Real Estate Marketing & Beyond
As a tool for helping market your real estate business, social media is one of the strongest tools there is. However, when most people think "social media", their thoughts turn to platforms like Facebook and Twitter, ignoring the potential of Google+, an almost criminally overlooked social media platform that just happens to be one of the strongest tools in any company's online marketing toolbox.
The primary goal of any real estate marketing strategy is to ensure your business attracts new clients through its online presence. While you can budget advertising dollars for this, it often turns out that the most effective way to drive new business is through more organic means, such making your real estate website easier for search engines to find it. This is where Google+ comes in.
Google's so-called "failed" attempt at a social media platform might get a lot of flack, but the truth is that it's alive and kicking -- and because of its integration with Google's other tools like Maps and its search engine functionality, businesses that make use of Google+ often have advantages when it comes to showing up in search listings.
Maintaining a professional presence on Google+ has a number of advantages, chief among those being that posting regular content on the platform has a direct positive effect on how Google ranks that content in web searches. This means that blog posts and other content that you host on your Google+ profile will naturally have better exposure than similar content hosted on other sites, which has the potential to drive more interest in your real estate business.
Getting preferential treatment for your content by using Google+ to post it isn't the only advantage, though. The simple act of filling out your Google+ profile in a full and comprehensive manner provides crucial data for Google's search engine, which means that it helps location-specific searches. People looking for "real estate agencies in Pasadena" in either Google Search of Google Maps will find your Google+ profile near the top of the heap if you fill out your agency's location properly.
Using Google+ as part of your social media strategy is an absolute must in this day and age. The search engine's social platform has more than 440 million users as of last count, and while that's considerably smaller compared to Facebook, it's still a strong second place. Thanks to the way Google prioritizes its content, though, it packs a major punch for its relatively diminutive size, making it a real competitor when it comes to marketing strategy tools.
That being said, Google+ is just one facet of your marketing strategy -- a single part of a much bigger whole. While nobody has hauled Google's CEO into Washington, DC to be questioned by US senators about membership data breaches, Facebook and other social media sites will continue to be a strong presence in most people's lives, so plan your marketing accordingly!
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