Virtually all of the mortgage industry marketing experts agree that producers need to have a viable social media strategy to be successful going forward. That is because the consumers are looking for one.
However, for many mortgage banking and brokering companies, social media is an area replete with regulatory and reputation pitfalls they are not quite ready to address. Those issues were raised during a panel session at the Mortgage Bankers Association Loan Production Conference in New York, and in interviews with attendees of that conference and the concurrent MBA National Secondary Market Conference.
Some members of the panel on how top producers use social media surveyed loan officers and found that 84% said the Realtors they work with have a social media presence.
They also found that 45% of the LOs said their own referral business has increased by using social media. Annette Melcher, director, product and business development at Mortgage Guaranty Insurance Corp., said we are now a “society which has become always connected.”
There are three camps among loan officers regarding the use of social media, she said. The first is lenders who are actively using these sites and tools.
The second group are those who are poised to move forward but are currently not using social media or if they are, doing so on a limited basis. The third group acknowledges they need to be their but are currently dormant.
For these last two groups, the questions they have, said Melcher, include how to move forward in social media without making mistakes, how to get buy-in from senior management to allow the use of social media, and finally what do their customers want regarding social media.
However, noted Brian Koss, executive vice president at Mortgage Network, one of the fears companies have in this area is in terms of making sure they are in compliance with federal and state marketing laws.
While there is a rush to make sure your name and/or company appears at the top of the search engine results, he said lenders needed to instruct their employees on how to position themselves correctly.
Realtors are embracing social media as a way to provide information to consumers. In this way, Koss said, they build trust and they become the authority.
Agents are also creating single property sites and using QR (short for quick response) codes on marketing materials. LOs need to know what roles these play for their Realtor partners, he said.
Joe Stanganelli, retail market manager for PNC Mortgage, said top LOs are blogging, limiting their topics and staying focused on their message. They consistently post new items.
But besides blogging, top producers use other social media such as LinkedIn and Twitter, and they use these to multiply the number of connections they have.
Furthermore, the social media presence creates credibility with consumers, he said. The producer can’t hide; rather the consumer is able to check him or her out.
Top producers have a plan when it comes to the use of social media. They do not let it be a distraction to their work.
Rather, he said, it is a tool to help them achieve what they want to achieve.
The president of QFS Sales Solutions, Patricia Sherlock, declared, “Social media is just the new telephone.” Marketing has not changed since she started in the mortgage business, just the technology has changed. Melcher said for the bank lenders, typically branding is at the corporate level, not at the loan officer level. They want to provide the tools to their originators to make them top producers, but because of the branding issue, it creates hesitation in the use of social media at some organizations.
What Stanganelli said he is finding regarding banks recruiting top producers is that a balance is needed. The producers feel there is a value proposition in marrying themselves to the bank’s brand.
But if the bank doesn’t recognize this balance, it makes it difficult to recruit. So there are ways to create this balance, he said. The LO needs to be careful about what he or she posts or says.
It is good to write something that is not business-oriented once in a while, but not to excess.
On the other hand, Stanganelli said, personal stuff does help to create a connection with the recipient.
But in an interview during the show, Casey Cunningham, president of the mortgage sales training company Xinnix, said a lot of mortgage lenders are worried about controlling the message their employees put out on social media.
There are those that are limiting their loan officers to having an account on LinkedIn, but banning them from Facebook and Twitter. LinkedIn is more business-oriented than the other two sites.
Xinnix offers a class on LinkedIn for loan officers, including how to build one’s site and how to use it effectively.
This course is part of a three-lesson offering Xinnix has on lead generation.
LeaderOne Financial has a policy in place on the use of social media through its human resources department, explained executive vice president Brent Duhaime.
It provides professionally written blog content for its employees. The company monitors Google alerts for when someone makes a post. He said on a typical day, 200 of these Google alerts pass through human resources.
One of the worries for the company, Duhaime said, is not from current employees but rather from a former employee who had been terminated. There is the fear of harm to the company’s reputation being hurt out of spite.
Today’s originator needs to be involved with social media to be successful in sales, he added.
Duhaime posts every day on Twitter, on such things as leadership and even personal things like his children. He will get responses from the company’s loan officers.
It is not only loan officers that see social media as a way to connect with their clients. It is also true on the B2B side of the mortgage business as well. Ernst Publishing Co., a Half Moon Bay, Calif.-based firm that deals with land recording requirements, earlier this year stated notifying its industry clients about changes in recording fees, transfer tax and title data through Twitter streams and Facebook postings.
“Social media has come of age, and has become a vital form of business communication that ensures that our clients receive updates and changes in data immediately without delay,” Gregory E. Teal, president and chief executive of Ernst Publishing, said in a press release.
“Given the challenging real estate market and the demands placed on our clients to deliver accurate information in as close to real time as possible, we recognized that Twitter and Facebook were important tools that will help us achieve this goal—and so do our clients.”
