What is Your Anticipated Social Media Marketing Budget?

Question

After having read a lot of bad and some good advice on social media marketing; I am curious as to how much an average investor spends on advertising on social media and the ROI? If you can list the sites you have marketing campaigns on and how much you may spend in a month or year?

Chris Jackson · Answer

@Richard D.  let me ask you a broader question, when you say how much is your social media marketing budget, who are you marketing to and for what REI business model? Seller for wholesaling?  Sellers for multifamily purchases? etc  Buyers for wholesaling? Investors for flips, multifamily raises etc?  Each one of these has their own strategy. looking for investors people need to be careful. If you are raising money and you are all set with a PPM for a 506(c) accredited investors, rock on. But I suspect not. Having said that you can find investors possibly through social media if you are very careful and do it the correct way but seriously I lean towards @Jay Hinrichs  style. Im pretty new school when it comes to the tech of REI. I am a full on tech bro , know how to code and know how to blow out marketing when I want to but do you know when things began to click for me in my real estate career? When I took it old school and added a new school hybrid. What do I mean? You are not going to win unless you rock an old school relationship building approach. Phone calls, emails, drives home in the car from work or trips contacting people and staying in touch. Developing relationships with people. New school from the sense of you can implement some very cool tools to help you keep in touch with more people in a meaningful and authentic way then one could before without using these tools. I am leaning towards a raising money approach here but when you take that same old school mentality of building relationships and actually giving a sh@t about people and their lives you bring that to the sell side and buy side for say wholesaling or even sellers of big multifamily or even broker relationships or PM company relationships.

So lets come back from my rant. Yes do I think you can roll social media for brand awareness in any of the REI business models, yes, yes I do but you need to go old school immediately when that lead comes in whatever the pipeline its filling. I am now a full on phone call guy. Yeah I can get down with many emails at once and keep relationships going by email but I have an internal clock when I know its time to get off the freaking computer and have some real convos with people to get to know them even further.  This happens with sellers too, someone calls you for say a wholesaling lead on a house they are selling. I give the seller the option of their preferred communication medium. I've closed deals by text only. But that's an outlier, its mainly phone time then you can keep the convo going by text and bring it back to phone if things require more voice inflection and correct tonality. Texts can get really gross very quickly if you are not careful.

So my point is who cares what the budget is as long as you are targeting the right target in your message, getting people to come to you and then taking it to old school tactics that work. My overall message is, the time you spend on the creative for social media and its social media spend needs to be checked against the time and money you are spending on say, calling every lead back for 3 hours and leaving voicemails.

hope that helps

Jay Hinrichs · Answer

I only spend whatever it cost to be on BP  :)  I know I am not the average consumer.. but I would not even for a minute consider doing business with anyone on Facebook or and I don't have tweeting or any of the other stuff.. to anonymous and to many social scammers.. not worth it to me..

Jay Hinrichs · Answer

@Mike Flora  Bruce is the MAN  did he also mention that he thought Multi was frothy though  as in overvalued and has some risk.. ???  did he mention his building in Florida ?

Jay Hinrichs · Answer

@Richard D.  however my wife as a RESI  RE broker she uses it.. she puts all her listings on it.. and advertises her open houses and she thinks it creates traffic .. as a lot of the younger buyers use it.. so play to your market as it were.

in the finance side of what I do.. Its just too many fakes for me to spend the time weeding through them.. in REAL estate sales your always weeding through people.. but in finance in my VERY narrow niche just don't have time for wanna be or like I said all talk no cattle.

Jay Hinrichs · Answer

@Richard D.  I am just an old dude.. and the end of a long career.. I think for most starting out they probably need to figure this out....  for me I simply don't need it.. or want to take the time to learn it  LOL  my rolodex is all ready pretty fat.

Richard D. · Answer

@Chris Jackson you went way to the scope of what I envisioned the responses for my topic to be. You hit some of the key points that I try and make to REIs here on BP. Social media as a platform should be used in context. It shouldn't be avoided as @Jay Hinrichs states or you end up leaving potential clients and referrals to clients for someone else to scoop in and build working relationships with.

Social media as a whole is the new medium that can be used as a relationship building tool. It is not the end all be all to relationship building, but it gives you a great, easy starting point. Can anyone name another medium to contact people you do not know that will give you a positive return on your contact, without spending a dime?

Chris back to your rant, you are looking at the idea from an investor perspective, which I get and respect. It has a very old school approach. But when you look at the future of marketing and communications over the next 20, 30, even 40 years; the trend is heading digital. Massively digital. If you do not produce content to contact consumers of any product or investment opportunity on a mobile scale, the consumer of those things will begin to ignore you. You will find it more and more difficult to compete. If you are in your 50's 60's or 70's, I wouldn't expect to see much from these generations as a willingness to adapt. But if you are 20's 30's or 40's; you will need to adapt, or your going to get left out.

The two biggest things that you stated in your rant are "...roll social media for brand awareness..." and "...building relationships and actually giving a sh@t about people and their lives..." The biggest plus about social media is that people will freely tell you about their lives on their social media pages, right down to where they buy their underwear.  You want to learn and engage people where they are. If you work your social media correctly, not only do you build that business relationship, you build that lifelong lasting relationship.

Steve Bracero · Answer

@Richard D.

This is a great topic!

I am not spending on social- youtube, instagram, facebook, twitter, website

What is Your Anticipated Social Media Marketing Budget?

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