Where Should You Focus Your Efforts?

Blogging, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and ActiveRain - all of these (and now Google+) are being utilized by successful real estate professionals. The question is, how do you know what works best for you and what you should focus your energies into?

Blogging is Essential

For most businesses, blogging is essential in many ways. First of all, it helps with your search rankings as your blog posts may rank well for longer keyword phrases. Plus, if your blog is on the same domain as your website, it will provide new content that Google and other search engine bots will want to visit regularly to index. The more pages you have indexed on search engines, the better!

Blog posts (when written for your audience and about your industry) are also easy to share on any social network. There's only so many times you can ask your Twitter following to check out your website or contact you for information about a new property. Most social media fans will be more interested in your updates when you are sharing informative blog posts over sales related content.

Getting Analytics Into Place

Before you start any measurement of your success on particular networks, you will need to get your analytics into place to measure that data. Google Analytics is free - just setup an account & install the code. Also be sure to track goals such as when a user submits a contact form by using the thank you page the user redirects to as a URL destination goal.

Getting What You Put Into Social Media

When it comes to social media, you will usually get as much out of it as you put in. If you just fill out your profile on a social network but never update, you probably won't have much engagement, traffic, or followers. If you just fill out a profile on one network, then fill out and interact regularly on another network, you will probably find the latter network brings you the best results.

If you want to get a better feel about what network really hits home for your business, you will need to take out some time (maybe a month or two) to put your energy equally into all of the top networks as mentioned at the beginning of the post. Create strong profiles, share somewhat similar updates, engage with other users, and join & participate in groups (as applicable on each network).

3 Questions to Ask About Your Social Media

Once you've invested time into your social networks and start receiving data from your Google Analytics, you're ready to answer the following questions to help determine which social networks are the most valuable to you.

• Which social networks brings the most traffic to your website? Check your Google Analytics traffic sources for the answer.
• Which social networks lead to the most submitted contact forms or other goals as you set up in your Google Analytics?
• Which social networks give you the most engagement on your updates? You may only have half the followers on one network over another, but that network may have the most likes / comments for each of your updates meaning it is the most engaged audience.
• Which social networks show up on the first page of search results when you search for your name or your business name? (Hint: log out of your Google account or perform the search in a browser that you rarely use and isn't logged into any of your accounts for the most standard results.)
• Which social networks do you enjoy using the most?

Once you have answered these questions, you will know which social networks are the best for you and your business. These will be the ones you want to focus the majority of your energy towards as they will give you the best results.

Have you answered these questions about your own social networks? Which ones are the best for you and your business?