Online Real Estate Technology

Social Media and Your ROI

After facing my second redundancy in as many years, I had an interesting debate the other day with some business colleagues. The debate centred on how much information is shared via blogs like this one and other social media sites for free, and what my colleagues essentially were saying is “Why would anyone pay you, when you give all the information away for free” and in reflection, I’d have to say that a number of people who I dealt with in the past, who were regular callers, have certainly dropped off since I started on my own, thinking  I might start charging them for the information and assistance.

When I started this blog almost 12 months ago it was just a bit of fun and also a tool to build my profile , as well as provide the people in the industry that I was working in with a resource and information bank that they could use to improve their Internet marketing campaigns. Looking back over the past 12 months on this social media journey, I think I achieved quite a lot, I’ve got this blog operating, which as far as reader numbers would indicate, does very well every month, and I’ve had a lot of support and great feedback from you the readers over that 12 months. I’ve got my podcast series, which is very popular with listeners all over the world and my Twitter profile is building each day as more and more followers join me on the journey, so all in all, would I have achieved all of that without social media? the answer is no I would not have.

This debate I’m sure, is one that is going on every day in business all over the world, how much do we share and what’s our return on investment with social media. In fact, I’ve had this come up time and time again when I’ve been presenting social media strategies to companies and I beleive the main reason it comes up is because the sharing and giving of information or advice is coupled with companies charging for this expertise and the thought of suddenly providing this information for free is very challenging. This leads to another challenge for companies and one that really impacts the culture of the company, social media is all about sharing and if you have people in your organisation who don’t want to share, your social media strategy will not succeed, and that comes back to my opening statement, how much do you give away for free?

 I’ve always based the information provided on this blog on issues that affect small business,how to improve Internet marketing campaigns, giving new technology advice and looking at issues such as SEO and SEM, & how important it is for SME’s to be aware of why they need an active search engine strategy. If that information helps make you aware of what you need to do to improve your marketing efforts then I’ve achieved my goal, if you decide to use me to help you in that effort then that’s even better.  

With the real estate industry, the Internet has changed the way consumers get information, 10 years ago when I was a working real estate agent, my buyers and sellers would come off the cards in the office window, I would then get the chance to interact and engage my buyers face to face, well how many times today do you get the chance to influence these buyers at that first point of research? not very often I would think, research tells us that 9 out 10 buyers start the process on the net and they start looking for information and properties in the areas or suburbs they are interested in.

How then do you make sure you are the agent they want to deal with along this process?, you need to have as many communication channels available to you assisting you in delivering information to the property buyer or seller along the journey, and that is not just having a web site, but a multi media strategy running alongside your traditional marketing activities. 

The benefits of my social media efforts over the last 12 months have helped me move into new directions and opened up a lot of doors for me that were previously closed, it’s improved my knowledge of technology and marketing and I’ve become a syndicated author. In my experience, you’ll get out of a social strategy, what you put in.

Why would I not keep doing what I’ve been doing, and as long as you the readers of this blog find it helpful and of benefit to you & your business then in my mind, that’s my return on investment.

Tweetlister for real estate agents only

It seems that every time I post these days it’s about Twitter, and that is not deliberate, it’s just that there is a lot of information and applications being developed about and for Twitter. Although sometimes there’s a new application that is released that I can’t really see the value in, for instance, a new application for real estate agents has been released called Tweetlister . This is a free application that allows you to create, manage & schedule Twitter friendly property listings. The site allows you to track contacts as well as download them as an Excel report. 

As a part of your social media strategy, this could be a handy tool, however there is more to using and being succesful on Twitter and other sites than just promoting your product or listing. I can name a number of real estate groups that are just promoting listings and as a result have virtually no followers on the social sites. To make this work for you, you need to build a strategy around the engagement of the on line social media user, not just promote product. It’s about sharing information, about providing support and advice for people as they go on the journey of looking and searching for a home or investment.     

Yes, you read right, it is a journey for most people, as they research on line for  properties and agents to assist and help them, ask yourself the question, are you providing that information, are you there on the journey with them, or are you just out promoting a product. 

Use sites like Tweetlister  as part of your overall plan, but remember, the best way to  create a successful social strategy is engage & interact with your followers.

Anyway, you can already do what Tweetlister offers on other sites, so it’s really nothing new. That’s only my opinion of course and if you have a differing opinion, then I’d love to hear it.

Hot on the news today is the reported closure of one of the oldest newspapers in the US, the 138 year old Tuscon Citizen. The paper will continue on as an On Line Paper in a modified format, but without news or sports coverage, it might as well be put to rest, although a move by the Santa Monica Media Corp to block the closure of the paper, after trying to negotiate to buy it, might see it survive for a few more days. This brings me to the recent moves at Fairfax in Australia, which has just recently retrenched a number of it’s on line staff, due to a merger with the print side.

Funny though, that only the digital staff were retrenched!!

It’s being promoted by Fairfax as a one stop solution for the companies clients and Fairfax is saying that all the agents out there are really in favour of it. I would suggest that they get to know the market just a little bit better, given that print is on the decline in Australia. It’s shame that this has started to happen, as Domain.com.au was starting to get it’s act together.

All they are really doing is protecting the print side of the business, and that for Domain.com.au is a very real shame.  

Maybe it’s time for the prospect of an Industry owned site to be raised again?

Social Media and Blogs Very Influential Communication Tool

As the first of my blog workshops is due to kick off in two weeks time, I thought I’d take a look at the impact that blogs have on the on line consumer. Sometimes as a writer, I often think about who will be reading this blog and whether the information I provide is of interest or help to the readers, and I think about who is reading and researching blogs like mine on the web.

New research available indicates that blogs are a very valuable source of information, and blogs are particularly popular with women according to research from the US. Blogs sit along side social media in popularity with 53% of the female online population who regularly participate in social media.

In terms of demographics, social media attracts a large number of Gen X&Y’s at 15.4%, with baby boomers not far behind at 13.3%. Blogs are also a powerful tool for companies to utilise to communicate with female on line users, women are more likely than men to make a purchase decision as the result of a recommendation or other customers experience reported about on a blog. In fact the figure is very high, with 85% of females surveyed said they had made a purchase decision from a blog post or the blog had had an impact on their purchase.

The other trend that stands out is the way social media usage is affecting traditional media, when asked the question about other media usage, 57% of the females responded they were reading less newspapers, 47% said they were reading less magazines and 36% said they were listening less to radio. This is higher than the general population decline in usage of traditional media in the US.

So the message for companies out there that have not yet embraced blogs as a corporate communication tool or blogging as a tool to engage and interact with the on line consumer, in particular the female market, is very clear.

Start a blog, communicate and engage the on line consumer and just as important, if you have a business, start to monitor what blogs and blog writers are saying about you and your business or brand, it could be costing you a lot in lost business, lost business that today you probably don’t know you’ve lost.

Twitter Social Media

I’ve been following for a little while now the number of tweets that are appearing on Twitter from some users offering big numbers of followers that can be achieved by signing up to  third party applications and auto follow applications.

Some are free and some charge you for the privilege of using their applications to build followers, but I can’t help but feel that this is not what Twitter is all about, it’s just an ego trip of getting big numbers of followers that in reality have no interest in what you do or say.

I first wrote about this back in March, and since then I’ve seen my following grow slowly, I’ve not tried to push the growth just so I could claim a huge following. To me organic growth that happens because people like the information I provide or they find it useful is far more important to me than having a huge following that never interacts with me. Now I know there are some using Twitter, that by the nature of what they do will always attract a big following, celebrities such as Ashton Kutchner for example, but for me I’ll continue to try and build a following based on good quality links,information and updates, and I’ll be pleased that the followers I have are there because they want good information which is helpful to them in running their business, not because some auto follow system drives them to me.

To those of you who are new to Twitter, build your following on providing good quality links and information, communicate with your target market and to do this, the best advice I can give you is to:

1. Follow
2. Create
3. Engage 

To me this what social media is about, not what Twitter is becoming.

I’d be interested in your comments on this subject.

TwitterJobSearch Logo

There are a lot of third party applications available for Twitter to enable you to use the site better, and as those of you who use the site all the time will know, there is lots of information or links published in Tweets. As I mentioned in my last post, Twitter is launching new search capabilties with an improved search engine to allow you to find all those links and then group them, making them easy to find. When I search Twitter I use #tags, so that I can follow emerging trends in areas that I’m interested in and this allows me to keep up with the latest Tweets on that subject, but I’d never thought about using Twitter to search for jobs, until now.

A new search engine called TwitterJobSearch uses semantic intelligence, link crawling and crowdsourcing to track job and recruitment tweets. It searches Twitter and pulls out tweets it believes to be job adds, meaning you can search for any type of job in any location and the search engine will display the tweets that are relevant to your query. By searching for sales jobs, IT or accountants you’ll get a list of jobs vacant. It is not perfect, as I searched for sales jobs in Brisbane and got a news story in the results, it was still very good.

TwitterJobSearch Job Search Results

TwitterJobSearch claim that “over a 180,000 jobs have been advertised on Twitter in the last 30 days and indexed by them” so this makes it a comparable alternative to the major recruitment web sites.

If you have never thought of using Twitter as a free recruitment site then now is the time to try, if you’re looking for new sales staff or to fill any role you have vacant then this is a free resource for you, you’ll not only be promoting the job to your followers but it will also be picked up by job aggregators such as TwitterJobSearch.

So go forth and advertise.

You can follow Mike on Twitter here and get all the latest on social media and real estate marketing

Twitter Micro Blogging

If you like to search Twitter for emerging trends by using #tags, for example, searching #swineflu on Twitter will not only bring up the thousands of tweets on the subject, you’ll also be able to monitor new tweets as they are published. However the Twitter search engine is no Google, all it does is index tweets and is great for monitoring conversations but not much else. 

This is about to change as Twitter are about to launch new searching capabilities such as being able to crawl the links included in tweets, there are a lot of links published daily and the ability to search these to find useful information or group them into catagories so you can read or search them later would be a very useful tool, also there’s a hint that Twitter will also include a Reputation ranking system. This will mean that not all tweets will be equal, rank will be calculated for each twitterer and could be based on number of followers, number of retweets etc.

The ability of the Twitter search engine to crawl links will give Twitter the scope to be able to compete with the likes of Google. It will be very interesting to see if Google’s search algorithm based on the number of inbound links to a web site, will stay superior to Twitters, which is based on real people’s conversations.

Another interesting situation to monitor is recent research from Neilsen On Line which indicates that 6 out of 10 people who use Twitter do not return after their first month of usage, in comparison, Facebook’s and Myspace retention rates are at 60%.

You can follow Mike on Twitter here and get the Tweets as they happen!! 

Here’s the figures from Neilsen for you:

60% of Twitter Users Don't Return after First Month