You have to be using social media to do more real estate investing, right? Social media marketing is the most cost effective way of generating new leads and real estate deals, right? So how is it sabotaging your business and preventing you from reaching your maximum income potential?
Yes, you must be careful about what you post on your social media profiles, use them to protect your online reputation and you should be developing your social networks in order to generate leads. However, social media is increasingly becoming a distraction that is limiting the amount of real business investors are doing.
Last week it was Pinterest that was the new must have social platform, now it is The Fancy. Oh, but you still haven’t finished producing your YouTube videos and still don’t have as many Facebook likes and Twitter followers as you hoped for.
So how do you find the right balance between maintaining an effective social media presence which brings in leads and protects your place in your local market, yet allows you to focus on making real estate investing deals actually happen and putting the big money in the bank?
Let’s start by pointing out the obvious fact that the few hours it actually requires your expertise to flip houses probably puts your potential hourly wage in the tens of thousands of dollars range. Clearly posting on Facebook and responding to Tweets or setting up new profiles on this week’s must have network is a minimum wage to perhaps a couple hundred dollars an hour job for some top industry talent. Clearly not a position you should be filling. Hire someone, outsource it and let somebody else manage your posting and responses and forwarding you the real leads.
If you are just starting out in real estate investing and don’t have a huge marketing budget yet then it’s OK to begin slowly. Focus on building on social platform at a time. Get your profile looking right, optimize it for the search engines, build a network and automate a system for funneling in the leads. Then move onto the next.
Where to start? LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google+…
