How Smart Real Estate Professionals are Using Social Media to Help, Not Sell

Are you cutting through the clutter and creating a memorable marketing experience?I recently had the opportunity to sit down with New York Times Best Selling Author Jay Baer and discuss how real estate professionals can embrace the concept of helping, not selling.Jay is a renowned marketing strategist and the author of YouTility and his latest book, "YouTility for Real Estate: How Smart Real Estate Professionals are Helping, Not Selling."Smart real estate professionals are applying the concepts of Youtility, giving away information and resources for free, to differentiate and dominate by providing real value to clients and prospective clients.What You'll Learn:- How to create differentiation in your local marketplace- The shift from selling to helping and how it can transform your business- What the power of "friend of mind awareness" can do for your business- How to be useful, transparent and relevant to your target marketRead a few of the highlights below and then watch the full interview.

How Real Estate Professionals are Using Social Media

Rebekah: Can you explain Youtility and what it means to a real estate professional?

Jay: The principle of Youtility and one of the main tenets of Youtility is self-serve information. It's letting people have access to information without having to contact you or have a meeting with you or telephone call with you or Hangout with you. That kind of self-serve information can be really challenging because you're like,

"Hey, I spent all this time, either in school or in business to learn these things, and now you're saying give that all away?"

But here's the thing and how Youtility works - you give away knowledge snacks to sell information meals. So, you're giving away little bits of what you know, a taste at a time as an hors d'oeuvre and you use those hors d'oeuvres to get people to,A. Trust youB. Believe in youAnd after that happens, then they want to actually have a relationship with you but that takes some time and it takes some measure of courage to actually give away what you know, even a little bit at a time.Rebekah: One of the biggest misconceptions I see, no matter what umbrella you’re under, is that a real estate professional is still a personal brand. I loved your examples of my friends Raj Qsar and Anne Jones and how they're standing out online.Jay: Raj is from The Boutique Real Estate Group and their use of high-end real estate video is incredible. It doesn't just say, "Hey, here, look, they have a fence. Look! A pool." It actually tells a story.It's almost like a mini documentary film that not only gives you what might be classified as a video brochure, but this tells an emotional story.

In some cases, there are actually actors in their real estate movies. It ties back to sort of an emotional level and this will probably be a corny way to say this is, but they create videos that make a house feel like a home.Anne Jones, a real estate professional in Tacoma, is in a completely different market and uses video in a very different way. Anne gives you a behind the scenes look into her business and shares how cost effective using video to showcase a home can truly can be.Anne hires a professional to do those video tours, but she also uses Google Hangouts to just sit down and talk about what she does. She has a willingness to give information away -- "Here's exactly how I do this and here's the budget and I'm not holding anything back."I think that is particularly admirable because the real estate industry has historically tended to say, "This is my secret. I'm not going to share my secret with you."

My Takeaways

I was incredibly honored to sit down with Jay and loved discussing how so many real estate professionals are crushing it within their local market. However, my key takeaway was this.No matter your industry, you always have a chance to shape and mold perception. You have the opportunity to change how information is shared and how potential clients find and interact with you. Just because your competition pushes out content or promotes the hard sell -- all off the time -- doesn't mean you have to.Ask yourself every day, how can I help, not sell to my potential customer and how can I be a benefit that will make them naturally want to connect, engage and interact?As Jay says, "the difference between helping and selling is just two letters. But those letters make all the difference. Your company needs to become a YOUtility. Sell something, and you make a customer. Help someone, and you make a customer for life."

Watch the Full Interview Here