Most of the work of being a Mortgage Broker is in building relationships and expanding one’s network. To that end, we want to highlight two tools that can be very useful for Brokers in 2017.
Facebook Live
Facebook Live is exactly what it sounds like. Using just your smartphone, you broadcast live video via Facebook. Why Facebook, and why live? The secret is in the distribution.
Facebook sends notifications to a large part of your network when you start recording live, and after your recording is over, changes them to from “is live” to “was live.” This has the effect of bringing in load of views, and for every interaction your video gets (reactions, comments, shares), it gets several more views. The results may surprise you, especially if you’ve ever uploaded a video to Youtube only to see it collect almost no views at all. Need proof? Check out the success of Chewbacca Mom. At the time of this writing, it has over 162M views.
Desirée Dupuis, Three Sixty Financial Group
“Facebook Live is an excellent tool for marketing through broadcasting,” says Desirée Dupuis
of Three Sixty Financial Group, whose Facebook Live videos have collected 1000s of views. “I have used it for fundraisers, for personal marketing, broadcasting from the Chamber Business Awards, and also from The Port Moody Spike Awards. It’s so easy to share what you are doing, for promotion, education, and to broadcast live from events to help with marketing.”
If you’re looking for an expedient way to send updates to your network, you could do a lot worse than Facebook Live as a distribution channel. The only problem is what to talk about.
What to Talk About
You can record to Facebook Live from your company or business Facebook Page, or from your personal account. In either case, you could give your network updates on market conditions, Lender requirements, interest rate predictions, and more. You could celebrate a new mortgage on camera with clients (with their permission of course). You could do the same on the day those same clients get the keys to their new home. Or you could feature any number of interests you have in your personal life, and mention just once what you as a profession. Go live from the tennis court, or the mountain top, or the sidelines at the soccer game, or at the craft fair, or the school fundraiser. Have some fun and connect with people. Think about your lighting, and holding the camera still, but it doesn’t have to be Hollywood quality; people like things that are real so have some fun with it.
LinkedIn Pulse
If you’re not already building your network on LinkedIn, you probably should be. It’s a social network for professional grown-ups, but has become so much more. Recruiters have begun to forgo the traditional resume in favour of the LinkedIn profile, and the giant network has also become a terrific source of content. Their blogging tool, “Pulse,” is aptly named. From your personal profile, you can choose to publish blog posts that will be shown to people in your network when they login and use the app, and will see some distribution to other viewers based on the content topic and amount of engagement.
Our VP of Business Development Lee Noble has used LinkedIn Pulse to re-post the blog articles he writes for our site, and they’ve received more views as a result, both from his network and from industry insiders.
Have something to say about the state of mortgage lending, the interest rates, or other stories to share? LinkedIn Pulse will help make sure that it gets seen, and all in the context of the world’s largest professional social network. You can’t buy that kind of credibility, and in this case, you don’t have to.
Want some other tips on the use of social media for Brokers? Check out our Canadian Mortgage Broker’s Guide to Social Media.