This guest post was written by Linden Moe,
who markets Hudson County Real Estate.

I have many conversations with REALTORs® about whether social media is a waste of their time.  The answer is…that all depends on what you are trying to accomplish and how much time you spend on that activity. If you don’t have the discipline to do social media activities in less than 1 hour, then don’t do it. Social media for REALTOR®s should be quick and easy, fun and profitable.

But the caveat is you must be there. You are darned if you do and darned if you don’t, so let’s put together a solid game plan for making social media for REALTOR®’s payoff in under 1 hour per day.

A Social Media Game Plan for REALTORs®

First thing is we are going to do is claim our spots in the world of social media. The first thing you must have is a blog, but you already knew that right? So assuming you have a blog, take 10 minutes to write a blog post about what’s happening in the local market.  Be specific.  Don’t target your state.  Write a blog post about the actives, solds and pendings in your local area.

Title the post something targeted like, “What’s going on in the Downtown Jersey City condos market”.  Go to the MLS and pull the last 30 days’ worth of information.  Explain what solds, pendings and actives are. Don’t assume they know.

Next we want to sign up for the 10 most popular social media platforms. So start with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube. I know you are thinking, ”What will I do after that?  “

Save Time – Repurpose!

It’s simple.  Remember that blog post we just wrote?  We are going to put that on our social media sites.  And to do that, we’re going to use tools to automate the process right?

So you can go sign up for some tools that let you post to all your social media sites at once.   HootSuite, Posterous and Onlywire are all tools to help out with our social media for REALTOR®s plan.

Those tools allow you to set up your accounts, and post to all of them with the click of a button. Copy the link from your blog post into a social media tool, press the button and bam! Your blog post is published on all your social media accounts. Now we are going to move on to the next stage. You need to go join some of your community groups on Facebook.

Type in [your area] groups in Facebook. Presto – instant prospects. Join the groups, but don’t sell. Just participate in the conversations at first.  After you warm up the group and engage, you will start seeing some friend requests.

Next you are going send friend requests to no more than 10 people a day.  Any more than 10 and Facebook gets upset.  If you spent 1 hour a day, by the end of 90 days you should have built your sphere of influence by almost 1,000 people.

Who knows you from your participation in the group?  When they see you are giving out market reports in their specific neighborhood, you will gain expert status.

In closing, lets recap:

1.    Write a blog post about a specific neighborhood
2.    Sign up to social media sites
3.    Join specific neighborhood social media groups
4.    Participate
5.    Start requesting friends (at least 10 a day takes 10 minutes)
6.    Post your market reports about your target neighborhood
7.    Build your center of influence.
8.    Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

Enjoy the payoff!