Welcome to “Landlords’ Barometer #7” where my message this week is: “If you’re not contributing to trending topics, you’re not at the party!”

I thought I would take a moment to explain why trending topics are important to you as agents.

The most important thing to remember is that the most up to date information is always the most relevant to the community.

People are hungry for news and fresh inputs and when a story or issue gains huge traction it creates “trending topics” on the social web.

Trending topics are topics that are getting a lot of eyeballs/views, a lot of comments, or a lot of “likes”.

This is relevant to you as an agent for three reasons:

1. You can leverage trending topics to deliver eyeballs to your proposition. It’s the equivalent of walking into a crowded pub instead of a pub with one man and his dog at the bar. It’s likely that your message will go further because there are more people engaged on the topic and they create a critical mass that sucks in lots more eyeballs.

A good example of this is the Autumn Statement where the Chancellor pulled a big rabbit out of a small hat with the announcement about Stamp Duty reform.

As soon as we heard about this at Property Tribes, we created content with this information and then added industry reactions as they came in. We also sent a “breaking news” emailer to our members.

We were actually in our car driving back from Dorset and got the breaking news emailer from our news partner, Property Industry Eye. I am all set up with internet in the car to be able to post from my passenger seat!

Autumn Statement – Stamp Duty Land Tax Reform

This action delivered a huge spike of traffic to our site. (We use an app called Chartbeat to see what is gaining traction on our site.)

Twitter is a great aggregator, so always be sure to use hashtags to get your tweets into the trending information stream.

2. Trending topics indicate what consumers are interested in. When you understand that, you can frame your proposition around it and create original content to serve the needs of the consumer.

Good social media strategy would be to create a blog about Stamp Duty reform with a comment from your MD, personalising it to your business and relating it to property prices in your area, perhaps with some examples, or how stamp duty reform will affect landlord acquisition decisions in your area.

However, to benefit from trending topics, you must be quick off the mark. A blog next week about Stamp Duty reform will be old news. Always strike while the iron is hot!

On Monday night, I live blogged “Britain’s Property Boom” which was broadcast by C4 “Dispatches”.

The second the programme finished I wrote my summary and pressed “publish”. This again delivered a spike of eyeballs to our site because people wanted to talk and discuss the programme and others who had missed it wanted to find out what they had missed.

Again, it is all about capturing attention because you can no longer buy it, in the traditional way of paying for eyeballs. You have to earn it by delivering value, being topical, and being relevant.

The British Property Boom – Channel 4 – “Dispatches”

Channel 4 spends thousands on advertising, so leverage their efforts to benefit your business! My post actually appeared above Channel 4’s own post on Google organic listings, which shows just how effective this strategy is!

Tip: When creating the title, always consider what people will put into google in search terms as your URL is one of the biggest magnets to the google bots.

3. By being first with news and trending topics, you train both the google algorithm and eyeballs to visit your site as the first point of call for a specialist subject. People will keep going back to where there is fresh, new, and relevant content.

If they visit a site two or three times and it has no new material on it, they will learn NOT to visit your site for information. They may even think you have gone out of business! This is why your blog is so vital as you can update it regularly – at least once a week, but more if you can manage it.

One thing that has surprised me this week, in that it has not been a trending topic, is the roll-out of the Immigration Act in the West Midlands. Landlords seem blissfully unconcerned of the impact of the Act on them, there are differing views, and confusion seems to reign at events I have attended over the past two weeks.

I interviewed Sally Lawson, CEO of Concentric Lettings, about the Immigration Act 2014 from a lettings agent perspective, here

Sally makes a number of valuable points, including the importance of increased property inspections to double-check who is living in the property.

All activity you undertake on the social web should demonstrate your domain expertise and show that you are tuned into to consumers’ wants and needs. This builds trust, and a by-product of trust is business.

Thank you for reading the Landlords’ Barometer and I will close with a quote appropriate to today’s column:

“These days, social media waits for no one. If you’re LATE for the party, you’ll probably be covered by all the noise and you might not be able to get your voice across. It could only mean that if you want to be heard by the crowd, you have to be fast; and on social media, that means you have to be REALLY fast.”

~ Aaron Lee