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The pitch
When I talk about tech that helps real estate agents manage social media, the discussion doesn’t veer far from the benefits of posting to multiple accounts from a single dashboard. Hooray for convenience.
To truly leverage social media, you need to do more than share pictures of people jumping “Anchorman”-style in front of their pad. (FYI, this is not at all funny anymore. Even ironically.)
Agents need to provide content and methods of engagement that will pull in the clicks and browser time of people on the fence about buying, or people about to contact the agent who outspent you to appear next to the Zillow page for your listing. By using a well-orchestrated social media marketing plan, I think agents can match mettle with the confounding, ethically vague tactics marring Internet real estate marketing.
The sale
Rignite (rig night) is Web software that focuses first on proactive online outreach, using easy-to-build-and-manage contests and promotions to pull in new brand devotees. It’s so much more than a sharing and scheduling tool. Using Rignite, you can build a Facebook campaign with definitive, trackable goals.
The software cleanly maps you from one step to the next, providing metric benchmarks and analytics as you go. Using Rignite’s Campaign tool, its most compelling argument for adoption, agents can build an entire social media plan around a single listing. Name the campaign (use the property description), create some content and posting parameters, then choose a run time.
For example, maybe you’ll use the average days on market as an end goal. You can do the same to promote open houses. You can deftly maneuver between Twitter and Facebook for each campaign, and Rignite granularly measures every click, retweet, share and mention. You can learn quickly which posts engage and which fall flat. Rignite’s campaigns are also great for general branding beyond specific listings. Use them to offer discounts or incentives to remain in touch.
If you’ve ever run a Facebook contest, for example, you know how tedious it can be to manually sort through the entry posts to choose a winner. (Or even getting attention.) Rignite has a specific feature for creating and tracking contests, allowing you to rate entrants as they come in and send winners personal congratulations.
It’s powerful stuff. I envision things like carpet cleanings — or gift cards to popular restaurants close to a higher-priced listing — being used to stack responses. Maybe you push slightly discounted commissions or $250 off closing costs. Get creative. This is the stuff of effective social media.
When it comes to the nuts and bolts of usage, Rignite has its interface dialed in. The iconography is rich and intuitive, and you can sort through an array of social media streams with visual ease. “My Communities” is your up-to-the-minute look, allowing you to respond quickly to clients and followers. Streams can be customized by your campaign, hashtags or profiles, or by a Watch List to monitor specific influencers. (Inman comes to mind.) Read and react.
Another standout in the Rignite feature set is “case assignments.” This is meant to allow team members to assign social media engagement tasks to one another. For example, Betty can be requested to respond to a Facebook question about her post. Ed can be assigned his “case” to retweet something nice his client said about the company.
Team leaders can create templates for specific kinds of posts, which are super handy if a particular property always gets the same question, such as “Is it true a school is being built in this neighborhood?”
Campaign reports are viewable through the quickly scannable Dashboard view. Everything you need to track can be seen, measured and exported, a great way to keep clients up-to-date on your marketing progress. You can also use the Gallery tool to store common image themes or property photos during a listing run, or for contests and employee headshots.
The Calendar view may be where one ends up spending a good amount of time logged in to Rignite. All of your campaigns can be spread before you, weeks at a time. Hovering over a post icon brings up all that post’s vitals, and you can still edit it if needed. If you notice a couple of days are post-heavy, simply drag and drop to another day. Easy.
The software’s real value isn’t in its ones and zeros; it’s in its ability to walk nonmarketing experts through inherently complicated online marketing campaign management and measuring efforts.
The close
Rignite makes reactive and proactive social media marketing quick and compelling. This is a true marketer’s tool. I don’t think there’s any overkill here, no fatty features or excess interface.
This suite of social media marketing prowess will best meet the needs of larger teams, simply by the nature of its collaboration tools. Also, the midtier package at $49.99 per user-month is the price point at which Campaigns can be used; and that’s what you want.
For real estate companies that want to effectively traverse the online media landscape, and have a structure that can internally support a uniform marketing strategy, Rignite can really make your brand be heard among the din of those who just click and share.
Do you use Rignite? What do you think? Leave a comment and let us know!
Do you have a product for our tech expert to review? Email Craig Rowe.
