Real Estate Marketing & Beyond
Many are aware of LinkedIn but think of it as another version of Facebook that businesses use to prospect for customers. It is a valuable resource for almost every business or professional when properly used. It can be particularly valuable for real estate investors.
Wholesalers can use it to create relationships with rehabbers and other investors. Rehabbers might use it to find the best contractor to fit their needs. It can also be used to find birddogs to hunt down great investment opportunities. Of course, it can be used to find sources of money to fund investments. There are many uses that investors will find with LinkedIn.
Many salespeople think of LinkedIn as just another cold call tool. They just send out pitches to as many people as they can and hope to find a few buyers. That's a very bad approach and you'll have very little if any success with it.
LinkedIn is a social media tool. Don't use it as a cold call tool. A much better approach is to develop online relationships. Establish trust and credibility. Once you do this and establish that what you offer is the best solution to a business need that or she has, you take the business off line to either telephone calls or for investors it might be a face to face meeting if both people are in the same geographical area. But this all begins in a social environment.
One of the most important approaches you need to use is correctly constructing your LinkedIn profile page. Among many other things, this involves carefully writing text that includes keywords and filling in as much information as possible. A high quality photo of you is also important. There is a proven method to building your page that you can learn everything about by following the link at the end of this article.
When you send out an invitation to connect on LinkedIn to a person that you don't already know, he or she will almost certainly looked at your page before making a decision to accept or decline your invitation. Make sure you construct it correctly.
There are way too many benefits about effectively using LinkedIn to cover in this article. But one that is very much worth mentioning is the groups section. I haven't looked recently but there are tens of thousands of groups on many different business subjects. Real estate and real estate investing are hot topics here. You'll find multiple groups that you want to join.
Group pages don't allow you to blatantly advertise although some have back pages where you can post limited marketing materials. Remember, this is a social media site for professionals and businesses. The best approach is joining conversations where you can contribute value added information. This begins by finding conversations here you can provide others with solutions or recommend sources of information to help them out. This not about promoting your business. It's about truly providing value added information. That is how you build trust and establish integrity.
If you really want the details on how to properly and effectively use LinkedIn, I recommend David Cole's book: Go From Zero to Hero on LinkedIn. You'll find the Kindle version by following this link:
Please leave a comment if this article was helpful or if you have a question.
Author bio: Brian Kline has been investing in real estate for more than 30 years and writing about real estate investing for seven years. He also draws upon 25 plus years of business experience including 12 years as a manager at Boeing Aircraft Company. Brian currently lives at Lake Cushman, Washington. A vacation destination, a few short miles from a national forest in the Olympic Mountains with the Pacific Ocean a couple of miles in the opposite direction.
