Many mistakenly believe that SEO and social media are two different entities when, in reality, they’re two sides of the mortgage marketing “coin.”

If you are a loan officer or mortgage broker handling your brand’s marketing on your own, keep reading to learn about social media’s impact on your mortgage website. Our mortgage SEO strategies, backed by an active and impactful social media presence, can significantly improve search engine rankings and increase website traffic, ultimately producing more leads in your pipeline.

Done-For-You Mortgage Social Media

Social Media’s Impact on Website SEO

‘Social SEO’ is a marketing term you may have come across. It refers to the site’s search engine ranking resulting from your social media content.

While Google has mentioned that social media doesn’t directly impact a website’s SEO, many studies suggest otherwise. For example, a recent Hootsuite study revealed that content backed by social promotion performed 22% better in search engines than content with no social promotion.

Other search engines, however, have openly shared that social media signals influence their ranking algorithms.

The truth is that social media and SEO are closely integrated.

In fact, marketers consider social media platforms themselves to be a form of mini search engine. Platforms like YouTube and Facebook receive a couple of billion searches a day! Therefore, would it be unreasonable to assume that those billion searches are influencing search engine rankings, too?

An active social media presence helps to get your business in front of the prospect’s eyes –whether that’s on the social media platform itself or through its SEO impact.

Top Social Media Strategies to Improve SEO

Now that we’ve covered what social SEO means, let’s dive into some expert tips on improving SEO for mortgage brokers using top social media sites such as Facebook, X (Twitter), Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, etc.

Sustain Visibility of Your Top-Performing Content

Social media provides a continuous opportunity to share your best content to bring new traffic. So instead of a one-time post on your website, which will get buried under an array of other posts in just a month or less, you’ll reignite interest and extend the life of each piece of content.

Plus, it gives you more chances to reengage your audience in a topic you already know matters to them!

Want to get even more life out of your content? Invite your followers and referral partners to reshare the post on their social media.

The traffic generated to the content, plus the time spent on your site, all vouch toward your boosting the visibility of your mortgage website, resulting in a boost to your organic search engine ranking.

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Capitalize on Social Media to Share Glowing Reviews and Elevate Your SEO

The public actively searches out business reviews and considers them necessary to learn about a company’s reputation. So it’s not surprising that search engines prioritize businesses with favorable reputations by ranking them higher in search results.

So, how can you use social media to do the same?

Ask your top clients to follow you on your socials. Chances are they will comment on your posts and support you, boosting your buzz and rep! Having social profiles also allows clients to tag you when they want to commend your service.

As long as your social media community praises your services and uses terms related to your industry (mortgage, loan officer, real estate, etc.), the public and search engines will quickly pick up on this to influence your ranking within related searches.

Harness the Power of Social Media to Boost Backlink Prospects

In the world of SEO, having another website link to your site matters. This is called backlinking. Social media opens up an avenue for backlinking by creating opportunities to connect with content creators who also own websites.

You’ll want to do this in an organic and valuable way. Simply messaging or tagging other content creators on a post without developing a relationship first is unlikely to yield results.

It might even get you blocked by the creator!

Instead, engage with their content and build a rapport. Research their site and see where you can add value to their platform that makes sense for your business as well. When you’ve found where you can provide value and you have the content that will fill the gap, share it with them!

They will have a tough time passing on linking to your content now that familiarity and confidence have been established.

Use Social Media To Get Your Content Indexed Faster

Did you know that search engines prioritize indexing content that generates the most clicks in the least amount of time? This tells Google and other search engines that a particular piece of content is important and should be shown in front of more people.

That’s why you should make it a key goal to post your content often on social media so you increase the chances for more clicks to your blogs and pages.

Pro tip: Use social media in tandem with the manual indexing feature in Google Search Console for lightning-fast indexing!

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Social Media Helps to Establish Authority –A Key Factor in SEO Ranking

Google prioritizes subject authority. It wants to present the most helpful content to its searchers, using every avenue at your disposal to send signals that you are an authority in this industry for your location is a must.

And as you might’ve guessed, social media helps with this aspect too!

There are many types of posts you can share on your socials to present yourself as an expert in your niche, including:

• A reel where you demystify the home loan process in three steps
• Mythbuster carousel posts about why people opt to rent rather than buy
• Client stories about how you led them through multiple hurdles (reels or posts)
• Not only will you increase SEO authority with more backlinks, but with more content circulation, others recognize how valuable your content is.

BUT…

Make sure authority doesn’t stop after someone clicks to go to your website. If a potential mortgage client has high expectations about your mortgage services and is led to a difficult-to-navigate website, overlapping design elements, inconsistent messaging, etc., chances are you’ll never get the lead!

Even details like page speed can affect your SEO ranking!

If you need to redesign your website to better convert your site visitors, consider using a mortgage website template. LenderHomePage’s library of SEO-optimized website templates includes all the features that every mortgage brand needs on their website, including:

• Built-in lead funnels
• Lead magnets with professionally drafted eBooks
• Interview-Style digital 1003
• Landing pages for your paid campaigns
• Interactive mortgage calculator, client testimonial engine,  and more.

Open Up Referral Partnership Opportunities

Social media is meant to connect people in general and not just to connect businesses to their target audience. Remember, thousands of companies have business profiles on top social media sites. This makes it easy for you to seek out new partnership opportunities for client referrals.

To find new partners to work with, look for other brands within the mortgage industry that have a decent following but aren’t your direct competitors. However, keep in mind that if your business profile has 20 followers, chances are that a brand with 5,000+ followers won’t want to partner with you. In the end, both of you should provide equal value for each other’s business, so try to find other accounts with a similar amount of followers as yours.

Once you find a company you are interested in partnering with, DM them asking to collaborate.

Types of collaborations can include:

Content collaborations: Split a piece of content in half so your partner encourages their audience to go to your website to read the rest, and vice versa. (ex. In an article about refinancing tips, go over three tips on your website and send your audience to your partner’s website to read the other three tips. Your partner will do the same for you.).

Client referrals: Ask your partner to refer their clients to you for their loan process, and make sure you do the same for them.

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Gain Insight Into Your Followers’ Needs to Provide Tailored Content

If you think about it, social media is one of the few options that provide you with a community where you can get to know your audience better. When you create interactive content that encourages your followers to respond to you or ask questions, you can learn more about their interests.

There are also a number of social media features that help you learn about what’s trending in the mortgage industry, including hashtags, top posts, and others’ blog content.

This can help you brainstorm topics for new content that your audience wants to see. Creating content on trending topics will likely garner more impressions and clicks to your mortgage content through Google.

Through indirect means, social media can help you improve your search engine ranking and helps you gain more traction on your quality content.

If you don’t know how to start creating top-notch social content, or you don’t have a design team to create social graphics for your brand, try using a mortgage social media service –included in every LHP3 Website! That way, you don’t have to worry about reinventing the wheel and brainstorming new ideas for top-performing posts.

LenderHomePage’s social media program includes done-for-you posts to generate social engagement, leads, and followers. Our posts include powerful call-to-actions to ensure your audience is enticed to click and be led to your website. Request a demo of our all-new AI-driven mortgage websites with social media today!

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Picture this: Your ideal customer, a perfect fit for your target market, eagerly searches for “loan officers near me.” As they hit that search button, a multitude of relevant results floods their screen. The prospect starts scrolling and finds a select few local loan officers. Unfortunately, your business is nowhere to be seen.

Or worse yet, the prospect finds your site but quickly clicks out because it took too long to load –triggering Google to drop your site further and further down search results.

To prevent such nightmares from haunting your business, it’s imperative to keep up with the latest updates for local SEO optimization –particularly page speed. In recent years, page speed has emerged as one of the most critical factors influencing search rankings.

Like LenderHomepage, Google understands that page speed and User Experience work together and play a pivotal role in determining the quality of a website and, ultimately, conversions.

Missing this marker means certain doom for any website.

So take charge of your online presence and search ranking by ensuring that prospective borrowers looking for a local loan officer finds you on their first search. After all, according to Google, 81% of consumers use the search engine to search for a local business (Brightlocal, 2021).

Act now, and secure your spot in the local market to maximize your visibility and success with SEO optimization.

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But before implementing a local SEO strategy on your mortgage website, we need to step back and review something called “intent.” Google uses intent to judge what sort of search result the searcher wants. Is the searcher looking for information? Looking to buy? Looking to compare? All of this determines what type of content Google will display. Tying in “intent” with location further determines search results.

So let’s start there.

Understanding “local intent”

46% of all Google searches have some sort of local intent, and a whopping 97% of users will use Google to find a local business. (Safari Digital, 2021). Because of this, Google offers a handful of features to support geo-targeted searches. 

For example, when you search for ‘loan officers in (city name),’ Google will first display results from Google Maps listings and then showcase the traditional ‘10 results per page’ search results.

Now, let’s say that a particular searcher looked up ‘loan officers.’ Even though the user has not mentioned a location in their search query, Google may still display all the loan officers in the user’s area. Some users may even search ‘loan officers near me.’

Again, if the location is detected, Google will do its job of informing the searcher of all the loan officers near where they are located.

Then comes the underlying purpose of the intent of the search query. A transactional intent is where the searcher intends to purchase something now. While informational, commercial, or navigational are other types of intent categories. When it comes to drivers of traffic, those with informational and navigational seem to be the intents with the most volume. When it comes to sales, transactional intent is the big winner –which isn’t surprising since someone that is looking to “apply now” will do just that (it’s just a matter of where).

Now that you have an understanding of the mindset of intent and how that works with the searcher’s location, let’s move on to the strategies to optimize your website to gain local traffic.

Best loan officer strategies for SEO: Your Plan for Implementing Local SEO

Improve Page Speed for Instant SEO Boost

Page speed, also known as load speed, plays a critical role in SEO by determining how fast a page’s content appears. Different factors, like web hosting and page size, affect how quickly a page loads, and this can vary between desktop and mobile versions. Faster loading times improve SEO because it enhances the user experience –essentially, the longer the load time, the more likely it is for a user to click out. 

So if Google detects that a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load, the search engine will drop your ranking. Conversely, a mortgage site with optimized load speed will get an instant SEO boost.

There are several strategies that you can implement to improve your page speed. The easiest one would be to use a mortgage website platform that addresses these factors for you, but if you prefer to hire a developer to work on your existing site, these are items you’ll want to overhaul:

• Optimize image files: Compress images to reduce their file size without compromising quality.
• Minify code: Remove unnecessary characters, whitespace, and comments from JavaScript, CSS, and HTML files to make them smaller and load faster.
• Reduce HTTP requests: Combine or eliminate unnecessary scripts, stylesheets, and other resources to minimize the number of requests the browser needs to make.
• Enable browser caching: Configure caching headers to allow the browser to store certain elements of your website, reducing the need to download them on subsequent visits.
• Use a content delivery network (CDN): Distribute your website’s content across multiple servers geographically to deliver it to users from the server closest to their location, reducing latency.
• Optimize server response time: Improve the server’s processing speed and reduce the time it takes to respond to requests from the browser.
• Minimize redirects: Reduce the number of redirects on your website to minimize the additional time required for the browser to reach the final destination.

Add location-based keywords to your website copy.

We all know that the right keywords are what bring the traffic in. So do your research! There are a handful of free keyword research tools that you can use to find out what the hot local keywords related to your industry are. Here are some of our favorites.

Google Search Console: Search Console is free to set up for any business, and the tool has many benefits. You can see the number of impressions, clicks, and average position for each of your web pages, and you can filter the timeline for when you want Google to gather the results. 

If you go to the ‘Queries’ section, you can see what search terms people are searching for, where your website shows up, and what position you are in for that search query. This is helpful because if you are showing up as the 80th result for a local search term, you know you need to optimize for that search query better.

Free Keyword Planners: There are several free keyword research tools out there to try. Most limit the results displayed on the free versions. However, they present a fair enough amount of data to be a valuable resource. 

Google Keyword Planner: Although built for Google Ads, you can still get a pretty good idea of what keywords are good for regular organic search copy.

Google Suggest and Related Searches: Did you know you do not need to use an external third-party tool to research your keyword? Google itself presents suggestions and related searches when you type in a topic into the search engine. 

The suggestions are presented as you are typing in the query. For example, if you are typing in ‘loan officer…’, Google may suggest that you search for ‘loan officers near me’ or ‘loan officers in California.’ That should give you some ideas for local keywords. As for related searches, you can find these when you go to the bottom of the search results page. The page will give you very similar ideas to the Google Suggest feature.

You can even ask your friends and loved ones for local keyword ideas! Ask them what they would search for if they were looking for local loan officers.

Keep in mind that optimizing your mortgage website for local SEO is one of the best lead-generation strategies for mortgage lenders too!

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Optimize your web pages for on-page SEO.

This is where you go all in and ensure your local keywords from step one are integrated into your website. There are many ways you can do this. The best place to start is your contact page. Do you have your physical address on your contact page? This would also be a great place to add headings such as ‘Best Loan Officer in (your city, state).’ 

Along with your contact page, make sure that the headings throughout your website have a healthy amount of local keywords added in. Do your title tags and meta descriptions mention your location? 

This is one of the best ways for your audience to find you. Of course, you’ll also want to optimize your blog articles, loan program pages, and images with alt tags!

Tip: Don’t forget to optimize for voice searches! A good way to do this is by adding questions that people often search for in your headings. You can use www.answerthepublic.com to find out what types of questions people search for regarding your topic.

Make your mortgage website responsive and mobile-friendly.

Although this is easy to miss, you want to ensure that your mortgage website is mobile-friendly. This is because many search engines, such as Google, have mobile-first indexing.

Use a free tool from Google Search Console called the Mobile-Friendly Test to ensure your site is up to speed and has no issues rendering on mobile. Hint: If you use a LenderHomePage mortgage site, you can rest assured that it’s responsive and mobile-friendly!

Create a Google Business profile

Creating a Google Business profile opens up another opportunity to bring in local traffic. This will allow you to appear in the Google Maps results that list all the registered businesses in the area. It is completely free to create a business profile on Google. 

When creating your profile, make sure that you add high-resolution pictures of your business with good lighting, have a proper description that compliments your business, describe your offerings, request your best clients to leave reviews, and make sure that your address, hours of operation, and name of your business are correct. 

The more relevant your description is to what your audience is searching for, the more likely it is to appear higher in the Google Maps results. 

Then, you need to monitor your listing every now and then and make any changes as needed.

Tip: Along with asking your best clients to leave reviews on your Google Business listing, you can also request them to leave a review on other directories such as Yelp, Trustpilot, etc. However, you don’t want to pay for reviews. Make sure the reviews are authentic and not spam-like.

Don’t forget directory sites

Once you have tackled the Google Business listing, you can move on to getting your business listed on other directory sites such as Yelp and Yellowpages.com. 

The most important thing to remember when listing your business on these sites is that the information must be consistent on every website. This helps Google recognize your business more easily to help it rank higher for relevant search terms. 

Stand Out, Reach Mortgage Audiences: Free Ebook!

Build high-quality local links to your website

Link-building is a process in which one website links to another site, giving the linked site more SEO value. When doing link-building outreach to secure links on other sites, you first want to ensure that the website you’re trying to build links on is relevant to your niche. 

So a high-traffic informational website on the latest films and TV shows will not be relevant for your mortgage business. However, given the right content and context, linking to a local home contractor or pet adoption website might be perfect.

Reach out to the top local publications and businesses in your area, and see if they are willing to partner with you in some way so that you can give them an opportunity to link to your website. 

You also want to remember to build links on sites with a higher domain authority score. Tools such as Ahrefs and Semrush are great for finding out the Domain score of a website. 

Link-building is not an easy process and will require a great deal of patience and effort. However, if your efforts are consistent, you will certainly start seeing your rankings improve in search engines.

Post on your social media channels to boost engagement

Many homeowners lurk around on social media, so you must make your business visible on all the social channels you can think of. Plus, Bing search engine – which still holds about 10% of all internet traffic –uses social media as a factor in their search ranking. Posting frequent and relevant content can get challenging for a single LO, so consider using an intern or a scheduling tool to plan ahead. This, at the very least, can help take some of the load off of your plate.

For a more comprehensive solution, use a mortgage marketing specialist who can do the heavy lifting. Check out our social media marketing service for more information. 

It helps eliminate competition from businesses farther away from you, and you can further optimize for local SEO with Google Maps. Did you know that 86% of consumers rely on Google Maps to find the location of a business (Backlinko, 2020)? 

There is no reason you should wait to optimize your website to garner local traffic and the traffic you already get. Want to learn more about optimizing your digital presence? Read this previously published article about social media marketing for loan officers. 

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You may have heard of search engine optimization for your website, but did you know that there is a set of SEO practices for YouTube, too? Just like search engines, YouTube has its own search feature. 

Every day, millions of video creators compete to make their videos appear in the first results of searches, and you can get your mortgage YouTube channel up there, too, if you follow the practices mentioned in this article. 

Read on to discover the top YouTube SEO tactics that can help you improve your ranking. 

1. Rename your video file using a target keyword.

Make sure that your target keyphrase is included in the file name itself before uploading it onto YouTube. This one is easy to miss since viewers will not see the name of the actual file.

However, the file name is one of the key areas (aside from the title and description) that YouTube uses to determine how relevant your video is to the topic. 

So if you have a file titled ‘tips video September 12 upload.MOV’ and it is a video on home buying tips, you will want to change it to ‘home buying tips business name.MOV’. Make the file name as close to the topic and your business name as possible.

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2. Insert your keyword naturally in the video title.

One of the most obvious places you want to insert your target keyphrase is in your video title. However, do not make the mistake of forcing it in the title. It should appear naturally, and readers should find your title intriguing. 

Similar to optimizing a title tag for search engine results, your mortgage YouTube video title should be no longer than 60 characters. You want your readers to be able to read the entire title without it cutting off. 

For example, if your keyword is ‘home buying tips’, a good title for your video could be ‘Home Buying Tips You Did Not Know About’. This title is intriguing, under 60 characters, includes the keyphrase, and we managed to have the keyphrase at the beginning of the title!

It might also be a good idea to use some online tools to research what keywords users are searching for on YouTube regarding your topic. Ahrefs has a free YouTube keyword research tool that provides a fair amount of keywords for you to get a solid idea.

3. Optimize your video description.

Your mortgage video’s description also has to face a character limit. Your description must not surpass 1,000 characters. You may recall that past videos didn’t have very long descriptions, and that is because most of the people who clicked on a video are there for the video, not necessarily the description. But don’t underestimate the power of the video description! 

Since it’s part of the Google “family,” the video description will be indexed on the Google search engine, giving it a solid chance of getting more views and traffic. 

Be sure to accurately describe your video in the first 100 characters, as this is the snippet that will show up before you have to click ‘Show More’. Going back to the home buying tips video example, let’s come up with a good description to support our video.

Buying a home is a big investment, and these home-buying tips will ensure you are getting a good deal. Home buying trends differ from year to year, and along with trends, best practices change as well. 

Got another helpful tip you want to share with our viewers? Comment below and let us know! Also, don’t forget to like, share and subscribe to our channel.

The description above is great because the first sentence describes the purpose of the video and what viewers will get out of it. Plus, it is nearly 100 characters. Not only that, but we also encourage our viewers to engage with the video and subscribe to our channel, which helps your video rank higher. 

Another feature you might want to make good use of is adding a transcript.

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4. Tag your video with popular keywords that relate to your topic.

When you are preparing your video for upload, you have the option to add relevant tags that you think will help viewers find you. This not only helps people find you but also helps YouTube further determine what your video is about to help you rank properly. 

You want to have a good mix of regular and long-tail keywords to reach as many people as possible. However, don’t think that YouTube is not smart enough to detect when you have used a tag that is completely irrelevant to your topic. Your home-buying video should not have a tag with whatever is currently trending if it’s off-topic. The last thing you want is for your 1,000+ subscribers channel to get penalized on YouTube.

5. Categorize your video.

Did you know that you can categorize your YouTube videos? You can find this setting under ‘Advanced Settings.’ Many YouTube channel owners may not properly utilize this feature because it can be hard to determine which categories your video can fall under. In that case, it is always a good idea to do your research. 

Find out which channels are in the lead for a specific category, what their video content looks like, how their audiences interact with their content, and one of the most important points to note, what the style and format of their videos are. 

All of these observations can help you determine whether your video would fit in that category or not. Some examples of categories for your mortgage YouTube channel could be ‘Buying a Home,’ ‘Refinancing,’ and ‘Credit Scores.’

6. Upload a custom thumbnail image for your video’s result link.

Thumbnails have nothing to do with keywords or how YouTube reads your content, but they certainly play a major role in attracting your audiences’ attention. You may notice that when you search for a tutorial or even a fun vlog, the top results will show videos that have eye-catching custom thumbnails. 

YouTube does give you recommendations for thumbnails when you are uploading your video, but at the end of the day, your video will be most successful if you take the time to design a custom thumbnail. Some good thumbnail ideas for mortgage YouTube channels can include a nice luxury-style house with a diagonal arrow pointing downwards, showcasing that now is the right time to buy a home. 

As for text in thumbnails, having actionable words such as ‘Buy a Home Now’ or ‘Don’t Wait to Buy’ etc. can capture your audience’s attention.

Canva is a great platform for creating video thumbnails, and it has tons of free features, including icons, stock photos, shapes, fonts, etc. Although Canva has a design option for ‘YouTube Thumbnail’ with the dimensions already taken care of for you, it is still important to keep in mind that best practices include using images that are 1280×720 pixels (16:9 ratio), and around 2MB or smaller file sizes. Before uploading a custom thumbnail, you need to get your account verified on YouTube. 

7. Use video hashtags to drive YouTube search results.

Hashtags are not only a great way for your mortgage business to be found on social media channels such as Instagram and Facebook, and YouTube as well. The good thing about hashtags on YouTube is that you can add them to your title and description to help viewers find your video. 

Here’s another cool tip: when you add hashtags to your video title, they will automatically get hyperlinked and shown above your title.

8. Add subtitles and closed captions

Subtitles and closed captions are terms that are sometimes used interchangeably, but when it comes to YouTube videos, there’s a critical difference. 

Subtitles are mostly meant for translating languages. Non-native English speakers may find subtitles helpful.

Closed captions, on the other hand, simply display the text being said in the video and do not involve translating dialogue into a different language. 

The files for both subtitles and closed captions will also include timestamps for every couple of lines of the text mentioned in the video, so viewers can go back to them as they want.

Which should you have? Both! Having both subtitles and closed captions gives you a greater chance of your video being found on various search engines. 

9. Increase audience engagement.

We’ve discussed various on-page SEO strategies, but what about off-page SEO? For YouTube, off-page SEO usually refers to the likes, comments, shares, and subscribers that a video or channel receives. That is why you should always encourage audience engagement. Whether you want to ask viewers to like and comment at the beginning, middle, or end of the video is up to you, but definitely mention it in every video. 

Another good strategy is to respond to the comments you receive. Not only does this increase the number of comments on your video, but also makes the viewers feel welcome – prompting them to see more of your videos.

10. Make Longer Videos

Longer videos are great for gaining higher revenue due to the fact that you can achieve more watch time hours and place more ads throughout the video. However, just because longer videos are more advantageous revenue-wise does not always mean that everyone needs to create longer videos. Sometimes, shorter videos gain more views since they are an easy watch.

The best way to decide whether your videos should be longer or shorter is by searching for similar content to yours and seeing which videos performed well. Look up other mortgage channels on YouTube and see what the average length of their videos is. If the longer videos performed better, then you know what to do.

Next Steps…

Now that you are aware of the top 10 best practices to help your YouTube videos rank higher with SEO, you can start creating video content that converts!

If you have not been following these practices and have uploaded videos that may not meet these criteria, you can always go back to those and optimize them. Even thumbnails can be changed on past videos, so there is nothing to fret about.

It’s about time you add YouTube to your mortgage marketing plan and start utilizing the most popular video platform to gain more leads for your real estate business. Need more help with your mortgage marketing? Check out our all-in-one customer-facing tech stack designed to help you generate clients and boost realtor referrals.

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You may have heard of search engine optimization for your website, but did you know that there is a set of SEO practices for YouTube, too? Just like search engines, YouTube has its own search feature. 

Every day, millions of video creators compete to make their videos appear in the first results of searches, and you can get your mortgage YouTube channel up there, too, if you follow the practices mentioned in this article. 

Read on to discover the top YouTube SEO tactics that can help you improve your ranking. 

1. Rename your video file using a target keyword.

Make sure that your target keyphrase is included in the file name itself before uploading it onto YouTube. This one is easy to miss since viewers will not see the name of the actual file.

However, the file name is one of the key areas (aside from the title and description) that YouTube uses to determine how relevant your video is to the topic. 

So if you have a file titled ‘tips video September 12 upload.MOV’ and it is a video on home buying tips, you will want to change it to ‘home buying tips business name.MOV’. Make the file name as close to the topic and your business name as possible.

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2. Insert your keyword naturally in the video title.

One of the most obvious places you want to insert your target keyphrase is in your video title. However, do not make the mistake of forcing it in the title. It should appear naturally, and readers should find your title intriguing. 

Similar to optimizing a title tag for search engine results, your mortgage YouTube video title should be no longer than 60 characters. You want your readers to be able to read the entire title without it cutting off. 

For example, if your keyword is ‘home buying tips’, a good title for your video could be ‘Home Buying Tips You Did Not Know About’. This title is intriguing, under 60 characters, includes the keyphrase, and we managed to have the keyphrase at the beginning of the title!

It might also be a good idea to use some online tools to research what keywords users are searching for on YouTube regarding your topic. Ahrefs has a free YouTube keyword research tool that provides a fair amount of keywords for you to get a solid idea.

3. Optimize your video description.

Your mortgage video’s description also has to face a character limit. Your description must not surpass 1,000 characters. You may recall that past videos didn’t have very long descriptions, and that is because most of the people who clicked on a video are there for the video, not necessarily the description. But don’t underestimate the power of the video description! 

Since it’s part of the Google “family,” the video description will be indexed on the Google search engine, giving it a solid chance of getting more views and traffic. 

Be sure to accurately describe your video in the first 100 characters, as this is the snippet that will show up before you have to click ‘Show More’. Going back to the home buying tips video example, let’s come up with a good description to support our video.

Buying a home is a big investment, and these home-buying tips will ensure you are getting a good deal. Home buying trends differ from year to year, and along with trends, best practices change as well. 

Got another helpful tip you want to share with our viewers? Comment below and let us know! Also, don’t forget to like, share and subscribe to our channel.

The description above is great because the first sentence describes the purpose of the video and what viewers will get out of it. Plus, it is nearly 100 characters. Not only that, but we also encourage our viewers to engage with the video and subscribe to our channel, which helps your video rank higher. 

Another feature you might want to make good use of is adding a transcript.

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4. Tag your video with popular keywords that relate to your topic.

When you are preparing your video for upload, you have the option to add relevant tags that you think will help viewers find you. This not only helps people find you but also helps YouTube further determine what your video is about to help you rank properly. 

You want to have a good mix of regular and long-tail keywords to reach as many people as possible. However, don’t think that YouTube is not smart enough to detect when you have used a tag that is completely irrelevant to your topic. Your home-buying video should not have a tag with whatever is currently trending if it’s off-topic. The last thing you want is for your 1,000+ subscribers channel to get penalized on YouTube.

5. Categorize your video.

Did you know that you can categorize your YouTube videos? You can find this setting under ‘Advanced Settings.’ Many YouTube channel owners may not properly utilize this feature because it can be hard to determine which categories your video can fall under. In that case, it is always a good idea to do your research. 

Find out which channels are in the lead for a specific category, what their video content looks like, how their audiences interact with their content, and one of the most important points to note, what the style and format of their videos are. 

All of these observations can help you determine whether your video would fit in that category or not. Some examples of categories for your mortgage YouTube channel could be ‘Buying a Home,’ ‘Refinancing,’ and ‘Credit Scores.’

6. Upload a custom thumbnail image for your video’s result link.

Thumbnails have nothing to do with keywords or how YouTube reads your content, but they certainly play a major role in attracting your audiences’ attention. You may notice that when you search for a tutorial or even a fun vlog, the top results will show videos that have eye-catching custom thumbnails. 

YouTube does give you recommendations for thumbnails when you are uploading your video, but at the end of the day, your video will be most successful if you take the time to design a custom thumbnail. Some good thumbnail ideas for mortgage YouTube channels can include a nice luxury-style house with a diagonal arrow pointing downwards, showcasing that now is the right time to buy a home. 

As for text in thumbnails, having actionable words such as ‘Buy a Home Now’ or ‘Don’t Wait to Buy’ etc. can capture your audience’s attention.

Canva is a great platform for creating video thumbnails, and it has tons of free features, including icons, stock photos, shapes, fonts, etc. Although Canva has a design option for ‘YouTube Thumbnail’ with the dimensions already taken care of for you, it is still important to keep in mind that best practices include using images that are 1280×720 pixels (16:9 ratio), and around 2MB or smaller file sizes. Before uploading a custom thumbnail, you need to get your account verified on YouTube. 

7. Use video hashtags to drive YouTube search results.

Hashtags are not only a great way for your mortgage business to be found on social media channels such as Instagram and Facebook, and YouTube as well. The good thing about hashtags on YouTube is that you can add them to your title and description to help viewers find your video. 

Here’s another cool tip: when you add hashtags to your video title, they will automatically get hyperlinked and shown above your title.

8. Add subtitles and closed captions

Subtitles and closed captions are terms that are sometimes used interchangeably, but when it comes to YouTube videos, there’s a critical difference. 

Subtitles are mostly meant for translating languages. Non-native English speakers may find subtitles helpful.

Closed captions, on the other hand, simply display the text being said in the video and do not involve translating dialogue into a different language. 

The files for both subtitles and closed captions will also include timestamps for every couple of lines of the text mentioned in the video, so viewers can go back to them as they want.

Which should you have? Both! Having both subtitles and closed captions gives you a greater chance of your video being found on various search engines. 

9. Increase audience engagement.

We’ve discussed various on-page SEO strategies, but what about off-page SEO? For YouTube, off-page SEO usually refers to the likes, comments, shares, and subscribers that a video or channel receives. That is why you should always encourage audience engagement. Whether you want to ask viewers to like and comment at the beginning, middle, or end of the video is up to you, but definitely mention it in every video. 

Another good strategy is to respond to the comments you receive. Not only does this increase the number of comments on your video, but also makes the viewers feel welcome – prompting them to see more of your videos.

10. Make Longer Videos

Longer videos are great for gaining higher revenue due to the fact that you can achieve more watch time hours and place more ads throughout the video. However, just because longer videos are more advantageous revenue-wise does not always mean that everyone needs to create longer videos. Sometimes, shorter videos gain more views since they are an easy watch.

The best way to decide whether your videos should be longer or shorter is by searching for similar content to yours and seeing which videos performed well. Look up other mortgage channels on YouTube and see what the average length of their videos is. If the longer videos performed better, then you know what to do.

Next Steps…

Now that you are aware of the top 10 best practices to help your YouTube videos rank higher with SEO, you can start creating video content that converts!

If you have not been following these practices and have uploaded videos that may not meet these criteria, you can always go back to those and optimize them. Even thumbnails can be changed on past videos, so there is nothing to fret about.

It’s about time you add YouTube to your mortgage marketing plan and start utilizing the most popular video platform to gain more leads for your real estate business. Need more help with your mortgage marketing? Check out our all-in-one customer-facing tech stack designed to help you generate clients and boost realtor referrals.

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A crucial component of marketing yourself as a loan officer is social media. Social media has made it easier than ever for businesses to reach their target audience, with both its accessibility and the sheer number of internet users on social media. 

Social media has assisted businesses of all sizes in establishing customer connections for years. While it is a helpful tool in increasing traffic and lead generation, more than anything else, social media helps businesses gain more exposure. 

With all that said, it’s a lot easier to state the benefits of using social media than it is to start.

There’s also the issue of keeping up the momentum –knowing what to post, finding the right image, editing it, and writing a catchy headline…

It’s a lot of work, we know!

Read on to learn the steps that can make social media content less intimidating and assist you in creating a lead-generating strategy.

Have you checked out the newly expanded Social Media Marketing Program? Our awesome automated evergreen content now also comes with done-for-you branded content to share on your personal social channels plus the ability to create your own branded social content for partners to share. 

Learn more in this video.

How To Create A Mortgage Social Media Strategy

1. Define your Audience

If you’re a loan officer marketing your services to everyone you can, you’re wasting time, energy, and money. Let’s say, for example, you’re based in Texas. Instead of marketing to “everyone in Texas,” it may be helpful to narrow it down to “first-time homebuyers with poor credit looking to buy in Houston.” Being aware of and planning for your audience, in particular, can help you reach the right people with the right message and more successfully accomplish your marketing objectives.

So, to start, decide who your target market is. Broadly, you may say a homebuyer, but what does a homebuyer specifically look like?  You should base the specifics of who these people are on your market research and the audience information you already have.

Find your target audience by:

1. Gathering data. You must be aware of your target market’s characteristics to reach them. To effectively market to your audience, you should learn what a typical homebuyer’s age, location, and engagement trends are on various sites. Although gathering this data may seem difficult, a CRM makes this information easily accessible and simple to use.
2. Taking advantage of social media analytics. Many social media sites, including Facebook and Twitter, have built-in analytics that can provide you with information about your followers, such as when, where, and other interests they may have. Additionally, using these tools with business accounts is free.
3. Keeping up to date with the competition. You’ll gain insights into how to communicate with your audience by knowing what those around you are doing. To fill any gaps in your current strategy, you can look at where your rivals are lacking and improve upon that.

Once you’ve identified your target market, stay up to date on their needs and interests, and put a social listening strategy into practice.

2. Establish Clear Goals

Setting objectives that direct your work is crucial to succeeding at social media marketing. The SMART goal strategy provides a helpful framework for setting up fundamental goals and achieving your overall objectives.

• SMART is short for:
• Specific: It’s critical to be clear about the specific, smaller results you hope to achieve to meet your goals and measure your progress. By being specific, you can narrow in on what you and your team need to do to achieve your larger goal. For instance, you might want to increase your Instagram followers by 15% this quarter as a specific social media goal.
• Measurable: You have to have a way to quantify whether or not you have succeeded in achieving your goal. Having clear ways to measure your goals can do that– you can use metrics to gauge your development and adjust your goals as necessary. For instance, if you discover that likes and follows don’t result in increased website traffic, you can change the metric to one that will.
• Achievable: All of your objectives should be attainable for your company. Unrealistic goals can discourage workers and cause conflict in your business plan. Realistic goals can increase your productivity and keep your motivation up. Make sure to adjust your goals as you set them if it seems like you aren’t achieving them.
• Relevant: Ensure that your social media marketing objectives align with your overarching business goals. For instance, if increasing brand awareness is your goal, you might set a target of getting 25 social media followers to click through a post to a landing page that details your services.
• Timely: Your goals should have a clear and firm deadline to hold yourself accountable. Set a specific cadence to check in and ensure you’re staying on track rather than setting a goal for some vague time in the near future.

Using SMART goals gives you a place to start, as well as a way to check in on your progress and make adjustments as necessary. Even though social media marketing has many moving parts, these goals can help to keep you on track and not get disoriented.

3. Administer your resources wisely

Social media tasks are often mindlessly handled as an afterthought for loan officers. It may seem that you’re saving money and time by just handing social media to whoever has the free time, whether that be yourself or a colleague, but managing social media successfully calls for specific abilities such as:

• A strategic mind
• Organizing abilities
• Branding knowledge

Hiring a specialist to manage your social media can be beneficial if you have the funds. If you don’t have the funds to hire a social media manager, you can still spend money on social media advertisements, increasing reach and promoting brand awareness. 

4. Use each platform differently

You may want to post on as many platforms as you can be strong, but doing so could hurt your social media marketing plan. For instance, if your target audience is people over 40, you may want to focus less on TikTok. You will likely find that most of your audience is on Facebook or Twitter.

When you are creating your strategy, take into consideration:

• Where your competition posts
• Where your target audience is most likely to be
• Your metrics

Additionally, you should consider how to use each platform most effectively based on the purposes for which it was designed and the types of content that perform best there. For example, Facebook is good for quality live video streaming and interacting with followers one-on-one; Instagram and Tiktok rely more on visual content, like pictures, infographics, and short, entertaining videos.

Youtube is also for videos but is more oriented toward longer, informative videos. LinkedIn and Twitter are more written content-based, but Twitter is better for real-time conversations and quick news alerts, while LinkedIn is better for long-form written work, like articles and blogs. 

You might discover that the majority of your target demographic doesn’t tend to use fast-paced platforms like Instagram, so you’ll want to gear your focus more toward Facebook or LinkedIn. Maybe you want to be able to frequently give quick updates to your clientele, in which case Twitter may be helpful.

To get the most out of your marketing efforts, research the best strategy for each platform you use. While there are many ways to expand your small business, social media can be useful for attracting and keeping new clients.

Done-For-You Social Media for Loan Officers

5. Be consistent with your content.

Consistently posting compelling, engaging content is the key to success on social media. This will not only help to give you an appearance of trustworthiness, but it will also demonstrate that you care about engaging with your audience and that you have relevant information to share.

The principle of posting frequently is still valid despite changes in social media platforms’ algorithms over time. It increases the likelihood that your content will appear in newsfeeds. By concentrating on producing consistent, pertinent content, you can convince the algorithms that your posts deserve to appear in different newsfeeds, which will eventually draw users to your page.

6. Engage with your followers

Because social media users enjoy interacting with brands, you can gain advantages like:

• Increased brand awareness and a broader market reach
• Increased brand loyalty
• Seen as a local expert

According to Forbes, a staggering 83% of consumers place a high value on the customer experience, which makes the potential for a high return on investment (ROI) enormous. This includes interactions with brands on social media that help customers feel seen, heard, and understood. Using social media, you can keep an eye on conversations as they happen and quickly address any queries or concerns from your audience.

This can mean several things: it can include posing questions about your offerings, making Facebook groups, and employing the use of fun features like GIFs, emojis, and videos.

It can also be helpful to employ tools like Instagram Live to open up a dialogue with people looking to purchase or refinance a home. You can answer their questions and let your experience speak for itself as you engage with both prospective and current clients in real-time. 

Allow yourself at least an hour a day of constant social media activity to keep engagement high. 

With this hour, however, you should do your best to respond to any urgent concerns as quickly as possible throughout the day.  

7. Keep things professional

Remember that whenever you post something on social media, you are representing your company. Too frequently, posts can be misinterpreted, upsetting followers and causing conflict. Consider developing a social media policy to direct your staff members’ posts and interactions to avoid any unnecessary issues. 

A typical social media policy will include the following:

• Clear, non-confusing guidelines on what to post and how to react to unfavorable comments
• Platform regulations and guidelines
• The consideration of brands
• Security measures

Investing in a social media policy can ensure that your company is prepared for any situation. Remember that social media is fundamentally about putting your customer service philosophies into practice.

8. Hone in your brand identity

Your company’s brand identity makes customers relate to you and distinguishes you from the rest. Therefore, consistency should be maintained across all marketing channels, including print, digital, and social media.

For loan officers, maintaining brand consistency can be difficult, especially in the beginning. But it’s significant in all aspects of your company, and social media is no exception. As you post, be sure to maintain your brand voice (how you speak to customers), keep your posts consistent across each platform, and concentrate on your value proposition. 

A consistent brand identity can help increase loyalty and make it simpler to decide what to post.

9. Quality over quantity

Instead of randomly producing as many posts as you can per day on as many platforms as possible, you should concentrate on producing regular, high-quality posts. It’s actually very likely that posting too many low-quality items will penalize your account and flag you as spam.

It’s also difficult to keep up with a schedule that requires you to post several times a day. So ultimately, posting too often will end up hurting rather than helping your strategy.

Consider implementing a social media calendar to reduce these risks. You can use these calendars to organize your schedule and plan posts in advance. Marketers can keep track of the various moving parts of social media by categorizing posts into categories like when to post, post captions, post visuals, and which platforms to post on.

To keep your posts’ quality high, constantly ask yourself before posting something: Does this information benefit my readers? Is this something new, motivating, inspiring, or enjoyable? Does the text cite its sources?

You can use these to produce high-quality content that interests and draws readers.

10. Watch your outcomes

Social media marketing is influenced by various variables, so it’s crucial to evaluate and track progress. Analytics are helpful because they can improve campaigns, set new objectives, and identify tracking metrics.

Before you begin tracking, you should decide which metrics are most critical to your marketing objectives. 

The most typical metrics include:

• ReachsEngagementsImpressions
• Mentions
• Posting clicks
• Video views

Although social media marketing can seem intimidating, there is much to gain. When done properly, social media marketing can be a reliable, cost-effective solution to keeping your pipeline filled and your referral network active.

If you still need help with your social media presence (or would like a quickstart way to supplement your posts), consider adding our social media marketing to your website plan. Click below to learn more and schedule a conversation with an account executive.

See Our Newly Expanded Mortgage Social Media

Referrals are the lifeblood of any business, accounting for as much as 65% of new business. However, your former clientele isn’t the only source of referral –you also have realtors! The value of connecting with real estate agents is clear –you share the same consumers and complement each other’s services. 

However, while it’s an obvious avenue for mortgage referrals, few pros know how to get referrals from agents. Fewer still know how to keep a steady stream of qualified leads flowing. 

(Offering to buy them lunch or coffee won’t cut it)

In this article, we’re going to give you three actionable strategies to help you build a robust network of real estate professionals that will enthusiastically refer their homebuyers to you.

Let’s dive in.

How to get more qualified mortgage referrals From Real Estate Agents

Drop The Sales Pitch. Build Relationships.

Realtors are excellent salespeople, so they’ll appreciate a good pitch when they hear one. However, coming off too “sales-y” will have the opposite effect you’re hoping for. You might start to sound like competition, making the agent resistant to anything you might have to offer.

Let’s also remember that realtors are not your end consumers. They’re your colleagues and referral partners.

Here’s how to have a “building a relationship” approach that effortlessly encourages more agents to give you leads:

• Learn about the agent. Research the realtor to know more about their business style, clients they serve, and strengths. Even info about associations, hobbies, or other interests could come in handy when getting to know a potential referral partner. 
• Make the first conversations light. Don’t always talk business. Agents often get approached by loan officers looking to take them out to lunch and explore how they can “partner up.” Don’t be that basic mortgage pro. Instead, keep the first meeting friendly and personal. Congratulate them on a recent accomplishment or other noteworthy bits of news. 
• Share your value (but don’t brag). Casually sharing how many referrals you’re getting and how happy those clients are is a subtle way to hype yourself up without pushing it. It’s also a way of letting them know that you are open to receiving referrals and are successful at seeing it through to completion. 

Partner With Them In Social Media Marketing

Here’s what we know: Real Estate Agents are some of the most active professionals on social media. In fact, an estimated 90% of all 2 million licensed real estate agents use social media for marketing their services regularly.

This fact alone underscores their ability to be powerhouse networkers and your most lucrative ally for getting more qualified referrals. 

The key to getting “in” is not to pitch them, to echo the above point. Instead, you need to focus on creating a reciprocating relationship that genuinely adds as much value to their business as it would to yours. Here are some ideas to get started doing just that:

• Help cross-promote special events like live virtual open house events. 
• You can also offer to participate in the event via chat or live stream to answer questions from participants about home financing. 
• Create real estate-related centered content such as articles, infographics, or videos that you can co-brand with the agent. 
• Better still, have them publish the original content on their site and link back to your site for an additional SEO boost.
• Continuing the spirit of offering free valuable content, reach out to their email list. If you’re not already aware, email lists have one of the highest conversion rates. So if your agent has a list of a few hundred emails that they organically grew, it can prove to be a white-hot lead source. 
• Engage with the agent’s social media. Go beyond just liking every post and take the time to comment with additional insight or echo their sentiment. 

Leverage Your Digital Mortgage Tools and Co-Branding Opportunities

Historically, the real estate profession has been historically an in-person profession –at least when it comes to doing open houses and showing properties to potential buyers. So when the industry was suddenly thrown into virtual-only, it posed a significant challenge. 

Fortunately, it seems that both the industry and consumers have embraced a virtual way of home buying as a welcomed alternative to traditional in-person. And much like in the mortgage industry, technology in real estate is proving to be a significant boost to revenue potential.

As such, real estate agents look to partner with technologically savvy mortgage professionals. Products like our co-brandable mortgage mobile app Loanzify are a popular and valuable tool that agents can easily share with their clients. It’s free for the agent and consumer to use, and it’s packed with resources, information, and interactive tools that lead all users back to you. 

Loanzify POS is another tool you can use to win over more real estate referral partners. Keeping every interested party informed is hard, and miscommunication is a major cause of delayed funding and unhappy customers. With Loanzify POS, the agent can have secure access to the loan file with a pre-determined level of access.  They can also be assigned to specific loans.

From the agent’s admin view can see where the borrower is in their journey to approval and can even download the borrower’s preapproval letter to submit with their offers. 

Real estate agents are a powerful resource for finding quality leads, but only you make a conscious and strategic effort. Remember that when you approach it from building lasting relationships, you make it a win-win for everyone. Make it personal, overdeliver, be social and genuine, and leverage your mortgage technology every chance you get. 

Want to learn more about implementing mortgage tech to win over more referral partners? Click below to try it out for free and schedule a live demo with one of our helpful account executives.

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Social media has become a valuable resource for consumers to interact with the brands they love and discover new ones. New users across the globe are flocking to social media platforms in record numbers and adding their voices to your brand’s narrative.

With social media tools, brands can capture a wealth of measurable insights from the consumer data that social networks provide. And social media monitoring is the key to staying on top of changes in the volume and tone of these online discussions that impact your brand – and you can be sure that potential impact is significant! Let’s dig into some “must-have” capabilities, followed by the advanced, and finally – some tools to help you stay ahead of it all.

Social media monitoring must-haves

The way consumers engage and evaluate brands online is constantly evolving. For this reason, it’s critical for brands, institutions, and agencies to listen and understand consumers as they share their opinions on social media. These opinions are a valuable resource to protect your brand health, detect emerging trends, and keep a watchful eye on competitors’ performance with consumers. Social media monitoring is how you do it – but not all tools are created equal.

Therefore, when you’re outfitting your social media monitoring toolbox, there are several critical use cases that you want to have in your arsenal at the end of the day. Let’s look at a few.

Fig #1: Critical metrics measured and capabilities made possible with social media monitoring.

First and foremost, you need the capacity for robust brand health benchmarks. The ability to capture and measure posts, comments, potential impressions, and net sentiment are the bare minimum. Additionally, you need the ability to perform a precision-based social media audit on your brand to establish key metrics and understand your “normal.” Tracking these measurements over time shows how your brand performs online and is a critical element for early crisis detection.

Monitoring your marketing endeavors lets you track how your campaigns are playing out in real-time. This is vital for seeing what works and what doesn’t. Therefore, your social media monitoring should bolster your campaign strategy at the end of the day.

Likewise, your tools should leave you with a holistic outlook on your product innovation and launch. Shedding light on the consumer’s voice is critical to understanding their needs and wants, so you know which direction you need to go.

Your social media monitoring tools should be capable of casting a wide net on any topic allowing you to detect anomalies and emerging trends over time. Trend analytics is a critical component of social listening success and should inform your brand’s decision-making.

With the speed of social your social media monitoring tools should have a robust alert functionality to notify your team when your social media mentions or sentiment is going off the rails. Crisis management is a crucial aspect of social listening and something you never want to compromise on.

For the ultimate in competitive intelligence, your social media tools should have the capacity to perform the functions mentioned above on your competitors. This is particularly the case for brand health benchmarks – and even setting alerts. That way, you can compare the competition’s social media performance against your own. The goal is an accurate understanding of your share of voice within your market through competitor monitoring.

For example, tracking three competitors’ social media mentions in chunks of time gives you a window into share of voice. Monitoring these metrics over time lets you know if your brand is gaining ground.

Fig #2: Tracking competitors’ social media mentions, sentiment and passion intensity.

To round out our social media must-haves, your tools should have the ability to identify and track conversations surrounding influencers and key opinion leaders that are shaping the narrative in your market. After all, they shape consumer opinion, so staying in tune with their conversations leaves you with a head start on detecting emerging trends. Not only that, it allows you to perfect your influencer marketing strategy ahead of the competition.

While these use cases don’t cover the entirety of what modern social media monitoring tools are capable of, these are a few of the high-priority abilities you want from your toolbox. Let’s explore the advanced side of social media monitoring tools in a little more detail.

Advanced social media monitoring capabilities

To excel in today’s business world, your social media analytics must happen in real-time. Artificial intelligence (AI) with machine learning capabilities does the heavy lifting providing you with immediate access to measurable insights – which means quick decisions.

AI is a game-changer with social media monitoring, but not all AI is created equal. When choosing your social media tools, actionability is based on breadth and depth of insight. If your actions are based on half-baked AI, you have a problem.

Keeping that in mind, your social media monitoring tools should be capable of:

• Accurately analyzing billions of conversations across all social media platforms on any topic with the push of a button
• Recognizing patterns in human emotions, behaviors, and sentiment drivers
• Revealing trending conversations and issues through sentiment measurement and volume
• Analyzing demographic and psychographic data such as interests, habits, and opinions
• Predictive (what is likely to happen) and prescriptive insights (recommend or do it for me)

There’s no doubt about it; if you want to keep up in today’s market, brands are leaning on social media tools that give them a holistic outlook at a moment’s notice. AI is the way to go, and you want to test your social media tools to ensure you’re getting accurate results. Again, not all social media monitoring tools are created equal. The key is to get actionable intel within each sentence for emotions, behaviors, attributes, hashtags, people, and brands.

Fig #3: Using AI to parse text and imagery for emotions, behaviors, attributes, hashtags, people, and brands.

Top social media monitoring tools to consider

Staying on top of your social media monitoring is a continuous process with many tools vying for your attention. Here, we’ll briefly cover a few tools that will help you cover the lion’s share of social listening applications that your brand needs to attend to.

NetBase Quid

NetBase Quid is the leader in social media and consumer experience analytics, capable of delivering insights 5x faster than other solutions. NetBase Quid’s next-generation artificial intelligence uses best-in-class machine learning for intelligent processing and analysis of social media and any other consumer and market data at scale.

Fig #4: Snapshot of topic mentions, posts, net sentiment, engagements, impressions and more to inform next steps.

NetBase Quid offers two distinct ways to assess data for social media analytics and data visualization. Quid not only takes your competitive intelligence to the next level with patent, company, news and blog data, but it also incorporates your NetBase queries into Quid Social for advanced social media monitoring data visualizations. That way, you can see your topic’s conversation at a glance and dive into the themes that impact your brand, like the Olympics conversation below.

Fig #5: Olympics conversation, visualized with semantically related clusters.

Looking to complement a one-stop-shop such as NetBase Quid, let’s look at a few other social media monitoring tools to keep your eye on.

Feedly

Trend analytics and monitoring are the name of the game with social media monitoring, and Feedly allows you to make sure your social listening dynamic is staying the course. Leo is their “research assistant” that organizes social media sources around your topic, filters out the noise, and helps you share insights with your team. It’s a great add-on to double-check your primary social listening’s AI accuracy.

Fig #6: Feedly dashboard.

StoryHeap

Many brands are all in on “stories” on Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat – as well they should be. Stories give your brand another angle to social media and maximize impact. StoryHeap measures how your stories perform by following growth, open rate, completed views, and screenshots.

It’s a niche tool, but one that complements your marketing intel gleaned from your main social media monitoring tools, so you know the right direction to go.

Fig #7: Storyheap dashboard.

Sendible

When you’ve uncovered the data you need with your social media monitoring tools, Sendible helps you plan, post, and measure your content across a wide variety of platforms. When you’re putting your brand out there on social media, story is everything. Sendible allows you to take your social media insights, craft your marketing for direct hits and customize posts for each of your social media platforms – and track your progress.

Fig #8: Sendible dashboard.

Conclusion

Your consumers are talking about your brand and your competition on social media. Today’s top social media monitoring tools keep you apprised of relevant conversations, so you don’t miss a thing and can get ahead of narratives. Shaping the story is powerful, particularly when it so greatly impacts consumer perception. It’s essential to ensure your brand uses the latest world-class tools to stay a step of the competition – and keep pace with an increasingly demanding and fickle audience. Tomorrow’s opportunities are being shared online today!

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