How to Use LinkedIn to Sell
More Real Estate
A practical guide to the
ins-and-outs of leveraging
LinkedIn to build your real
estate career.
What Is LinkedIn?
LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com) is an interconnected network of
knowledgeable, practiced professionals from around the globe, representing 200
countries and 170 industries. Executives from all Fortune 500 companies are
LinkedIn members, and LinkedIn has more than 50 million members worldwide.
When you open your free account, you create a profile that summarizes your
professional background, achievements, and expertise. You can then invite
trusted contacts who are already have LinkedIn accounts to connect to you, and
you can invite contacts to join LinkedIn (if they’re not presently users).
Soon your network will include your contacts and
connections, your contacts’ connections, and your
connections’ connections. You are now linked to a huge
number of experienced professionals!
What LinkedIn Can Do for Real Estate Marketing
In creating a LinkedIn account and profile, you can:
Control what clients and prospects learn about you.
Showcase any testimonials, referrals, and recommendations.
Recommend another contact.
Share relevant articles, blog posts, and market statistics.
Network with and recommend professionals in industries directly related to
real estate, i.e. appraisers, mortgage brokers, home inspectors, title
companies, and contractors.
Expand your network and solidify connections, enhancing your business.
LinkedIn allows you to present yourself to clients, prospects,
and related professionals, and provides you the opportunity
to answer their questions in your areas of expertise. This
builds your credibility, which in turn leads to more business.
There are also many groups discussing real estate and related topics on
LinkedIn.
For example, there is a NAR group on LinkedIn:
LinkedIn on NAR’s website:
http://www.realtor.org/about_nar/linkedin
The actual NAR LinkedIn group on LinkedIn.com:
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=90005
NAR’s page about NAR & Social Media:
http://www.realtor.org/about_nar/social_media
You can learn, network, and participate in these groups, again, enhancing your
business.
How LinkedIn Differs from Other Social Media
Social media platforms enable their users to reach out to others with similar
interests, businesses, or professional needs, and then to build relationships. The
plural relationships is key here because social media are all tools to help you
network – i.e. build relationships on a large scale.
In real estate, for example, your profile on these various social media is hugely
important in creating great introductions, and strong first impressions often lead
to lasting and fruitful relationships. In LinkedIn’s case, they lead specifically to
fruitful professional relationships, referrals, and recommendations.
But in order to make the most of each of the social media platforms, it’s important
to first understand their differences.
Twitter is primarily used for meeting new people, and real-time information
broadcasting (and discussion). It’s an ideal tool for finding people interested in business
details and arrangements, in joint endeavors, and of course, in information (i.e., where
your booth is located at today’s trade show, or what this week’s special cupcake is at
your local high-end bakery). It enables you as the business owner to announce things
pertinent to your business, and speak directly with clients and customers.
By the way, you can download our free eBook on Twitter here:
http://www.fhfrea.com/twitter-training-for-real-estate/
Facebook is more a tool for connecting – and reconnecting – with friends
and family. It’s also a great tool for deepening current relationships. It has the distinct
ability to suggest friends based on your profile and information, so it’ a wonderful way to
reach out to people you haven’t spoken with in a long time. Facebook’s “Pages” provide
an ideal opportunity to highlight your business.

LinkedIn is a social networking tool primarily for professionals. It’s a wonderful way to
find other professionals in your field, to extend your network of people in related fields
(i.e., mortgage brokers or contractors, for a real estate agent), to create or collaborate
on projects with other professionals, gather data, share files, solve problems together,
and even to showcase any testimonials and recommendations.
One commonality between the top three social media platforms is their
aversion to the hard sell.
These tools are called “social media,” after all. They are all about relationships:
new, old, or professional. If you push your products or services aggressively,
you won’t find much success – on Twitter, Facebook, or on LinkedIn.
You’ll find much better luck in the social media realm
engaging your fellow user(s), participating in dialogues,
interacting in groups, and providing value (in whatever
form) to others. Give first, then receive.
Utilize status updates and some of the various interactions specific to each social
networking tool, and you will start to see why it’s so important to understand each
individual platform, and its specific audience or user base, before you do too
much.
This is not a “one size fits all” arena; it’s a targeted one, where it will behoove you
to remember that different tools attract different types of users, to achieve very
different goals.
Develop a clear idea of what your goals are, then build a marketing plan
incorporating whichever combination (or all!) of these social media networking
tools can best help you achieve them.
Use LinkedIn for Real Estate Marketing: How to Start
The following steps will get you up and running with LinkedIn. This does not
cover every small detail of the setup process, but highlights the major steps
conceptually. (This information was originally published in December, 2009, and
small changes to the LinkedIn interface may have occurred since this book’s
publication.)

Create your free account at
LinkedIn.com -- Fill in the basic information (first & last name, email and password)
and select “Join Now.”
(The image on the right was taken from the
home page at http://www.linkedin.com.)
You will be required to verify your email address during the setup process.

Create a profile that is searchable and complete -- Use keywords that
will make it easy for people to find you. You control what the page says
and how detailed it is, but the more details you provide, the clearer a
portrait you paint of yourself.
Under "Profile Settings," you should pay particular attention to the information you make
available on your Public Profile. This information may be visible to people who aren't
one of your main contacts — known on LinkedIn as your "connections." In other words,
it's information you should feel comfortable for anyone to see.
After clicking on the Public Profile option, you will be taken to a field that
allows you to check (or check off) certain aspects of your public LinkedIn
profile. The default will make most of your LinkedIn profile information
available to everyone, including your picture, work summary, education
and past jobs.
If you want to restrict certain pieces of information to people who are not
“connections,” there is one feature under the personal information section
to consider: "name & location."
Your connections will always see your first and last name, but if you
wanted to set it so other people on LinkedIn can't see your full name
(just your first name and the initial of your last name), you can do so
here.


Privacy Settings – Connections Browse: By clicking "yes," all your connections can
view your list of connections. Unless you are concerned with other agents snagging
contacts and prospects from your LinkedIn list, you should leave this setting on.
There is nothing more anti-social on a social
network than not revealing whom you’re
connected to.
Profile Views: LinkedIn likes to inform users that people in their industry
have viewed their LinkedIn profile (this information appears in a widget
down the right column of your home page). There are 3 options:
a.) the default setting tells a user that someone visited his profile
page, but only by industry and general title, not your actual name,
or
b.) you can set it so they know you specifically visited, but if you value anonymous Webbrowsing, maybe skip that one, or
c.) you can also just turn it off entirely, so no information is broadcasted to other
LinkedIn users when you visit their profile.
Profile Photos: You can decide to see the photos of your connections, your network, or
everyone on LinkedIn.

Provide your educational background – Sharing where you’ve gone to
school opens up valuable connection opportunities to other alumni, to professors and
faculty, and it provides an important window into the sort of person you are… your
interests, field(s) of study, your places of employment.

Use your experience to sell your services – Your professional
background is shown, as are any recommendations you’ve been given.
There is also a segment highlighting past positions. Be sure to explain
what your primary responsibilities were; don’t simply provide the title and
assume everyone knows what that entails. Use brief, succinct phrases so
that your experience is clear, even on a quick read.

Upload a picture of yourself – This is especially important in real estate,
where your headshot offers instant recognition and familiarity.
How to Manage Your Account
1. Control what is viewed in your profile: Now that you have your LinkedIn
account and a searchable profile offering numerous interconnected networking
possibilities, you need to manage it. You can adjust anything at any point, once you see
how your details and profile choices are enhancing (or not) the expansion of your
network.
Maybe you want to change a few wording choices, maybe you’d like to choose a
different photo, maybe you’d like to expand your professional experience to include a
recent project you had initially forgotten to include when setting up your profile.
You can also control what is viewed on your profile, i.e., you may want to share your
photo with your connections only. Or maybe you’d like to restrict or limit the general
public’s access to current personal information (see section above), such as where you
worked last. You can limit certain things to your connections only.
2. Adjust your Email settings: There are 3 things you can adjust here:
a.) Contact settings: “You are receiving introductions and In-Mails,”
b.) Receiving messages: “Control how you receive emails and
notifications,” and
c.) Invitation filtering: “You are receiving all invitations.”
If you don’t want to receive emails from LinkedIn, simply check it off.
You also determine how you receive invitations and introductions.
3. Share news articles of interest or relevance: Passing along an article,
or the link to a smart industry blog
4. Join professional groups, or local area professional groups: There
are hundreds of professional groups that fit your area of specialization.
Ask and answer questions, contribute to discussions, post links to relevant
articles, sites, and blogs. Start private correspondence with fellow
professionals who help you and seem like experts in their own right.
There are also local or regional groups that focus on a given geographical
area (i.e., San Francisco city real estate agents). These groups have the
advantage of being able to meet over coffee, have face-to-face meetings
to exchange business cards. From there, you can invite them to connect.
5. Update your status, your work situation, your professional
experience
6. Thank new contacts for inviting you to join LinkedIn: Private
correspondence can lead to stronger professional relationships, which in
turn can lead to leads and client referrals. Take the opportunity to thank
members who invite you to connect, and try to build a correspondence out
from there.
Two Tips to Enhance Your LinkedIn Account
Once you’re familiar with all of the specific details and the fine points of LinkedIn,
and you understand how best to manage your growing professional network,
there are a couple of tools that can really maximize your account and help you
achieve your marketing goals.
Get a personal LinkedIn URL
LinkedIn offers “vanity URLs,” your own personal and private URL, or universal
resource locator, or your address on the web. This is a straightforward, simple
way to maximize your account. If your name were Strawberry Shortcake, your
vanity URL would look something like this:
www.LinkedIn.com/in/strawberryshortcake.
Once you have a profile on LinkedIn, follow these simple steps to get your own
URL with the network:
1. Log on to LinkedIn.com & click on “Accounts and Settings” near the
top of the screen
2. Scroll down and click “Public Profile”
3. Choose one of the suggestions offered, or create one of your own
(your custom-created URL must be 5-30 characters, letters and
numbers but no spaces)
4. Click the “Set Address” button to save your selection Now that you have a vanity
URL, publicize it! Add it to your email signature, your business cards, newsletter,
website, anywhere you would provide your contact information. You want your friends,
clients, and any prospects to be able to find you and reference your profile easily.
Utilize the “Answers” tab
Another way to maximize LinkedIn is to use the “Answers” tab, where you ask
and answer questions about topics in which you have expertise.
Showing yourself to be an expert expands your credibility, then your network –
and eventually, your client base – faster than almost any other method.
1. Log in and click the “Answers” tab near the top of the screen
2. Ask a question immediately, or scroll to find a question that you
could answer in depth, expertly
3. Browse along the right-hand side of the screen to find the topic
4. The “Personal Real Estate” is simple for the typical agent, but to
truly be an expert, look for questions you can answer in other
categories… you can even refer or recommend a friend who does
have the specific knowledge to answer the question.
Answering questions helps other LinkedIn users, it shines a
light on you and casts you as an expert in your field, and it
gets you the chance to start a private correspondence with
another member.
Providing the answer you gave was accurate and helpful, another member will
likely tell others members and friends about your help.
Even referring the LinkedIn member to a friend who does have the expertise to
help out is a great service… and another way to extend your network of contacts
and connections.