Recycle blogs to boost estate agency PR

Penny Haywood Calder is the MD of PR agency PHPR and is hugely respected for both her online and offline expertise, so I was delighted when she answered a call for guest bloggers that I put out on the 4Networking website.

Today, Penny writes about how you can re-use and recycle your social media content to maximise the value of the effort you put in.

"Publicity is the oxygen of business – there are no sales if no-one has heard of you.


A company I know has used social media to reduce a £100,000 marketing budget down to £20,000. With that, they have grown the business from 4 employees to 15 with 90,000 customers in 8 countries during the recession.

Most people try to pinpoint: what was the one publicity tool that worked. But no single action works without the trust and recognition built up by a combination of efforts. This cumulative effect works better (creates buzz) if you can get all those things happening within a fairly tight timescale – say a month.

The trick is to use the free social media tools to accelerate all those online encounters.

OK, you are interested in your local area, but the two-way reply option with social media like Facebook, Twitter and Linked-In allows you to attract and interact individually, building relationships based on common niches like locality. And you'll catch the people thinking of moving into the area with online tools. They could be anywhere.

The beauty of a blog or news piece is that it gives you the opportunity to demonstrate your expertise and experience, building the trust that will ensure that people will be comfortable buying from you.

Then it's actually not that much extra effort to take a blog piece and turn it into a news release or an article to be posted to online media sites and the local media.

Then an edited version of the blog post in 120* characters (plus a link to the blog post) makes a good teaser post for Twitter, Facebook, and your Linked-In status updates. You can also cut ‘n' paste that link and add an extra sentence or two to make it relevant to online forums and the relevant Linked-In group forums.

(* I use 120 characters so there's an extra 20 characters left over which allows people to re-tweet your post on Twitter.)
Using tools like Hootsuite or Ping.fm, makes it much easier to quickly post to multiple social media sites. Don't forget the headline is the best place to put a useful search engine term to boost your SEO results on Google.

Finally, a few blog posts can be edited into an e-newsletter, so there you go, recycling again!

The Bottom Line

No matter what online activity you get up to, you need to monitor the bottom line. You can set up Google news alerts to monitor your conversations. Plus use your website analytics to see what effect you are having on your web traffic.

I'd also suggest working out how well you are converting site traffic into sales enquires, and sales enquires into actual sales. There's no point in spending time and/or money drumming up new site traffic if the calls to action on your site are too few, or not effective. Or wasting sales enquiries if you are not converting them. Fixing the conversion rates is a lot cheaper than getting new traffic or sales enquiries."

Penny Haywood Calder
Email: penny@phpr.co.uk
Blog & website at http://www.phpr.co.uk/
http://uk.linkedin.com/in/phprltd
http://twitter.com/pennyhaywood