How to Use LinkedIn to Sell More Real Estate A practical guide to the ins-and-outs of leveraging LinkedIn to build your real estate career. Provided by: Scott Levitt President of Oakley Signs & Graphics www.oakleysign.com
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How to Use LinkedIn to Sell More Real Estate Table of Contents What is LinkedIn?
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What LinkedIn Can Do For Real Estate Marketing
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How LinkedIn Differs From Other Social Media
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Use LinkedIn for Real Estate Marketing: How to Start
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How to Manage Your Account
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Two Tips to Enhance Your LinkedIn Account
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Now You Know & Yard Sign Discounts
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What Is LinkedIn? LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com) is an interconnected network of knowledgeable, practiced professionals from around the globe, representing 200 countries and 170 industries. Executives from all Fortune 500 companies are LinkedIn members, and LinkedIn has more than 50 million members worldwide.
When you open your free account, you create a profile that summarizes your professional background, achievements, and expertise. You can then invite trusted contacts who are already have LinkedIn accounts to connect to you, and you can invite contacts to join LinkedIn (if they’re not presently users).
Soon your network will include your contacts and connections, your contacts’ connections, and your connections’ connections. You are now linked to a huge number of experienced professionals!
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What LinkedIn Can Do for Real Estate Marketing In creating a LinkedIn account and profile, you can: •
Control what clients and prospects learn about you.
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Showcase any testimonials, referrals, and recommendations.
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Recommend another contact.
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Share relevant articles, blog posts, and market statistics.
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Network with and recommend professionals in industries directly related to real estate, i.e. appraisers, mortgage brokers, home inspectors, title companies, and contractors.
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Expand your network and solidify connections, enhancing your business.
LinkedIn allows you to present yourself to clients, prospects, and related professionals, and provides you the opportunity to answer their questions in your areas of expertise. This builds your credibility, which in turn leads to more business. There are also many groups discussing real estate and related topics on LinkedIn. For example, there is a NAR group on LinkedIn: LinkedIn on NAR’s website: http://www.realtor.org/about_nar/linkedin The actual NAR LinkedIn group on LinkedIn.com: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=90005 NAR’s page about NAR & Social Media: http://www.realtor.org/about_nar/social_media You can learn, network, and participate in these groups, again, enhancing your business.
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How LinkedIn Differs from Other Social Media Social media platforms enable their users to reach out to others with similar interests, businesses, or professional needs, and then to build relationships. The plural relationships is key here because social media are all tools to help you network – i.e. build relationships on a large scale. In real estate, for example, your profile on these various social media is hugely important in creating great introductions, and strong first impressions often lead to lasting and fruitful relationships. In LinkedIn’s case, they lead specifically to fruitful professional relationships, referrals, and recommendations. But in order to make the most of each of the social media platforms, it’s important to first understand their differences.
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Twitter is primarily used for meeting new people, and real-time information broadcasting (and discussion). It’s an ideal tool for finding people interested in business details and arrangements, in joint endeavors, and of course, in information (i.e., where your booth is located at today’s trade show, or what this week’s special cupcake is at your local high-end bakery). It enables you as the business owner to announce things pertinent to your business, and speak directly with clients and customers. By the way, you can download our free eBook on Twitter here: http://www.fhfrea.com/twitter-training-for-real-estate/
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Facebook is more a tool for connecting – and reconnecting – with friends and family. It’s also a great tool for deepening current relationships. It has the distinct ability to suggest friends based on your profile and information, so it’ a wonderful way to reach out to people you haven’t spoken with in a long time. Facebook’s “Pages” provide an ideal opportunity to highlight your business.
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LinkedIn is a social networking tool primarily for professionals. It’s a wonderful way to find other professionals in your field, to extend your network of people in related fields (i.e., mortgage brokers or contractors, for a real estate agent), to create or collaborate on projects with other professionals, gather data, share files, solve problems together, and even to showcase any testimonials and recommendations.
One commonality between the top three social media platforms is their aversion to the hard sell. These tools are called “social media,” after all. They are all about relationships: new, old, or professional. If you push your products or services aggressively, you won’t find much success – on Twitter, Facebook, or on LinkedIn.
You’ll find much better luck in the social media realm engaging your fellow user(s), participating in dialogues, interacting in groups, and providing value (in whatever form) to others. Give first, then receive. Utilize status updates and some of the various interactions specific to each social networking tool, and you will start to see why it’s so important to understand each individual platform, and its specific audience or user base, before you do too much. This is not a “one size fits all” arena; it’s a targeted one, where it will behoove you to remember that different tools attract different types of users, to achieve very different goals. Develop a clear idea of what your goals are, then build a marketing plan incorporating whichever combination (or all!) of these social media networking tools can best help you achieve them.
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Use LinkedIn for Real Estate Marketing: How to Start The following steps will get you up and running with LinkedIn. This does not cover every small detail of the setup process, but highlights the major steps conceptually. (This information was originally published in December, 2009, and small changes to the LinkedIn interface may have occurred since this book’s publication.) •
Create your free account at LinkedIn.com -- Fill in the basic information (first & last name, email and password) and select “Join Now.” (The image on the right was taken from the home page at http://www.linkedin.com.)
You will be required to verify your email address during the setup process. •
Create a profile that is searchable and complete -- Use keywords that will make it easy for people to find you. You control what the page says and how detailed it is, but the more details you provide, the clearer a portrait you paint of yourself.
Under "Profile Settings," you should pay particular attention to the information you make available on your Public Profile. This information may be visible to people who aren't one of your main contacts — known on LinkedIn as your "connections." In other words, it's information you should feel comfortable for anyone to see. More FREE eBooks: http://www.freehelpforrealestateagents.com/
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After clicking on the Public Profile option, you will be taken to a field that allows you to check (or check off) certain aspects of your public LinkedIn profile. The default will make most of your LinkedIn profile information available to everyone, including your picture, work summary, education and past jobs.
If you want to restrict certain pieces of information to people who are not “connections,” there is one feature under the personal information section to consider: "name & location." Your connections will always see your first and last name, but if you wanted to set it so other people on LinkedIn can't see your full name (just your first name and the initial of your last name), you can do so here.
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Privacy Settings – Connections Browse: By clicking "yes," all your connections can view your list of connections. Unless you are concerned with other agents snagging contacts and prospects from your LinkedIn list, you should leave this setting on.
There is nothing more anti-social on a social network than not revealing whom you’re connected to. Profile Views: LinkedIn likes to inform users that people in their industry have viewed their LinkedIn profile (this information appears in a widget down the right column of your home page). There are 3 options: a.) the default setting tells a user that someone visited his profile page, but only by industry and general title, not your actual name, or b.) you can set it so they know you specifically visited, but if you value anonymous Web-browsing, maybe skip that one, or c.) you can also just turn it off entirely, so no information is broadcasted to other LinkedIn users when you visit their profile. Profile Photos: You can decide to see the photos of your connections, your network, or everyone on LinkedIn. •
Provide your educational background – Sharing where you’ve gone to school opens up valuable connection opportunities to other alumni, to professors and faculty, and it provides an important window into the sort of person you are… your interests, field(s) of study, your places of employment.
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Use your experience to sell your services – Your professional background is shown, as are any recommendations you’ve been given. There is also a segment highlighting past positions. Be sure to explain what your primary responsibilities were; don’t simply provide the title and assume everyone knows what that entails. Use brief, succinct phrases so that your experience is clear, even on a quick read.
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Upload a picture of yourself – This is especially important in real estate, where your headshot offers instant recognition and familiarity.
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How to Manage Your Account 1. Control what is viewed in your profile: Now that you have your LinkedIn account and a searchable profile offering numerous interconnected networking possibilities, you need to manage it. You can adjust anything at any point, once you see how your details and profile choices are enhancing (or not) the expansion of your network. Maybe you want to change a few wording choices, maybe you’d like to choose a different photo, maybe you’d like to expand your professional experience to include a recent project you had initially forgotten to include when setting up your profile. You can also control what is viewed on your profile, i.e., you may want to share your photo with your connections only. Or maybe you’d like to restrict or limit the general public’s access to current personal information (see section above), such as where you worked last. You can limit certain things to your connections only. 2. Adjust your Email settings: There are 3 things you can adjust here: a.) Contact settings: “You are receiving introductions and InMails,” b.) Receiving messages: “Control how you receive emails and notifications,” and c.) Invitation filtering: “You are receiving all invitations.” If you don’t want to receive emails from LinkedIn, simply check it off. You also determine how you receive invitations and introductions. 3. Share news articles of interest or relevance: Passing along an article, or the link to a smart industry blog 4. Join professional groups, or local area professional groups: There are hundreds of professional groups that fit your area of specialization. Ask and answer questions, contribute to discussions, post links to relevant articles, sites, and blogs. Start private correspondence with fellow professionals who help you and seem like experts in their own right. There are also local or regional groups that focus on a given geographical area (i.e., San Francisco city real estate agents). These groups have the advantage of being able to meet over coffee, have face-to-face meetings
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to exchange business cards. From there, you can invite them to connect. 5. Update your status, your work situation, your professional experience 6. Thank new contacts for inviting you to join LinkedIn: Private correspondence can lead to stronger professional relationships, which in turn can lead to leads and client referrals. Take the opportunity to thank members who invite you to connect, and try to build a correspondence out from there.
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Two Tips to Enhance Your LinkedIn Account Once you’re familiar with all of the specific details and the fine points of LinkedIn, and you understand how best to manage your growing professional network, there are a couple of tools that can really maximize your account and help you achieve your marketing goals.
Get a personal LinkedIn URL LinkedIn offers “vanity URLs,” your own personal and private URL, or universal resource locator, or your address on the web. This is a straightforward, simple way to maximize your account. If your name were Strawberry Shortcake, your vanity URL would look something like this: www.LinkedIn.com/in/strawberryshortcake. Once you have a profile on LinkedIn, follow these simple steps to get your own URL with the network: 1. Log on to LinkedIn.com & click on “Accounts and Settings” near the top of the screen 2. Scroll down and click “Public Profile” 3. Choose one of the suggestions offered, or create one of your own (your custom-created URL must be 5-30 characters, letters and numbers but no spaces) 4. Click the “Set Address” button to save your selection Now that you have a vanity URL, publicize it! Add it to your email signature, your business cards, newsletter, website, anywhere you would provide your contact information. You want your friends, clients, and any prospects to be able to find you and reference your profile easily.
Utilize the “Answers” tab Another way to maximize LinkedIn is to use the “Answers” tab, where you ask and answer questions about topics in which you have expertise. Showing yourself to be an expert expands your credibility, then your network – and eventually, your client base – faster than almost any other method. 1. Log in and click the “Answers” tab near the top of the screen 2. Ask a question immediately, or scroll to find a question that you could answer in depth, expertly
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3. Browse along the right-hand side of the screen to find the topic 4. The “Personal Real Estate” is simple for the typical agent, but to truly be an expert, look for questions you can answer in other categories… you can even refer or recommend a friend who does have the specific knowledge to answer the question.
Answering questions helps other LinkedIn users, it shines a light on you and casts you as an expert in your field, and it gets you the chance to start a private correspondence with another member. Providing the answer you gave was accurate and helpful, another member will likely tell others members and friends about your help. Even referring the LinkedIn member to a friend who does have the expertise to help out is a great service… and another way to extend your network of contacts and connections.
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Now You Know! (Don’t Miss Our Newsletter, too…) Hopefully you’ve found this introduction to LinkedIn for real estate professionals useful. By now, you should understand that LinkedIn is more than a “little black book” of business networking, but is, in fact, a great way to build productive relationships through the free exchange of information. If you have feedback or ideas, don’t hesitate to contact us! We’d love to hear how LinkedIn works out for you. ALSO: Be sure to sign up for our Tuesday Tactics email newsletter to be the first to receive specific, actionable advice, tools, and information that will positively impact your real estate career: http://www.fhfrea.com/email-newsletter/ Sincerely cheering you toward real estate success, Scott Levitt Oakley Signs & Graphics http://www.oakleysign.com
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Looking for more free e-books to boost your business? This is just one of many great guides available for free! Visit: www.freehelpforrealestateagents.com More FREE eBooks: http://www.freehelpforrealestateagents.com/
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