Social Media Improvement Part 3 - Don’t Make It Everything

Summary:

This is part three of our series about how to improve on social media. This episode is about making sure you are on and using multiple platforms and not using social media as your end-all, be-all for communication with your clients. You might be thinking “Well, wait a second, John. We've been talking about how important social media is and how great it is for my business. Why are you now telling me not to make it my everything?”

I had an issue on April 1. I woke up to what felt like a terrible April fool's joke. My Facebook account was shut down along with 3,500 Facebook friends and connections I had built over a period of 15 years. Gone instantly. The good news was that it turned out to just be a huge glitch. There was a New York Post article that said many Facebook accounts were disabled for no apparent reason. But at the time, I thought my account was completely gone. So I learned in that moment that one social media platform cannot be the only place you store your information. I had clients I didn't even have phone numbers for, because we would just message on Facebook Messenger all the time.

Lessons learned

• Yes, use the social media platforms, but do not depend on them.
• Facebook cannot be the only place your content and contacts are stored. Get client phone numbers, email addresses, and keep them somewhere off of social media.
• You can download your entire Facebook account history (all your friends, pictures, uploads, everything you've ever put on the platform). Do it now just in case, God forbid, you ever lose your account.
• Facebook and other platforms can and do shut people down for no reason. It can happen to you, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
• When people search for a Realtor, the more that you have showing up in Google search results, the better. You want people to find your business even if your social media accounts were to disappear. That's why I've started doing a better job with that and having a website created and blog posts written.
• It was a huge lesson for me to stop putting all my eggs in one basket.

I hope this is helpful for you. Think about this in your business. Yes, social media is great. It's amazing, but it cannot be everything. One social media platform cannot be the only thing you use to grow and promote your business. Diversify.

Show notes and blog posts brought to you by Harshman Services and Realtor Emails.