Your customers are talking about everything from sex, politics and religion, to the latest shade of eye shadow. Every responsible social media interaction from your company carries with it a set of “musts,” those things you have to do in order to remain ethical, above-board, believable, interesting and relevant. Your media marketing strategy needs to include a set of guidelines by which anyone who writes for your company operates, a code of ethics that will leave your reputation intact at all times, and make you invulnerable to unwarranted criticism or attack. Even small business marketing strategies need to include maintenance of a viable “corporate” image. With the right strategies even the smallest Atlanta based companies can be active on the world stage.

Your media and public relations policies should include the following:

Authenticity
Be original in thought, deed and word, at all times. If you are ever found out to be a mimic, a plagiarizer, or an overt over-the-top pusher of your brand, you will not only lose customers, but you will incur the wrath of the Internet in the form of unflattering reviews and comments from which you will find it difficult to recover.

Transparency
Being open with your public should become second nature, to a certain extent. While transparency means admitting mistakes publicly and responding to critics or negativity, it does not mean revealing trade secrets or divulging personnel matters, ever. Legally speaking, if you are going to quote someone, always obtain permission and attribute the source; treat every quote you make as if it were copyrighted information. And, with every entry on a social media site, include digital marketing information including your name, email address and web address.

Play to your audience
Remember who is reading you: Past clients, current customers, potential buyers, and even past, current and future employees. Before you publish anything, read your content with all of those people in mind, and edit accordingly. This is your public face; don’t embarrass yourself.

Common sense
Exercise good judgment about language, unflattering commentary, inflammatory remarks, or any other interactions that might be slanderous or hurtful. Businesses based in Atlanta for instance, have long used their social media strategy to build product support and moderate negative comments in their social marketing network. Your company image and media marketing strategy can have no room in it for below-the-belt social networking interactions. Let your employees know that your policies mandate that any and all interactions undertaken by them in the course of business, or even after hours, if they use your name, will be monitored. Stress the need for an ethical approach to social networking that keeps your code of conduct in media public relations intact.

Be value-added
Bring something to the table that is not only interesting and relevant to your company or product, but make it so people want to engage and learn more. It’s a balancing act, but you want to promote your company and ideas without seeming to do so. No one wants to waste time reading blatant advertising when they are casually surfing, or feel duped into buying something when they are browsing the web.

Maximizing Profits Using Facebook for Real Estate

There is hardly a person living in this day and age who hasn’t at the very least heard of Facebook and how it brings everyone together. The fact of the matter is that social networks are becoming an increasingly integral part in the lives of many people out there and it is only logical that they should be used for marketing and advertising. As it happens, there are ways to use Facebook for real estate agents who want to give their career a little boost.

First of all, how can using Facebook for real estate marketing benefit the agent? Well, for starters it should be mentioned that it is estimated that in August 2012, Facebook will hit the 1 billion subscriber mark. Put that together with the fact that one these networks news travels almost as the speed of light and you have yourself a nice potential way of spreading the word about yourself. You can do all the run-of-the-mill stuff such as making a profile page where they can pretty much do whatever they want. However, that is far from being the best Facebook can do for you.

Facebook allows the creation of fan pages and group pages to which people subscribe. When they “like” your page, every single thing you are going to post will become visible in their news feed, meaning that you are going to be reaching to thousands of people potentially only because they clicked a button on your page. Of course, using Facebook for real estate marketing consists of more than simply creating a page because after all, you need to give people a reason to join and like it. And it’s not like you just need anyone liking it; it is better to have a hundred people interested in what you are selling them like your page than a thousand who has no idea what you are doing there. So here is a little guide for how to use Facebook for real estate marketing.

How to Use Facebook for Real Estate Marketing

To start things off you are going to create a landing page which will give your visitors just a little taste of what you have to offer, encouraging them to click the like button and see the page in its full splendor. You should give them some incentive to click the like button, such as some kind of exclusive information about the housing sector, an ebook, or really any kind of little offer you can think of. The aesthetic of your landing page is extremely important so you should definitely work with a professional designer on it if you can afford to.

In any case, once they “like” your page they will be taken to second landing page where they can actually get what they clicked the button for. This is a very effective method of promoting your brand and getting your name out there as the people who will have gotten what they wanted from you will spread the word to their friends, who will hopefully give you a visit and do the same.

There is a great way to get more people to your Facebook page which consists of setting up good Facebook ads, which are basically the advertisements displayed on the side. All you need to do is simply click on the “create an ad” link which can be found right next to those advertisements, and you will be taken to the creation page. There you make your ad by simply choosing a picture and typing a quick sales pitch that goes to its right. You can choose to either run a cost-per-impressions or a pay-per-click campaign, whichever is more suitable for your current situation.

The best part with these ads is that if you are promoting a Facebook page those who are looking at it can “like” it instantaneously without even visiting it. If you can manage to make your advertisement enticing enough, you will see no shortage of unique visitors everyday who are looking to see what your brand has to offer them.

So how exactly do you get started and use Facebook for real estate marketing? Well, there is nothing complicated to the process as all you need to do is install an application which allows you to easily create landing pages. There are many applications which allow you to do that, and you can find them using your search engine of preference. Once the application is installed, use it to put your landing page into place, and get started with the steps above.

Check out my recent blog post for tips on growing your Facebook fan base.