Social media and the promotion of commercial property businesses
The use of social media within the commercial real estate markets has seen phenomenal growth in recent years, with businesses and individuals using it to promote development projects and individual properties. However, astute users and property professionals have taken advantage of the publishing opportunities that social media platforms offer, demonstrating their market expertise and promoting the property services they provide.
In reality, social media is seen by some as trivial and unimportant. Due to the fact that it can be time-consuming, the need to constantly produce new, fresh content is not always seen as a priority. Part of the problem is often the lack of a strategy. All too often content is distributed on social media platforms with no real thought or aim behind it.
Many of the more successful businesses look to utilise their social media activity to drive traffic to their website. This is commonly known as ‘content marketing’ or ‘inbound marketing’, where links to stories and articles are distributed (often using teasers, images or videos) that encourage people to follow the link back to a particular web page. Hopefully, they will be interested enough by the story to take a look around the rest of the website and, who knows, maybe engage with the website’s owner.
By its very nature, distributing (new) content in this way can also be beneficial for any SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) activity being undertaken by a business, as Google (and other search engines) look favourably upon fresh content on websites. This is why using your latest news is often the easiest way to create content. It is, by definition, ‘new’ and can be used to populate a web page.
Links to news can then be distributed as content via social media platforms such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. If there is a good quality image that can be used to illustrate the story, there is also an opportunity to use sites like Pinterest and Instagram.
News stories can also be translated into short videos (maybe animated stories using still images?) and published on sites like YouTube with links back to the original story.
The key to success is to use news that interests the target audience. In the case of commercial property, this means talking about things that are relevant to occupiers, investors, developers, their advisers and other professionals. In short, news about transactions is perfect for this purpose and creating stories from transactional data has never been easier.