AWESOME EVENT!

I attended the Social Media Marketing seminar that was put on by Joe Petrowsky of Right Trac Financial and Kyle Reyes of the SilentPartnerMarketing this past Thursday.  At the outset I want to thank these two for doing a very well run, professional and useful event.  I am not the most computer literate person, but I am not a totally dummy when it comes to computers and the internet.  Kyle has more tricks for the use of social media than I can imagine, and Joe has always amazed me with his ability to adjust and embrace new and innovative techniques, which he has done extremely well in the marketing of his business through social media.  Well done Gentlemen!

Joe statrted off the program by telling us about his blogging.  He has documented that he gets at least two new mortgage applications a week from his blogging and other social media activities.  He does a total of 10 blogs a week and posts them on about 5 - 6 different platforms.  He can blog on ActiveRain and use those blogs on LinkedIn and various other platforms, including WordPress.  He staggers the timing based on his intuition as to when things fit better on one platform than on another.

Kyle took the stage next and talked about using videos as a marketing tool on social media sites.  He included his pitch about awesome marketing - be bold and outside the box with what you do.  This is a tough one for me as I don't like being on either side of a camera.  But, it works.  You do need a professional quality video.  You don't want something that is shaking and moving all over the place.  It is something that you can do yourself with the purchase of a tripod and an inexpensive but good quality camera.  Video cameras today are not like those of old.  They use memory cards that probably hold more memory than most computers.  If you need to shoot a scene more than once it is not like you are wasting film.  No big deal, and editing on the spot is easy.

Joe rounded out his end of the program by telling us about how often he shows up on search engines, although they did mention that SEO is not as important as Google might have you think.  You do need to match the key words for your business to what you are doing, but there are no magic words that will insure top spot on a search engine.  Joe also told us about his use of LinkedIn and I learned things about that site that I prevciously was unaware of.  Finally and most importantly Joe did describe how he built his mortgage business to be a "referral only" business.  It is a matter of how and when you ask and your ability to build a network of people in different but related businesss that are each referring clients back and forth so that all in the network benefit.  While this may not involve the internet and social media directly, it was fascinating.  I thought it to be worth the price of admission only.

Kyle spent some time talking about Facebook.  I thought I knew Facebook, but there is more behind it than meets the eye, and it can be a difficult and time consuming effort to engage people and get their attention and hold it for a period of time to develop a "conversation with them.  I find that I myself, am doing poorly on Facebook, which I do want to improve tremendously.

The program was great.  It went by quickly.  There was a lot of useful information and ideas.  Social media may not be for everyone, but there is no doubt that it is the most effective marketing today.  Joe sold a house in a day with a video posted on the internet.  Try doing that with traditional marketing - just ain't gonna happen!!  No question, this is the way to do real estate business today and for the foreseeable future. 

Just so you know this is not a paid blog for Joe and Kyle .  It is only coincidential that I also work with Joe.  Give us a call at Right Trac as we do mortgage loans equally as well!!  Would you expect anything less from Joe?