Expand Your Business Using Two Surprising Social Media Channels

Social media has become an accepted part of normal daily life for most professionals in residential real estate. Now, however, it is proving to be particularly useful for those involved in the commercial real estate industry, as well. Maintaining contact with your customers and clients once meant time spent answering emails and returning phone messages. Now, however, the opportunity to expand your business with the use of social media offers even more possibilities, than ever before. 

In addition to nurturing a presence on Facebook and sending out timely tweets on Twitter, using social media to its fullest potential can mean the use of sites that offer something a bit different. Sites like Yelp and Pinterest, in particular, can offer commercial real estate professionals a way to step outside the rigid box of conventional practice, and become a trend-setter. 

How Can Social Media Sites Like Yelp and Pinterest Help Expand Your Business?

Yelp

Even though Yelp is one of the newer social media sites, it has become a real powerhouse with some 60 million registered users and more than 20 million reviews on the site. Easy to navigate and search, it can offer tremendous research opportunities to the enterprising commercial real estate broker who chooses to maximize its potential.

When clients and customers post reviews on Yelp, they reveal vital information about a business location. Customer reveal details about parking and safety concerns, how often they visit commercial areas, whether they work or live nearby. For retail and service businesses, this type of reconnaissance can make or break a location choice. Doing your research on Yelp allows you provide invaluable insight to your clients and expand your business as a result.

Pinterest 

We are a visual people, and Pinterest has taken visual interest to the absolute extreme. Taking great photos of your listings and posting them immediately to this site can get them noticed by millions of people, worldwide, making them a perfect showcase for commercial real estate brokers. 

In addition, you can expand your business opportunities by creating interactive boards that include your listings and the services you provide, along with information about the community, or even the history of the area. Pinterest has quickly become one of the top social media sites for all types of activity, and many are surprised to find that it now drives even more referral traffic than YouTube, LinkedIn and Google+, combined. 

What Should Commercial Real Estate Brokers Remember When Using Any Type of Social Media?

In any form of social media, there are a few basic rules that will help you achieve and maintain the type of exposure needed to expand your business and become known as the industry leader in your area. 

• Strive For Perfection - Make sure that contact information is accurate, and attractively presented with correct spelling and grammar. It is hard to appear professional with glaring typos, or incorrect or missing contact information. 
• Seek To Hold Their Attention - Provide high quality, interesting photos that will catch and hold the attention of prospective clients. A head shot of a smiling agent is much less memorable to a commercial real estate buyer than a well planned photo of an attractive building or property. 
• Help Them Find You - Be easy to locate. Make sure that working links are there to transport them to your website with just one click.
• Participate, Participate, Participate - Prospective customers can be very disappointed to find that your information on social media is old, or outdated. Responding to reviews, commenting on new listings, and keeping current with the people who frequent the site will keep your presence fresh and help draw new business to you. 

The climate of commercial real estate is changing more rapidly than ever before. Social media can be the key to not only keeping up with these changes, but maximizing their potential to expand your business.