Week 8 - Visual Platforms Part 2

Week 8 – Visual Platforms Part 2

Discuss [on your blog]: Find examples of 2 or 3 businesses that are similar to yours. See what visual social media they are using and how they are using it.  Is it effective? Some businesses work best when they have visual support.

The businesses I found similar to my real estate agency are:

Chris Heller The Home Seller, http://www.hellerthehomeseller.com/

I heard about Chris from a radio advertisement promoting his agency’s guarantee in selling your home. If his agency doesn’t sell your home, he will buy it!  He uses Facebook, Google +, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Blog, and a Podcast. He doesn’t have the social media icons on his website, but he had a blog link that lead me to the other platforms. He uses photos that complement his posts. He doesn’t have too many virtual tours of properties on his platforms except on YouTube he had a couple and 40 videos offering tips, advice, education, and information on the real estate market, updates, and trends. On Pinterest several boards (17 boards, 130 pins) on home improvement, rooms in a home, mortgages, and real estate. He also has a radio show on KOGO and offers seminars with a free mobile app. There was an indication that he travels and sells internationally. He is ubiquitous -- taking full advantage of social media in portraying himself as an expert in real estate, very knowledgeable, and very capable in selling / buying homes.

The Lund Team, www.lundteam.com

 

 

This real estate team is well known, established, trustworthy, and a successful family-owned business in Carlsbad. They use several social media platforms that give them exposure to a very large audience of different demographics and psychographics. It should be effective especially with a lot of virtual tours of their listings on their numerous platforms. They utilize social media with a variety of content that is interesting, informative, and visual. You realize the enormous amount of time and effort they put into maintaining their platforms on a regular basis.

Their Facebook (884 likes, 11 visits since 2011) and Google + (24 followers, 55,433 views) have similar content from real estate updates, tips, open houses, virtual tours of properties, personal family, company and community activities, interactive maps, things to know, photos of different areas they cater to, interactive maps, announcements, local activities, except they mainly have team photos on Google + not many on properties. Their YouTube (28 subscribers) have several videos on market updates, virtual tours, and intro on their company. As for LinkedIn (9 followers), they have similar posts as Facebook and Google +, to include speaking engagements.  Twitter (90 followers, 89 tweets) contain a number of hashtags, brief posts with call to actions in the form of questions, open house announcements, tips, and few videos. Instagram (6 posts, 9 followers), seem they just added this platform since July 2014 with only 6 photos (no captions) of their team members. As for Pinterest, (19 Boards, 264 pins) is full of photos in different categories from location properties, staging a home, funnies, tips, real estate FAQs, Sell My Home, etc.

Does visual media work for the type of business you have started? 

Yes, visual media would work well for real estate. It provides viewers a glimpse of what the properties look like and they can imagine how they would live in it. Photos and virtual tours of the properties will give them a good idea of the properties features and if it meets their requirements. They can start to visualize how they would furnish it to make it their home.