A mortgage broker called me yesterday to ask for some advice on social sharing after hearing me speak at a recent event. She works for a bank in a small central Kentucky town and wanted help with the technical end of sharing good content.
- Go to http://alerts.google.com. Login or create a Google account if you don’t have one. They’re free. In the box that says, “Create an alert about…” type in “when buying a home” and include the quotation marks. Now subscribe to the updates via email daily. I told her she would then get a new email everyday with any new article that appeared online with the phrase “when buying a home” in it. The reason I chose that phrase was it was one that would really only be used when someone wrote advice to an audience about buying a home. Putting your search thinking in line with what a journalist would write when giving that kind of advice will help you get better results.
- Go to http://feedly.com. Login or create an account. In the “Find Feeds & Boards” button (the one with the + sign in the left side bar), click, then use the search bar on that page to type in “home buying” or “mortgages” or “Brad Pitt” or whatever topics you think your audience may be interested in. As the choices of blogs and websites come up on that page, add them to your Feedly so you can log back in and see new content from those websites regularly. If there’s a website you want to add to Feedly, like a small town newspaper, just copy and paste it’s URL into the search bar and Feedly will go find it’s “feed.”
- Now check your email daily. Or go to Feedly as part of your morning routine, find and article or two your audience would be interested in and share it on your social networks. For more effectiveness with social sharing, use HootSuite, Buffer, SproutSocial or some other management platform that allows you to queue multiple pieces of content to share out across the day. Or one that lets you manually choose a time to share content rather than all at once, in real time.
And that’s it. Unless you want to pay for pro accounts for any of those softwares listed above, you can be a social share machine for an investment of a little time and exactly $0.00.
The final thing I told her was that in a small town, you just need to use your instincts. Be a good community resource and friend. Small town folks buy from people they know. So build a network of people on Facebook (or whatever social network you choose) who you can be a good resource to and who can come to rely on you for useful content. Then when they’re ready to buy, you’ll already be in position to win their business.
That’s one way to do it. What are your ideas? The comments are yours.