Use the Social Network of LinkedIn to Your Advantage
Did you know that NAR (National Association of Realtors) publishes the results of their surveys to the very clients that real estate professionals help? Well they do and the surveys always show year after year that well over 45% of business by real estate professionals is done by referral. What this means is that you truly must take advantage of every referral possible. In fact you need to take advantage of referrals for people who you may not know directly.
How do you do that? You do that with social networking. I will be the first to say I do not spend hours a day on facebook or myspace but I do have accounts at both. The one that I have had the longest is linkedin. In fact you can check out my linked in profile 
View Joey Bridges’s profile. So why linked in for me?
My brother and I were Fortune 500 consultants prior to getting into real estate and LinkedIn is the social networking site that the vast majority of our associates were using. It was key that for myself and my brother that we already had people we knew on the system and that our clientele was favorable to it.
What does Linkedin Offer?
This is a site that is definitely geared more toward the business crowd. I am not saying it is stuffy but it is used by many employees and employers in the Fortune 500. This site is truly about the profile, resume, and contacts. Picture sharing is not a big part of this site but networking and connecting for business is what this site is all about.
How to grow your Linkedin Network?
Like many other social networking sites this one is about building your network and building it as fast as possible. There are plenty of ways to build it and you can start with your highschool and college friends first as the system will automatically prompt you to look people up by school. In addition it looks people up by employer so you can get reconnected with past coworkers from previous real estate companies or jobs.
Using Linkedin for real estate testimonials
You know we are bit on testimonials here and Linkedin is a perfect way to get customers to give you a reference as well as build your network. They can give you an endorsement which only helps you attract more people. It is just like in school, people like to associate with the popular people.
Whatever social network you choose make sure you participate and help people. The networks don’t respond well to those who are only asking for business.
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July 25th, 2008 at 5:53 am
[...] Original post by Internet Real Estate Success: [...]
July 25th, 2008 at 4:07 pm
I am using linkedin but I don’t know alot of business people to connect to I would like to get into one of the tech companies relocation HR departments. any ideas.
Sandy
July 25th, 2008 at 4:45 pm
Added. Nice work on this one. Btw, my blog is dofollow, stop by and grab a link. Bompa
July 25th, 2008 at 4:46 pm
Sandy,
Do you know 1 person in the company or companies that you want to be in?
If you don’t check out the blogs that they might visit in online such as technology blogs and start networking there.
Also in the activities that you do there are probably people to network with on linked in if you do hiking, or biking, etc.
–Joey
July 25th, 2008 at 4:58 pm
Bompa
Nice point on making your blog a dofollow. That is a great way to reward posters.
-Joey
July 25th, 2008 at 5:38 pm
There are plenty of other websites around that use social networking. There are even entire websites that are being built around the concept of social networking. It is going to be critical for real estate professionals to be involed in some of these sites to be where the buyers and sellers are going first.
We wrote another post on Social Networking sites such as BeatYouThere.com that you may want to check out.
July 26th, 2008 at 3:59 pm
A way that you can really grow your contacts on the networks like LinkedIn, FaceBook, Plaxo and ohers is to e-mail your past clients that you are now on them. It gives you a great touch point and then you may often seen new opportunities of people to contact
July 28th, 2008 at 7:45 am
[...] Use the Social Network of LinkedIn to Your Advantage [...]
July 28th, 2008 at 10:58 pm
Considering that there are now so many social networks catering to such a wide range of niches, my biggest problem is finding ones relevant to me and related to my specific interests or product niches. Google seems to be inefficient and returns alot of irrelevant results. A good resource that I use to find them is this search engine for social networking sites.
July 29th, 2008 at 3:28 pm
Jonathan,
The social networking search engine you list is a nice resource. Search engines like this definitely show how a specialty focus can help.