So I was contemplating last night as I was adding Plurk to my repertoire of social media sites…Is this all worth it? Does it really pay off? Are the fruits of my labor going to reward me in the end? My answers to all are I really think so.

I’ve been actively involved in the social media/blogging/web 2.0 scene for about two months now. When I say active, I mean active. Yea I had my Facebook account and I wrote an occasional blog post for my old company but I was not as passionate about my efforts as I am now. Not even close.

I’ve gained more social networking traction in two months than I could have ever thought possible. Not because I read some book or hired a company to help me along, but because I put in the time to get involved and take an active role.

What exactly does that active role entail you may ask?

Well first of all, let’s talk about the writing efforts. When I joined Roost.com, I was given the responsibility of writing content for the blog. Now at first I was a little overwhelmed by the time commitment that was needed to develop and create content for our blog on a weekly basis. But I believe like most, the more you write, the easier it gets. I also need quite because it is very difficult to create sound content in the hustle and bustle of the office. So I use my hour train ride into San Francisco to develop most of the blog posts that you see on it today. This writing effort paid off greatly in the first month. The Roost Blog saw a 270% increase in traffic month over month and experienced almost as much traffic last month as it did in the six previous months combined.

In addition to my own writing efforts, I have to comment on other people’s material. Now this in itself commands a huge time commitment because I have to actually read the posts in order to comment intelligently. And I don’t care what anyone says, we all love to get comments on our posts. It makes us feel like what we wrote actually made sense and engaged people long enough to put forth an effort to tell you how they feel.

Another key piece of the puzzle is you have to meet your audience where they are. Right now that “where they are” for me is Twitter. I am learning so much about the people I’m trying to build relationships with like other bloggers, brokers, agents, etc. and I really feel it is paying off. I feel people are getting to know me and at the same time, getting to know the company I work for. This is the same thing that can happen to you. People can get to know the person first and build a trust with you before you even talk about the “business” side of things. This is why blogging has been so effective within the real estate world. It’s a trust factor and people want to work with people they trust and how do you trust anyone unless you get to know them first?

I feel through my efforts, we are slowly building that trust and getting our name out there to a community that knew very little about us (and me) and hopefully it is establishing Roost.com as a viable player in the real estate search arena. Now thank goodness we have a killer product to back up these efforts because I don’t think all the social networking efforts in the world could help a bad product or a bad business.

So will I keep dedicating time and resources to my social networking efforts? You betcha! Until the time commitment outweighs the benefit, which I don’t think will be any time soon.

Derek Overbey
Sr. Director of Partnership Strategy
Roost.com
http://blog.roost.com
Twitter - @doverbey
Plurk – doverbey
Active Rain - http://activerain.com/dovereasy
Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=664933818
brightkite – dovereasy
AIM - dovereasy