Dick Betts: Using Social Media to Grow Your Connections
The Zoom call this week was presented by Dick Betts, on his business generating activities with Facebook to be visible within the The Villages, adult town in Central FL. This was a follow up presentation to his earlier Zoom call of Sept 13 in which he presented The Villages.
Dick spent almost 20 years around real estate working as an instructor through NAR, and has only been an agent for a little over 2 years. Covid pushed him to get his license as he wasn't able to fly any more.
Living in the community of The Villages, he sold over $10,000,000 in real estate in his first year licensed. He has since gotten a full time Admin assistance to help with his social media exposure as well as 2 additional team members.
His first year in business he spent nothing on lead generation or marketing.
He developed his marketing plan, as his sphere, which was over 50,000 contacts developed over 20 years of travel only produced 2 sales for him that first year.
His Process
As an early riser, each morning, he writes a hyper local post about his community and anything and everything that is happening in the community of The Villages
His feeling is that as the community has grown so much and is so attractive to people looking for a warm weather home writing about events in the community will get him to the top of search engines, and it does. He calls this an accidental find.
He offered an example of an agent within the same community that pays someone to write social media articles for her. The problem was that on her blog pages, were articles about anything but the community in which she worked. As an example: 5 best places to retire in Europe. Not only was it not local but worse was that the agent didn't even take the time to read their own posts.
He has at times several blogs going and was spending less than an hour writing.
He uses ActiveRain, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumbler and Word Press.
He doesn't make posts onto Facebook but writes directly. All his posts have artwork about the community or something relevant to the post topic.
He will post his work onto YouTube so as to get the embed code that allows him to drop the post elsewhere.
He will modify each format so that it's appropriate for each of the different sites onto which he posts.
On his business Facebook page, he has almost 5,000 friends. On LinkedIn he has over 29,000 followers and has a separate ghost account on LinkedIn with over 15,000 followers. When he posts to these 3 accounts, he hits almost 50,000 followers.
He works to what he calls threads and demonstrated how one thread worked. From LinkedIn he was noticed by someone that recognized his knowledge and referred someone to him. That person bought from the agency within the Village, but he was referred to another person that did buy and from that thread he got another client. He keeps a log of these threads that and he can track all the business.
From each of his posts, he gets a substantial number of hits. For him it is the nature of the inserted photos that gets the attention and also reposts. He calls all of this shotgun marketing
For all his posts, he uses analytics to get what he calls heat maps.
His heat maps show that the best times for Real Estate are Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9-10 EST.
He would spend an hour posting to his Facebook groups.
He posts to the Facebook groups that are connected to The Villages, and these groups expose him to over 400,000 views.
Posting onto these pages gets him exposed.
He emphasized that one should never include one's web address within the post.
This drops the post down in the analytics. He stressed this as there are filters on the groups that will bounce posts that include phone numbers or web site links.
To bypass this, he will look at comments, especially if the post is about real estate and then include a link to the web site. he calls this organic. He demonstrated this by looking at the analytics of one day in which he received 673 users, 816 sessions and over 1,500 pages viewed' In this year he has reached very state in the union with at least 1 viewer before August 1.
He is Interntional as he discussed at least 1 viewer from Ireland that has been visiting the web site for 2 months already.
He gets people that will log onto his site and view his IDX page which requires full details. From OK, he received a request for his IDX page and that got him 2 contacts on the same day. Those contacts requested maps, which he graciously sent.
Each contact was widowed and when they came to Florida, they had requests to see properties and they spent a couple of days and wrote an offer on a house for over $575,000, and when it was accepted the man also proposed to his companion.
The analytics allowed him to see where the interest was being generated. When he does hyper local posts, he calls these 22 exposures as opposed to shotgun, but it allows him better information on his activities.
With the assistance of his admin Erin, he maintains a strong social media presence, which generates the interest he seeks for his business.
It was a fast hour with great insight as to how he promotes himself and his area to generate his business.
Dick Betts: Using Social Media to Grow Your Connections
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