Real Estate Software expert and Lucernex President Joe Valeri (see Joe’s management summary here) discusses the use of social media in the real estate industry.

It will probably surprise you as much as it did me when you learn that real estate professionals are the number one user of social media for finding business resources Business.com’s Social Media Benchmark 2009. So what are real estate professionals using social media for and which sites are they using most. The study linked above will tell you that the most common social media use is attending webinars and watching podcasts. A bit more research shows that there are thousands of real estate professionals on the major social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and even Twitter. While these tools are useful for finding out a little about a person and for providing contact information, other real estate professionals are setting themselves apart by creating Blogs and other web resources to provide industry information that many will benefit from. For example The Tenant Advisor: http://www.coydavidson.com/ is a good example of how a single house can use social media to provide information about their market while promoting themselves. The writer also recently provided “scores” for the effectiveness of social media for his business.

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