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Social media has grown exponentially since last year’s conference, so this year, we invited Ashley Norman, the director of social media at CP’s PR firm, to share her insight on how our agents can use these tools to help grow their businesses.

Ashley gave practical tips for agents to take home and start implementing to enhance their social media presence. She delved deeper into the topic and below are some of the highlights from her presentation.

Starting the conversation:
Consumers don’t want advertising pushed on them anymore, so agents need to move away from traditional marketing and start conversing online. Engaging with fans and followers by staying active in the online communities is important.  The two main platforms Ashley went into were Facebook and Twitter.

Facebook = Cultivating brand advocates while Twitter = Generating short term buzz.
So, which one is better for your CP franchise? Perhaps both? Here’s the breakdown:

Facebook:
Facebook allows agents to post more information in one place and for CP agents, Ashley recommends creating Facebook fan pages to allow linking your personal brand with your professional business persona.

Agents can customize Facebook tabs for their CP fan page on http://bit.ly/2yHJm3. Since social media is all about transparency, this is a great tool for agents to personalize their online brands even more.

Although social media can be time consuming, many agents are ahead of the game and starting to seal deals based on relationships cultivated using social media. Ashley suggests using Facebook analytics to measure success on your invested time on social media. Fan pages are enabled to measure metrics of who is looking at the page, which is just another benefit.

Twitter:
Twitter, on the other hand is short bursts of information (140 characters max) and a great way to share links, information and ideas. It helps build your personal brand and is great for contests and networking with audiences with similar shared interests (like cruising or other niche markets.)

Six degrees of separation is no longer how people are connected - social networking sites merge worlds together that would not necessarily blend. So, CP agents can take advantage of these new platforms and start enhancing their personal brands.

Easy tip to grow fan base: Embed your Facebook Web page address (did you personalize it?) in your e-mail signature. Don’t forget to include a link to your Twitter handle as well.

Are you reading this post and still lost? No worries. There are some great tools on the new CPU site to help get you started and learn the basics of social media.

- Caitlin Murphy