Remember back in the day when rates dropped and you had to call every client you’d done a loan for In recent years? You’d spend hours on the phone trying to alert each of your clients to the potential savings. 

If you didn’t spend hours on the phone pitching to clients, you spent hours running numbers to see who qualified to save cash or time. It caused 90 hour work weeks and that’s not counting the time actually doing the loan. 

Things got easier with technology and eventually we were able to send a blast email out with the rate update.  You could copy and paste every email of every past client and send an email to them with an “apply here” link to your online application.  It saved a ton of time but is still time consuming. 

Here’s the worst part:

In America today, 86% or ALL phone calls go unanswered. Think of how much time you spent leaving voicemails that will never be listened to. Most of those 90 hours were wasted. 

The average open rate of emails is only 16%. At means 84% of your emails don’t get seen either. It’s enough to to drive a LO crazy. 

So if 86% of phone calls go unanswered and 84% of emails get unseen, how in the world did this refi boom happen so fast?  It’s not like the average consumer is glued to CNBC on a daily basis waiting on rates to drop. 

The answer is simple  – Social Media. 

Smart LOs and Agents have been connecting with their clients and prospects on social media for the last few years. If you close 5 loans a month and take about 10 apps a month, you have 120 people a year that you can add to your friend’s list on facebook. 

If you’ve been doing this for the last three years that’s 360 people you’ve personally done business with and are connected to on facebook that could use your services as a LO again. 

So how much work does it take to get the word out to these 360 people? It takes about 5 posts. One a day in each social media prime time slot For 5 days.  

This go around, when the rates dropped LOs and Agents simply posted the notifications of low rates to their facebook profiles and the word spread quick. Faster than I’ve ever seen before. 

Social media has changed the way we communicate and now it has changed the way we alert our clients to beneficial policy changes. In my 10 years in the mortgage industry this recent rate drop was the fatest reacted refi boom I’ve seen. 

It’s amazing to see how sites like facebook effect everything even down to the way the banking industry spreads news. If you’re not using facebook to prospect, bring brand awareness and meet agents, you are missing out on a significant chunk of business in 2015. 

Social media marketing and advertising is the way of the future. Get it. Learn it. Implement it.