I want to take this article in a slightly different direction.  That direction is using Facebook, Linkedin, and maybe even Twitter to boost your lead conversions today.   At my brokerage, Investor Nation Realty, lead generation is the lifeblood of our company.  We distribute leads to our Realtors who then call and follow up using a CRM tool to nurture the leads.  As a company we have your standard Facebook Fan Page and I have all my Realtors on Linkedin.  Getting them to use Twitter has been a struggle or even actively use Linkedin and Facebook.   As with any group of people, some of them get it, some of them don’t.

The problem with lead generation is you seem to get leads in various forms; some with phone numbers, some without.   The problem is also the solution. This is what you want.  In converting leads frequency of call attempts, emails, or otherwise comes to mind as does the most important element; recency.  He who calls the lead first seems to win the business in the real estate industry.  I want to add a third element:

Recency – How quickly you try to reach a lead after you receive it.  Often the quickest person or company to respond gets the business

Frequency – How often you try to reach a lead after you receive it.

Format – What methods are you using to try to reach a lead?  Most of us are using phone and email.

In the summer of 2009, we started using social media to convert leads by changing up the formats in which we tried to reach them.   First let me preface by saying that any attempts to reach a prospect or lead are done in a non-salesy manner with serving the client at the forefront of this type of campaign.

Using Social Media to Vary the Format

Assuming as an agent or as a brokerage you have Facebook Pages and Linkedin profiles already set up which are clean, professional, succinct with your website or blog, and somewhat memorable  (Please no Mafia Wars or growing tomatoes on your Farmville).

The strategy is this;  when a new lead comes in which has an uncommon name (example:  Ryan Hinricher, since there’s only one), quickly search on Linkedin, and then send a request to connect with that person.  Here’s a sample request I recently sent out to a prospect who signed up on our site to view properties for sale:

If the potential client or lead does accept your request, you now have access to a trove of information which you didn’t before including; employment, education, and a general idea of who they are as a person.    Also In doing so you’ve reached out to them in a way in which your competition, at least for now is not.  Those are obvious pros, but what are the cons?   First off you’ll be spending additional time searching and you’ll come up empty handed.  Try doing a search for your new prospect, John Smith.  Good luck with that one.  I’d say roughly 20-25% of the time we’re able to locate them on Linkedin and maybe 25% of those folks will accept our connection request.

The pros outweigh the cons and I feel that while it may be a bit more aggressive, most prospects who are serious appreciate the aggressiveness. They’ll realize we apply the same aggressiveness for finding and negotiating the perfect foreclosure for them.   Plus isn’t in our best interest to do everything contact and service someone who is showing genuine interest?

The second method, which I’ve found a bit less effective, is using the Facebook page.  Many people see Facebook as a very personal, non-business, experience, so our response rate is pretty low.  It doesn’t, however, take up much time and we’ve had maybe a 10-15% success rate in securing the connection this way.   The agent will go to the bottom left hand corner of the Facebook Page and hit the “Share” button.  This will prompt them to either share it with a friend if you start typing or just an email address.  We use this as a requirement on all of our leads we’re generating.  Everyone gets an invite to join our Fan Page.  Remember to make it about adding value to the user, not about YOU and YOUR Page.

Although I wish everyone would accept our invitation on Facebook, the majority won’t.  I rarely accept all the invitation causes I receive from my friends on Facebook, so why would I from a total stranger?  If that stranger is truly interested in finding more information about your market, or getting the content you’re offering, then why not?  If they do, you now have access to a lot of personal information including their Birthday.  This makes dropping the Birthday card out in the mail much easier than the awkward questions that result from phone interviews and profiling.

In a new real estate economy where each and every lead and prospect is a precious commodity, real estate professionals can maximize the volume they already have versus always chasing after more leads.  Plus these tools are free to use.  Unfortunately it is extra effort.   Most of us are no stranger to that, especially in this economy.

These strategies work no matter if your lead generation is in-house or via Zillow, Trulia, or somewhere else.  You must tailor your reply and specifically mention where the lead originated from.

These methods can be used with most any other social media site, though outside of Linkedin and Facebook we’ve had abysmal results.  Usually too much time spent searching for them.   So go where your prospects already are and make this strategy part of your ongoing process.  I’ve incorporated a checklist on our CRM, SalesForce.  Prior to deletion of a prospect, the Realtor must complete the checklist which includes multiple calls, emails, a Linkedin request, and Fan Page suggestion on Facebook.

In doing so, you’ll likely have a leg up on your competitors who see this as too much effort.  The effort yields results.

I’ve listed several applications which you can download and start using today to become a better mobile real estate professional.  I’ve recommended  applications I’m using for real estate purposes which aren’t necessarily built specifically for real estate.  Once you’ve downloaded the App World Application from Blackberry’s mobile site, you can quickly access these.

#1 Google App Suite – The Google App Suite is a must for any real estate user of Blackberry.  It provides you quick access to Google Maps (life saving), Google Reader (for reading your real estate blogs, including GeekEstate, of course), Mobile Search, Gmail (or Google Apps for you corporate users), Calendar, Photos, and Notebook (great for notes on the fly when you realize you forgot your pen).   These are quick to access, load fast, and are extremely dependable on your Blackberry.

#2 Smarter Agent – Smarter Agent seems to be the only major real estate centric application on the market right now.  I’ve found it useful for accessing MLS data on the go.  Since it is pulling from the MLS you get tons of data although it loads incredibly slowly.  It is especially useful in scheduling showings, looking up seller agent data, finding comparable sale, and as an overall tool for buyer reps.  The cost is free and I’d strongly recommend every real estate professional with a Blackberry download it.

#3 UberTwitter – I’ve tried many Blackberry Twitter apps only to have settled, for now, on UberTwitter for Blackberry.  The distinct advantage UberTwitter offers over its main Twitter for Blackberry rival is that UberTwitter offers is the ability to search and to do it well by geography.  This allows me to quickly access hashtags, search for users, key phrases, and more.  I can also narrow the search by the number of miles from location and enable geotagging on my Tweets.  Until something better replaces UberTwitter, I feel like it wins on ease of use and features.  UbertTwitter is free.

#4 Yammer- Real estate is still very much a people business and effective communication in within companies is more important than ever.  Twitter for business comes most easily the shape of Yammer.  Yammer allows teams and groups to easily communicate without having to create email distribution lists.  The Blackberry app is sweet because after a showing an agent can send a quick update back to their team, or allows a team leader to easily distribute a lead to an agents phone.  My company has become Yammer addicts facilitating more team communication.  The Blackberry App for Yammer takes this completely mobile.  Cost is free.

Bonus Item:  Your CRM – If you use a CRM tool or are evaluating one, make sure they have a mobile version of the software.  I personally use SalesForce.com and they have an excellent application for Blackberry which lets me search for contacts, update contacts, add tasks, and much more.

Of course these are just a sample of the many useful Blackberry applications for real estate.  There are certainly many more such as mortgage calculators, flashlights, voice-to-text translating, and everything in between. Despite the buzz surrounding Google’s Nexus, the Android operating system, and iPhones, Blackberry is holding its place in the enterprise and with many in the real estate industry. The Blackberry App World gives those of us clinging to our Blackberrys hope in creating a mobile tool box for real estate.

After signing in once at Deed Street, one can start using the “^” to organize tweets they post either on the site or simply from their Twitter account.  For example, if I want to post about a news article in Atlanta, I would simply use  ”^ATL” when I post.  Doing this aggregates the tweet within Deed Street.  This is better than traditional Twitter search because the specific posting will not be confused with “party tonight in the ATL!”  This might all sound a bit overwhelming at first but the site has many suggested abbreviations for geographic areas as well as commonly used words such as “mortgage” and “shortsales”.

Sample recent conversations taking place about Atlanta:

I’ve used Deed Street off and on over the last month or so but other times, admittedly, I’ve forgotten to use the ^ or the ^^ when posting about real estate on Twitter.  This is solved by simply logging into the application and managing your Twitter postings from Deed Street.  In theory this makes sense since the application gives you a pretty beefy profile.  It allows you to show more data than Twitter including your; blog feed, Linkedin URL, Facebook URL, and a short description.

As you can see with the example below, setting up your profile has some distinct benefits to it:

The micro-blogging profile on steroids might be originally intended along with the remainder of the site to be business to consumer focused, but I think the real value is in meeting other real estate professionals.  In fact Lazovic calls it e-harmony for real estate professionals and consumers.  From my experience so far 100% of the conversation has been B to B.  The site may end up working better as a community portal for real estate people to satisfy their social networking hunger.   Adoption is going to be the key element as it always is.  The assumption is the consumer will find the site via Twitter search as I did.   From the real estate professional side, Deed Street should get a good mention at Inman Connect in January where Lazovic is speaking on the panel:  Tweet This! The Business Case for Twitter.

Overall I think Deed Street has the potential to be a good filter for real estate conversations on Twitter with this community approach. Currently they are pretty much alone in this category although I recently checked out another more B to B focused one called CoBrokeNation (little activity as of this post).  Real estate professionals can use Deed Street to connect with others in their local communities or carve out a niche for their specific geographic area if consumer adoption takes place.

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