At its best, social media is about making deeper connections with other human beings. At their best, Facebook and Twitter improve the quality of our relationships. We’d like to think our latest feature at RealSatisfied, the social dashboard for brokers, has connection and improving the quality of relationships as its chief benefit.

Last year, as part of our own customer satisfaction survey, we asked our clients if they’d like to see their testimonials turned into graphics for sharing on social media. The answer was yes and the visual testimonial was born. Agents immediately began using the new feature to share their testimonials to Facebook and Twitter and the response has been overwhelmingly positive. We know that these posts are getting traction. However, we knew more could be done to insure these shares were receiving the greatest benefit.

Almost since their launch, we’ve been thinking about providing brokers with a way to see all of the visual testimonials posted to social media by their agents. The obvious benefit of providing this tool would be to create the opportunity for agents and brokers to connect on social media around agent successes. This improves the quality of those relationships, surely, but it also sends other subtle social signals.

Take for example the Facebook post illustrated above, shared by Betsy Hurst-Younger. Betsy did a number of things right here, first and foremost, delivering exceptional service to her clients, and one of those things was sharing this to Facebook in a way that engaged her network. At the time of this writing, 69 people had liked the testimonial, it had 19 comments and 3 shares, including one by us. Read the testimonial and then read through the comments. You can see that this post captured the attention of her social sphere and almost certainly energized Betsy.

If her broker wasn’t participating in this thread, they would be missing a great opportunity to connect with Betsy. That’s obvious to me. In this case, Betsy’s broker, Kimberly Darr, was engaged and even used it as a teaching tool in their office meeting. And this highlights the more subtle opportunity available to brokers willing to engage is about retention, recruitment and consumer awareness. The retention part is closely tied to the relationship part. Strengthen your relationship with your agents and you have a better chance of keeping them. But we all know that other real estate agents pay as much, or more, attention to these posts than the consumer does. So a broker who is willing to engage is sending a very subtle message to others about how they manage and the value they bring to the relationship. I think it’s powerful. And finally, the consumer gets a peak behind the real estate curtain that shines a human light on professional relationships.

The social dashboard for brokers is available now on the front page of every office admin account on RealSatisfied. And when you click on the “see more social activity for your office” link, it opens to show the last 50 social posts by the agents in that office. This link is a public link brokers can bookmark, or share with others in their office who might want to amplify the social messages of their agents. It’s a simple way to connect with your agents around their successes and to amplify their social efforts.

At it’s best, social media is about making deeper connections with other human beings. We built the social media dashboard for brokers with that thought in mind. We hope you use it to create deeper connections with your agents.