When writing for borrowers, brokers should discuss things such as loan products, interest rates, government incentives, consumer impacts related to industry news, tips for understanding the mortgage process and insights about finding the best deal.

On the other hand, if you're writing for an industry audience in an effort to build new partnerships, your content should focus on the impact of national real estate finance news and proposed solutions to industry problems. You also should consider sharing links to other online resources your audience might not know about.

If your readers find these sites useful, they'll often remember how they learned about them.

Shared responsibility

Although it might be tempting to hand full responsibility for a company blog or social-media site to a single executive, this often isn't a good decision or an effective use of human resources.

It also can become a burden for a single person. In many cases, the site will fall behind and the audience will fade.

A better solution involves tasking an entire team of executives to craft content and establishing a point person or department to handle administration and posting. If you have enough employees to take this route and decide to do so, make sure to capitalize on your executive team's knowledge and experience. Also, establish a schedule for how often you will update your sites. Weekly is barely adequate; three times a week is good; daily is great. Multiple times a day is fantastic.

In addition, make sure to assign an administrator who will be in charge of building and managing the editorial calendar.

The same person should send reminders that keep your bloggers and other social-media contributors on track and on deadline. The administrator also can help with the writing and should be responsible for ensuring all published content meets company standards and abides by policy guidelines.

Whatever direction you decide to take with social media, make sure you consider your business goals and the expectations of the modern online audience.

Rick Grant is the principal at Rick Grant & Associates, a marketing communications and public relations consultancy in Jim Thorpe, Pa. He is the former managing editor of Broker magazine and Mortgage Technology magazine and is the former editor of Real Estate Technology Insight. He also produced online content for Office.com. Grant writes for a number of trade publications and is an avid blogger. He can be reached at rick@rickgrant.net or at (570) 325-2818.

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