Real Estate Social “Notworking?”

Social Builds Brand

It was getting close to Inman Connect NY, and I could feel the urgency in a text message from Matt Beall, “did you get my email regarding the social media case study for Inman?”

I’m sure somewhere—in the ether that is my inbox—sat an email from Mr. Beall. Knee deep in a Hawaii Life interface redesign, however, my Gmail account was left unmanaged and overflowing its 200G limit.

Since integrating social media into our real estate search in September 2011, I hadn’t really thought about the project. Social (from a business standpoint) was not driving sales, and my mind was on other things that were—specifically a recent surge in mobile traffic led by the iPad.

With Inman looming on the horizon, however, it was time to do a little digging into our social integration project. A text message to Yax, Hawaii Life’s lead programmer, and a few minutes later the Facebook insights installation was complete.

Hawaii Life Facebook Insights

A quick test drive of the Insights interface (Facebook could learn a thing or 2 from Google Analytics) and I was off. 332,828 Facebook impressions in the month of December. Wait…what? 332K impress…ions? Could that be right? It was. If you need good connectivity at the office to work about this subject, read this new post about wifi for business compared.

Still, with over 1.2 million impressions in the 4 months since launching the Facebook comment box and other social media buttons, it had resulted in zero trackable sales. But that doesn’t mean that the integration into search wasn’t working, just not how we expected.

Instead of generating leads that turned directly into sales, social media created a platform that allowed other people to share our brand.

Using Social Media to Build Brand

You can learn how Hawaii Life is using social media to build its brand in 2 ways:

1) Short & Sweet – The slides for the Inman presentation in PDF format, sexified by Winny (Creative D / Co-founder):

Case Study – How to (Effectively) Integrate Social Media into Property Search

2) Detailed – The entire report which was used to create the presentation:

Integrating Social Media into Real Estate Search

If you have questions, comment below. I’m sure there will be several. There were at Inman after Matt gave his talk, which I believe (without being bias) was one of the better presentations at the conference.