As a real estate agent – your personal brand is everything. In the past, personal real estate branding consisted of expensive high gloss magazines, full page newspaper ads, and four-color, heavy stock, triple-fold agent brochures.
Nowadays, with the economy the way that it is, and more people shifting their eyes online, real estate agents need to know how to monitor their brand on social media networks, find out who are their influencers are, and where their content is getting shared.
A huge component to managing your brand is to measure which posts on your social media sites are most effective, where and how people are sharing them, and what type of content people like the most.
Here are four of my favorite tools for measuring and monitoring your brand in social media:
1. PostRank. 
Just acquired by Google, PostRank is a great tool to measure your blog’s performance. It measures user actions, such as comments, retweets, bookmarking sites and Facebook likes. It will measure a URL’s performance even when your Twitter handle is not attached to it. So, if you have a post that goes viral, PostRank keeps track of who’s retweeting it or liking it even when your Twitter handle has been dropped from the tweet.
2. Twitalyzer. 
This is a Twitter influence-measurement tool that looks at your network, your reach and what sort of influence you have on your followers. Twitalyzer measures your impact in a percentage score, based on a lot of the same measurements as Klout. What’s really cool about Twitalyzer is its metrics page. This gives you a better idea of where you’re performing well and where you’re not.
3. Bit.ly 
This is one of the most popular URL shorteners. I use bit.ly as my default shortener in Facebook and LinkedIn. I like bit.ly because it tracks clicks to a URL I shorten, regardless of where I shorten it, and lets me see how many clicks I received. It’s also a good way for determine the the best times to post an article. For example, post a Facebook post from your blog at 9 a.m. with one bit.ly URL, then post it again with a different bit.ly URL at 2 p.m., and see which time gets you the most clicks. Do this a few times, and see if you can figure out what time of day is the best time to regularly publish your blog posts.
4. Social Mention. 
This is a great tool that works very similar to Google Analytics. You can track certain phrases on all social media sites. So if you website is “San Francisco Homes by Katie” – you can track that exact phrase on Social Mention. Once a day, you will receive an email with links to everywhere that search appeared in sites like Facebook and Twitter.
These measurement tools are by no means the final word on measurement and monitoring your brand, but in my opinion you should choose at least one to start and make it a point to use it everyday!
You would keep a close eye on any magazines or newspapers with your brand in it right? If you answered, ‘yes,’ then keep an even closer eye to your brand on social media channels.
Do you have any new tools or techniques that are better or have more features than these? Leave me a comment below!
