only two people linked to it.

This is fascinating to me. There is no question that FB and twitter are changing how people “vote” for a blog post.

And this has to have SEO implications.

But Heather makes a great point. A good blog can be far “meatier” than a Facebook post, and certainly more than a Tweet. Case in point, on July 4th, over 15,000 people viewed my blog post on where to see fireworks in the Phoenix area. Several thousand more viewed it in the days leading up to July 4.

I don’t think there is anything I could have done on Facebook that would come remotely close to generating that level of traffic (all of which by its nature was very localized traffic). People still go to Google to find information (like where fireworks shows are, or where to search for homes online). They don’t go to Facebook for this kind of information.

At least not yet.

I’m lucky in that I started my blog almost five years ago. I was able to garner 70Kish backlinks and build up some Google “authority”. Doing that now from a cold start? Could be problematic…

The way people find content online is not changing – by and large, they are still going to Google. But at some point in the next few years, that may change. I agree with Jay that Facebook and Twitter are absolutely changing the way that people vote for content online — “Likes” and retweets are rapidly becoming the new “links” (votes) of the web. I’ve certainly noticed the exact same thing over the past year with my own blogging activity on my personal blog and Geek Estate Blog; it is much harder to get a link now than it was a year or two ago. Bloggers still link to other blogs, but not nearly as often. More often, they retweet a link or “Like” a piece of content on Facebook rather than write a blog post about it with a link back to the source. As Jay states, this has serious SEO implications since links have been the single most important factor for determining relevance of a particular piece of content since Google introduced the concept of Page Rank about a decade ago.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still a huge proponent of blogging as a marketing and client acquisition strategy — but I believe an effective social media strategy may end up being the most important component to Search Engine Optimization in the coming years. Those that figure out how to optimize their content to attract the new “votes” of the web will have a leg up in the search game as Google and other search engines begin to factor that data into their algorithms.

And of course, YouReach Media is all about teaching you an efficient and effective social media strategy — you can learn more about our next Mobile Social Media course that begins September 1st here (or you can sign up here).

Do you have a social media strategy in place yet?