Using social media for marketing purposes is now commonplace, however not all social media channels are created equal. And as with most things in life, you need the right tool for the job.

When it comes to the real estate industry, of all social websites on the planet, LinkedIn takes the cake. Not only is it the world’s largest professional network on the Internet, but it’s also growing like crazy. As of June 30, 2012, professionals are signing up to LinkedIn at an astonishing rate of approximately two per second.

What’s most interesting is that 84 percent of real estate professionals utilize social media, according to Postling’s data, yet only 29 percent use LinkedIn while a whopping 79 percent use Facebook. If you take a step back and look at LinkedIn’s targeting capabilities compared to Facebook’s, these figures make no sense. Well, maybe they do.

As the popularity of social media skyrocketed, especially between 2008 and 2011, Facebook and Twitter were (and still are) the big names in the business. On the other hand, LinkedIn has always been geared towards business professionals, which has considerably limited its exposure and subsequent use. Hype centered around Facebook is ultimately why more real estate professionals use Facebook over LinkedIn, regardless of conversion rates.

Marketing 101 establishes the fact that targeted marketing efforts will increase conversion rates, and that’s the reason why LinkedIn is best for business-to-business (B2B) marketing. We’re all social, but we’re not all business professionals.

Today, LinkedIn has over 16,000 groups related to real estate, over 500 recent discussions about real estate in the Answers section, 2,110 real estate jobs, and 1,983,286 profiles associated with the real estate industry. Clearly it’s a very powerful marketing tool.

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