If you’ve gotten on the right track with social media and launched your Real Estate Blog, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube campaigns, you’re now thinking one thing, “how can I tell if this is working?”

If you aren’t measuring your success/ROI, you aren’t done.  There is more to social media marketing than setting up accounts, running ads and adding friends.

You want to be sure your efforts are effective and that you’re “doing it right.” The time it takes you to execute your social media campaign, (or cost in most cases if you have hired someone to handle your social media) should be justified by leads, new business generation, referrals and increased brand awareness.  As long as you are active in the social networking arena, you are succeeding in increasing brand awareness, but from here you’ll want to improve, strategize, and streamline your marketing plan in order to turn these Facebook users into clients.  This can only be achieved by evaluating your efforts.

For example: If you have set up a pay-per-click advertisement on Facebook & received 30 hits on a $5.00 per day budget, you can begin to compare the success of different ad campaigns, and see what is most effective when it comes increasing brand awareness and getting hits to your website. Facebook makes it easy to evaluate the success of your ad campaigns and these charts should model the way you measure your overall social networking campaign. 

Social media marketing can result in more business even if you cannot see the clear path from your YouTube video to your lead/client. Rather than assigning credit only to proven and direct correlations from your social media efforts, compare your numbers to before began your social media campaign.

Don’t sweat the numbers too soon, this is not something black and white that will happen overnight.  Social networking is not a math or science and becoming too fixated or obsessed with the facts and figures can derail your campaign, so be careful not to over-think it or abandon your initiatives.  Sites like Facebook and Twitter are a casual, informal way to make new contacts, socialize within new circles and become a pillar in your community.  While you can measure hits, analyze charts and track performance, it is still going to take your winning personality, expert advice and valuable contributions to become their friend & agent!

Talk with your Real Estate Virtual Assistant and begin planning your social media campaign.  It is important to set goals and determine a budget upfront.

Have a great weekend!

Carrie Gable and the team at RealSupport, Inc. are our “VA Quick Tip” columnists offering expertise in real estate marketing, technology and more. RealSupport’s office and team of 9 full-time staff members is located near Chicago, IL. Their successful team works virtually for many top real estate agents and brokers nationwide. Pioneers in the Real Estate Virtual Assistant industry, RealSupport offers marketing, branding, website and logo design, listing marketing, lead generation, technical support, transaction management, social networking, blogging and much more… Just ask!