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Elliman’ s top digital ace now @Compass
Mike Fabbri spent just a year at larger firm
UPDATED: 10:18 a.m., April 16: Mike Fabbri, Douglas Elliman’s director of digital and social media, is now Tweeting for another company: Compass.
Fabbri, who was tapped a year ago to jump-start Elliman’s social media presence, is now senior manager of agent marketing and brand strategy at the startup brokerage.
“I’ve always been an entrepreneur at heart,” he told The Real Deal. Despite his background of working in the social media space, the role at Compass is broader in scope, he said. “Digital and social don’t work in a vacuum; marketing now is more about all these tactics, how each piece works together,” said Fabbri, who joined Compass two weeks ago. “It all comes back to an overall strategy.”
Still, Fabbri’s departure is surely a loss for Douglas Elliman’s social media effort, as the firm has had a tough time keeping his former job filled.
In April 2013, the firm tapped former Citi Habitats marketing executive Joshua Ferris to be its first director of social media, but Ferris left four months later.
Fabbri joined Elliman last March, when the brokerage hired him to “create a new brand personality and voice that will be effective across all business sectors, with a focus on digital and social media,” according to Fabbri’s LinkedIn profile.
In his profile, he also described himself as a connector and storyteller, and he claims: “What Kevin Bacon did in 6 degrees, I can do in 5.” Prior to his stint at Douglas Elliman, Fabbri launched two social media startups, prollie and MJF Digital Marketing, based in Fairfield, Conn.
He described his experience at Elliman as “wonderful,” and said he boosted the firm’s following across all social media channels.
Still, while several top agents have strong social followings – Fredrick Eklund has 287,000 followers on Instagram, for example – Elliman historically lagged behind other firms in its social engagement.
The firm has nearly 38,000 likes on Facebook, but less than 10,000 followers on Twitter and a little more than 8,700 followers on Instagram.
In a statement, Nicole Oge, Elliman’s global chief marketing officer, said: “Innovation is at the core of our operational philosophy and we plan to continue raising the bar for digital marketing in our industry with the support of the best internal and agency talent in the game today.”