Leveraging Social Media to Grow Your Home Staging Business

After months of dabbling in social media and learning about it, the light bulb finally starting to shine because it started to make sense.  It’s time consuming and if you don’t know what you’re doing, it could be a huge waste of time, particularly since it’s so vast.

For example, if you are a Stager in Texas, connecting with Realtors in other parts of the country might be fun, but it doesn’t add to your bottom line and keep in mind, it’s not the size of your list (friends, followers or connections), it’s the quality that’s most important.

So first, let’s talk about the top 3 social media sites today - Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. The best thing about all of these is it’s absolutely FREE!  You just need to sign-up for an account.  All of them have tutorials included to help you understand how to maneuver around the platform.

Twitter (my personal favorite) is a micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length which are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have subscribed to them (known as followers). It’s challenging sometimes to get the info out using only 140 characters - that’s when you have to be creative! There is a lot of activity on twitter.  You will find some people on there 24/7 - it’s insane, but because you don’t have to get people’s approval to follow them, you can quickly build a list of followers.  Just keep in mind that there are daily limits to how many people you can follow and there has to be a proportionate balance between the number of people you are following to the number of followers you have.  Twitter has # groups, but it’s not as organized yet as Facebook & LinkedIn.  Check out #real estate, #realtor and #homestaging.  You can do searches for people on twitter, but a better resource is twellow and search.twitter.com.  You can also use an application like Twhirl or TweetDeck (my personal fave) to make it easier.  If you are on there, follow me at http://www.twitter.com/AliceTChan.  You can send me a DM or direct message which would not show up on the feed - it would be a private message for my eyeballs only!  =)

Facebook is a free-access social networking website which allows users to join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region to connect and interact with other people. People can also add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. There are a lot of Staging and Real Estate groups on Facebook that you can join. In the search bar, just type in “Real Estate Groups” and see which ones are most interesting to you. Once you join, you will have access to the members of that group, but in order for you to see their profiles (unless they make their profiles public to everyone), you will have to invite them to be your friend.  My recommendation is to look for people who are specifically in your area.  You can even do a profile search and plug in specific criteria such as city, state, zip code and in their work info field, try different words like “Real Estate” or “Realtor” or “Agent” and see who comes up.  If you’re on Facebook, add me as a friend at http://profile.to/alicetchan/

LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking site mainly used for professional networking. There are a lot of real estate professionals on LinkedIn, but my impression is that members are not accessing their accounts as frequently as those on Twitter and Facebook. Just like Facebook, there are groups that you can join and from there, you can invite people to join your network.  LinkedIn is definitely not as exciting as the other two platforms, but is more professional and can be very valuable.  If you’re on LinkedIn, go ahead and send me an invitation to connect at http://www.linkedin.com/in/alicetchan.

TIME SAVING TIP: Link your Facebook and LinkedIn accounts to Twitter so that when you send an update, it automatically sends it to the other two accounts.  Good options are friendfeed or ping.fm.

Have fun and try not to get too sucked into the twitterverse or social media cyberspace.  It can definitely be addictive.

I would love your feedback so please post your comments at http://AliceTChan.com.