Mortgage Marketing and Anti-Social Social Media

Social media is fun. It’s fast and, sadly, it’s limited. From a data perspective, it’s amazing, but it’s limited when it comes to the big-ticket item sold by those who don’t have big-ticket money to market said item. Like a loan officer who’s loan officer marketing budget is in the hundreds monthly, unlike Wells Fargo. On Facebook and Twitter words scroll by so fast that even the coolest things are missed, especially by those who have many followers or follow many people. The allure of someone with many followers is deceiving and has problems. The scroll factor is only one of those problems. It’s a fact that anyone spending hours keeping up with everyone’s tweets of Facebook posts aren’t getting much done. Unless they are impulse buyers, it’s tough to “sell” them a loan. Regarding brand awareness, consider your stats thus far…

The bigger problem is the anti-social nature of social media. It reminds me of that movie with Bruce Willis called “Surrogates.” If you haven’t seen it, well, it’s not the greatest movie, but it fits this point exactly.

Looking at marketing and tweets is something I do spend some time doing because of the nature of my position and function here at Exodus, and the so-called content that people tweet, post on Facebook and in emails is as anti-social as it gets.

Replacing social interaction with social media and then writing in an anti-social way doesn’t do the medium any good, and it certainly isn’t going to add any value to the marketing.

I’ve said on many occasions that you don’t want to mistake activity for achievement. People who dedicate themselves to “social media” activity don’t see anywhere near the achievement they thought they would when they started. While the cost of social media isn’t that inexpensive, the time put into it is extremely valuable. I won’t bore you with a lecture on the free market system, but I digress.

For example, I received an email from a loan officer just this morning. He talked about his office moving to a new location and there was something that stuck out like a sore thumb. It was disingenuous to say the least, and I see this type of thing more often than not.

Telling his clients about the move wasn’t a problem. The way he said it and what he didn’t say lost my interest by the second sentence. There was no reason to continue reading, so any value towards the end was lost. I wasn’t interested in reading on. Another problem was he kept referring to his clients as “they” and this always puts the reader outside of the message. “This email isn’t really for or about me, I’m done,” and off to the trash, it goes.

It was very non-social. I felt excluded from his priorities and I’m sure that this was the LAST thing he wanted to happen. There were other problems in the email to be sure, however, that email is gone and I don’t know what else he wanted to say.

I didn’t intend to go deep on literary devices or first, second, and third person points of view, but rather to elicit a question:

Is your social media or, better yet, your marketing non-social? Is it the opposite of what you intend for it to be? Chances are it is and this is because, with all due respect, the area of expertise of loan officers and real estate agents regarding marketing is far less than it is for loan origination and real estate sales.

This is why we freely give what we call the free Marketing Needs Assessment. Figure out what you are trying to achieve. Look at what you’ve done, what you’ve been doing and take a cursory, but serious look at what the results have been. You’ll get insight as to what works and why, and your marketing will go from activity to achievement. If you aren’t turning your clients into ambassadors for your mortgage business, someone else certainly will. It will be the best 20 minutes you spend on building a client base full of ambassadors!