Where Do I Start? A Facebook Page or Blog?

Guest Contributor Jimmy Mackin says:

Where Do I Start?

Many Realtors® who are new to Blogging and Social Media do not know where to begin. A common mistake many Realtors® make is they try to do everything at once. I want to share with you the strategy we used to build our brand.

July 2nd, 2010 – we launched our Facebook Page.

Over the next 6 month, we focused all of our attention on connecting and engaging with our community. As a result of our efforts, we were able to consistently grow our Facebook Page month after month.

When we launched our blog (Jan 12, 2011), we immediately started seeing traffic flowing in from our Facebook Page. In our first 108 days, we have driven in over 16,000 visits and 35,642 pageviews. Our readership is growing by approx 30% per month.

The important takeaway here is that only 8.84% of our traffic is coming from the Search Engines.

We often think that the only way to drive in traffic is to rank well for relevant keyword phrases. We have found that there is an alternative marketing strategy that you can use that may help you get better results.

Pre-Social Media

Realtors® would launch their blog, hope that Google would crawl their site, index their webpages, and "hopefully" rank their pages for highly relevant keyword phrases. This is a push-and-pray marketing approach – push out your content and pray that Google ranks your pages well.

The challenge many of us face with this approach is that we cannot control how well we rank for specific keyword phrases. We can optimize our sites until we are blue in the face. The fact remains that ranking well for highly competitive keyword phrases is very difficult.

Post Social Media

Facebook allows us to take more of a proactive approach to building a following.

There are two very important distinction worth making

Establishing yourself as a resource for valuable information is a great way to attract followers. This doesn't require you to create all of the content; you simply need to be a good curator. A perfect example of this is The Corcoran Group.

People are the engine that drives growth – not bots.

Great online marketers like Jonathan Rivera and Chris Smith used a similar strategy to drive traffic to their blog...well before we launched our blog.

If you are struggling to grow your readership on your existing blog or you have started blogging at all, I would consider starting a Facebook page first... It worked for us.

Are you struggling to get traffic to your blog? Please share with us.

What do you blog about? Join in on the discussion...