Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and the rest of the social networking/media gang are no longer a secret to real estate agents across the country. Most are well aware of these tools and generally accept the notion that they can be powerful when leveraged for business. Specifically, nearly all of us have a Facebook profile and dedicate precious work hours to growing our number of friends and fans on a regular basis.

Interestingly, a very small fraction of us can actually trace a shred of ROI back to our social media and social networking efforts. The reason why is clear. We as a profession routinely ignore the media component and spend all of our time on the networking piece. This is why most agents have tons of friends and fans, but no clients to show for our efforts. In order to make social tools work for your business you must incorporate both the networking and media components in perfect harmony.

In other words, you must network because it is important to grown an audience. These are your friends and fans. You must be witty, interesting, social, and smart. Many of us are already very comfortable in this space. But we then have to do something productive with that audience to leverage our popularity and generate business.

This is where social media comes into play. The proper use of social media is to provide relevant content in to your social network. Social media can be an article, video, statistics, or just simply a message that is geared toward establishing yourself as an expert on a topic within a social setting. It is in the social media piece, not the networking, where the true power of tools such as Facebook comes alive. It is an opportunity to educate, self publish, and spread your message faster than ever before.

The message must be relevant, consistent and preferably original. Those factors working together will very soon have you viewed as an expert in your niche. It just takes a little purposeful strategy, which very few agents utilize in their online efforts.