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5 Ways to Embrace Social Media in Real Estate Crowdfunding
By Adam Gower Ph.D.
It’s impossible to know what you’re missing out on when you don’t know what you’re missing out on, and if you think that using social media isn’t relevant to raising capital for your real estate project then, well, you’re missing out!
As investors turn to real estate as a viable option to grow and diversify their investment portfolios, social media is increasingly becoming a necessity to reach prospects and grow a relationship built on trust. If you’re hesitating to jump into social media for any reason, it’s time to get over any concerns you may have and to start getting active – it’s not that difficult and not having a presence online could render any others efforts you make obsolete.
While there are legitimate reasons for keeping you away; worried it will become a time sink, being camera or microphone shy, concerns about trolls, the benefits far outweigh the inconveniences and barriers and in this article we’ll take a look at a few a compelling reasons why you shouldn’t hesitate any longer to get on social media to raise capital for your real estate projects.
Transparency Isn’t Sharing Everything
When we hear about being more transparent on social media, the instant reaction is to shut it down before you begin. The word “transparency” feels a bit too invasive and scary on its own.
Luckily, transparency on social media isn’t the same as transparency in your personal life.
You don’t have to share everything. You don’t have to gush about all your secrets. Full transparency doesn’t mean sharing everything and it certainly doesn’t mean you need to share your personal life. All it really means for you to be transparent on social media is to be more open with your communication about the skills that you have, both your strengths and how you ameliorate your weaknesses.
Discussing the pros and cons of a deal or a location, being forthright about a missed opportunity, explaining how you discovered and managed unexpected maintenance issues in a building you acquired and how you overcame them, all serve to demonstrate to prospective investors that real estate investing is fallible, that the unexpected must be expected (????).
Being transparent online by sharing the challenges of real estate investing demonstrates not that you are in some way weak because you missed something, but it reinforces that you are a seasoned expert who knows how to handle anything that comes your way.
There’s an important difference between the two.
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Social Media Is Just a Conversation Tool
Imagine hosting an investor meet and greet event at a hotel or social event hall. Maybe you have speakers or important people who come to present, but the main focus is getting around and speaking to different investors and connecting people together. Social media is just the same – but it is open 24/7 and with a far wider reach.
It’s true that social media doesn’t give you the same personal connection as face to face interactions, but it can make it easier for you to reach a greater number of people at once. People can jump in and interact with you in their own time. Instead of trying to coordinate a ton of separate meetings and trying to be in the same place at the same time, use social media to make and maintain connections. Use it as it’s intended.
The purpose of social media is to facilitate social interactions and conversations between people. So, converse with people. Have a chat. There’s a place for press releases and official language, but there’s also a place (arguably a much larger place) for more casual conversation with your prospects and existing investors.
Turn Negative Interactions into Brand Enhancement
Trolls exist. They are the people who will say ghastly things about and to you online without necessarily even having any kind of direct experience of working with you. People who are genuinely dissatisfied with your business also exist. Doubters, skeptics, and chronically pessimistic people exist.
Don’t let any of these groups of people dissuade you from publishing content and having a conversation. People of all types are present on social media and you don’t get to pick and choose who to exclude from the conversation.
Turn negative sentiments, comments, or interactions into a good look for your brand. Instead of ignoring them, address the concerns and face situations head on. Your responses will be read by more than just the initial commenter. Something you say could have an impact on the next person reading it, even if it does nothing to change the mind of the person you’re talking with.
Social media is like living in a TV show. People anywhere can come and look at what you’re doing, who you’re talking to, and what you’re saying at any time. You won’t know who’s looking and you have no control over how they react or what they do to engage with you. Remember to keep your communications consistent and stick to your brand image as you’re responding, but always look for the chance to turn negative interactions into something good for you.
"And keep this in mind; it’s just a numbers game."
You remember the bell curve from high school math? The graph with a large bulge in the middle where the vast majority of an audience reside and on the extremes are fewer and fewer, both positive and negative. Well for ever person who responds negatively to your online posts, there’s at least one person out there who is positively inclined to invest with you. Keep talking to that person, keep your attention on them and they’ll become your biggest investors.
Content Comes in All Forms
Don’t feel pressured to produce and publish a specific type of content. With the right strategy and plan in place, you can make an effective use of social media with any type of content format. Video may be the most popular format for consumption right now, but that doesn’t mean you need to produce and publish videos. You can still do well with audio content, visual imagery – real estate is perfect for the use of photography – and the written word, of course, in the form of blogs and articles.
Work with what makes sense for your company, your brand, your image, your message and your projects.
If your message doesn’t come across well in a particular format, or if you don’t have the capabilities to produce consistently high-quality content in a certain format, choose a different one. Try to be flexible and find what works for you – don’t worry about what anyone else is doing, limit yourself to what you do well and you’ll stand out from the crowd.
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Social Media Is the Perfect Platform for Modern Investment Deals
Real estate investment is associated with stuffy board rooms, fancy meetings at expensive country clubs, and high dollar projects soliciting big minimum investments. It’s time to move past the traditional, image of exclusivity in real estate investing. With modern crowdfunding, you can reach a much larger audience of prospects on social media than you could by interacting with your personal network and connections.
Offer the opportunity to invest in your projects to the millions of investors who have never before had access by using social media and see your capital pipeline expand exponentially.
Think of the future also and embrace the next generation of investors. Millennials are the first generation to grow up with social media in their daily lives. Not all millennials are heavily involved in social media, but a large portion are, and they engage with it on a regular basis. You’ll have the perfect outlet to reach them directly through social media, giving you the chance to put your real estate investment offerings in their sightlines on a regular basis. And it is this generation that will be there during the next downturn, ready to help you capitalize the flood of opportunistic distressed deals that come your way.
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If you avoid social media and stick with traditional channels, you run the risk of being passed by as other sponsors embrace these methods of communication and outreach. As intimidating and pointless as social media might feel to you now, you probably won’t feel the same way when you start seeing other sponsors increasingly heavily using the media to raise capital online.
Don’t wait until it’s too late to get started. If you want to stay ahead of the curve, if you want to raise more capital than you have done before from an alternate and almost limitless resource, then you must be present on social media.
And the best time to get started is right now.
If you have only just started in real estate development, have completed no deals, have no email list, but know you want the freedom and wealth being a real estate developer brings, then I suggest your first step is to start evaluating deals so you can recognize a good one when you see it.
Here’s where you should start. You’ll learn everything you need to know – the different types of real estate, different development strategies, how real estate cycles influence the market, and all about due diligence.
If you want to find deals and raise money for them so you can start your real estate development business, then learning how to conduct due diligence so you can pitch your deals better to investors is a great place to start.
If you’ve already purchased one or more real estate project and are seeing more opportunities than you can finance, then now is the time to start building your investor network so you can finance all your next deals quicker.
You’ve already got some momentum; now start finding and educating prospects about what you’re doing so you can build an email list of people to pitch to when you’re ready to raise money for your next deal.
This is what we build for private clients all the time – it’s called the Investor Acquisition System and you can access the entire program right here so you can find prospects, and convert them into being deep pocketed, repeat investors in your deals.
If you are a seasoned pro with multi-cycle experience, a substantial portfolio, a decent deal pipeline, and find yourself spending too much time raising equity capital because you’re still doing it in-person, then it’s time you put technology to work for you.
The wonderful thing about doing this is that you’re not going to be doing anything different than you’re already doing and, guess what, you’ll never have to sit through investor meetings again.
Sounds crazy I know, but I lay the whole thing out for you in this white board workshop where I personally show you exactly what it takes for you to transform your equity raising into a fully automated, capital raising machine so you can find new investors while increasing commitments from your existing network.
