Why should you participate in social media? Simple answer, the conveyor belt principle. At the end of the day, you do it for two reasons; 1. To make friends 2. To drive them to your point of purchase (website). Not unlike a conveyor belt moves your groceries to the checker, your social media sites will move your new friends to your website where your goal should be to move them along in the purchasing process.
It drives me crazy when I hear people talk about creating big expensive, flash media, dramatized and theatrical websites. I say, why? Nobody goes to your website any more. They get to your website. There is a big difference. So, why not create a great website that furthers the relationship you will be creating at your MySpace, Facebook, Squidoo and blog site. The sites that will, if they have not already, drive the lion’s share of traffic to your site. It’s FREE marketing. It’s FREE to get them to your site.
I love Forrent.com and many of the other ILS’s out there but when I can drive it for FREE I wonder if I need them.
On an aside, it humors me to see the major ILS’s jumping on the social media bandwagon and tauting it as if they have been there all along. Social media is moving into it’s third or fourth year by my estimations. I say welcome to the party and in the same breath guess what, smart owners have been here for a while and understand it as well if not better than you. I do applaud Forrent for being the front runner in the adoption process and am quite interested to see how their business model further evolves.
On a further aside, I often refer to the day I created a Squidoo site for my Equity Residential Portland portfolio that outranked every major ILS and our own eqr.com site any time of the day or night. My passion for social media was cemented the day my ForRent rep challenged me to do a search so she could show me how well ForRent ranked on Google’s organic search results and my Squidoo page came up first. Not once but nearly ten times she tried, each time with different but relevant search terms and each time Squidoo ruled the day. Cost to me? 20 minutes of my time to create the site and 5 minutes to email it to five of my friends.
That’s it for my Saturday morning rant. My apologies if it seems all over the board. The kids will be stirring soon and we will be off to the zoo.
Your fellow property management maniac. M