To say that real estate professionals are time-crunched may be one of the greatest understatements pertaining to the industry. For agents and brokers who are on call around the clock, 24/7, there’s no question that their time is both precious and limited. In addition to the necessary time-management skills required to be successful, technology has become increasingly demanding as agents realize the importance of social media and blogging. What was once viewed as an overwhelming, yet necessary evil has now transformed into a highly regarded method for lead capture, communication, and engagement with the hungry buyers and motivated sellers of today. Think you don’t have the time to maintain your online presence? Lumentus Social™ might make you think twice.
For those looking for a social media solution and real estate news, Lumentus Social makes it easier than ever to fully utilize everything social media has to offer in order to bolster your business. The Lumentus platform identifies, organizes and curates real estate information that’s important to your team or market, and then provides easy-to-use tools to help share this info and engage your target audience. Though the knowledge of new and social media may differ among various agents, Lumentus Social helps even the playing field, offering more effective online communication for entire organizations, at large.
Lumentus Social is a division of Lumentus, an integrated communication company. “We solve communication challenges, like a PR firm, but with a technology focus,” says COO and Managing Partner Adam Selig. “Social media is hard. People don’t know what they should be posting and how they should be engaging through their social media channels,” he says.
In addition to the “what” and the “how” is the “when;” after all, the most time-consuming aspect of social media is finding relevant content to put in front of your audience, whether it be sharing useful information from a trusted blog or source, to writing your own blog full of real estate content. By capturing fresh, relevant and local real estate news for you and presenting it in an easy-to-read, shareable way, Lumentus Social can cut the required time it takes you to fill your pages, opening up your schedule for more direct client contact.
There’s a constant stream of information flowing from Lumentus Social at all times. Informative, educational and even entertaining content can always be found, including industry insights, community news, and lifestyle information, all of which have an impactful relevance with buyer and seller clients looking to conduct their own real estate business in the near future. By sharing this information, you can become your clients’ No. 1, go-to source when it comes to real estate news and information. Furthermore, social media allows agents to put their best face forward 24/7 on the Web, all while building stronger relationships and a lengthier client list, thereby growing a healthy business.
Having a provided feed of content full of stories from RISMedia and other popular real estate news sources doesn’t mean you can’t make the content you share your own. Lumentus Social provides the fixings to completely customize the content based on your own needs. Adding your own commentary or updating your own visuals is a simple way to truly brand the feed to yourself, or even your company. After customizing, agents and brokers can schedule their posts for future times and dates. In just 15-20 minutes, before that first cup of morning coffee is slugged down, agents can schedule an entire social media publishing calendar for the week.
Brokers can even opt to customize data streams for their agents, including the ability to make the data hyper-local—a definite plus for any real estate professional in any market.
“Agents know what a huge opportunity social media is, but they just haven’t worked it into their routine,” says Cassandra Bollinger, business development/client services manager for Lumentus. “It’s low on the list of priorities. To have a tool and platform that allows the broker to do it for them, while not taking over anyone’s pages but adding to them, is a huge timesaver and makes the process very efficient.”
To compete with other news aggregators on the market, Lumentus’ technology was created to remove bad data, ensuring that the information presented to agents for consideration is extremely relevant and shareable. Created by the company’s technology department under Ed Posnak, lead technology architect, Lumentus’ filtering system sorts the valuable goods into topics, while removing anything that isn’t up to par.
“The user looks at one dashboard and has the ability to move through and make a selection. Within minutes, the post will be in the correct format for LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and more, all done from one place, at one time, from one dashboard,” says Bollinger.
“We aggregate news feeds as well as Facebook and Twitter feeds,” says Posnak. “The filtering technology we developed, combined with aggregation, gives you this very customized news feed that’s much more engaging than what aggregation alone would provide.”
Lumentus saw a challenge inherent in the real estate industry—an alarming amount of agents who haven’t yet mastered the art of social media.