Real Estate Marketing & Beyond
Real estate brands looking to build their reputation online could do well to understand the difference between the concepts of “social listening” and “social monitoring”.
Data from social analytics firm Netbase shows that 42 percent of complaints against businesses by U.S. consumers are done via social media or review websites. Out of those customers, 82 percent says they have stopped doing business with a company due to a lack of response.
That’s where social monitoring is useful – it means monitoring for such complaints and responding to them in a timely manner. Customer engagement is an essential practice after all.
Social listening is a different game, however. While social monitoring involves immediate engagement and interactions, social listening is a much broader view that involves participation in conversations not immediately related to your brand. Social listening allows brands to collect more data on their target audience, including things such as what they’re saying, doing, talking about and taking an interest in.
Social listening will help you find out who drives conversations happening on social media, blogs, and message boards. These are social influencers. Once you see who is driving certain conversations, you can decide whether it makes sense to engage with them—and if it makes sense, create partnerships. Examples might include a home flipper with a popular blog, a fellow real estate professional with a large Twitter following, or a local business in your community that is active on Facebook. It will also help to identify effective keywords and hashtags, especially on Twitter and Instagram, which are highly search-based and hashtag-driven. You’ll soon understand what type of content draws in your target audience.
Integrate social listening data with the analytics collected from your email marketing and other digital campaigns for a better picture of your clients’ preferences. From there, brokers and agents can run more meaningful social media accounts and be more impactful in their overall communications.
