As an estate agent who started in the business back when the only technology in the office was the telephone and photocopier it would be fair to say I was not exactly a resident of the social media community. But 18 months ago when I established Lime Estate Agents in Preston, Lancashire we turned away from the traditional high street agent model and chose to work in a more flexible way. Mobile broadband, internet phones, cloud software, tablets, smart phones etc all became part of our day to day lives and with it a realisation that if this was the new way of working then social media could be the new marketing and communication tool.
We started safely with Facebook and dipped our toe more recently into Twitter and Linkedin hoping for wonderful results (like playing the lottery and expecting to win in the first week). But of course as most people using social media know success like most things in life comes from perseverance and not luck. Having persevered we successfully sold a property that came to us from a client posting a request on Facebook, asking for estate agency recommendations to which 5 people named us. Most recently a new instruction came via a connection on Linkedin. Not massive success yet maybe but as this style of marketing is free it certainly improved our bank balance. We are still learning and if social media is like a foreign language to most people then we have just about reached the level of “je m’appelle Kevin”.
I don’t know how big social media can be but as the saying goes “the more you practise the better you get” and all of us at Lime will learn to speak social media fluently, what have we got to lose.
Just don’t tell our competitors!