Online Real Estate Technology

Effective Blog posts ahead

Every day I can guarantee that you will be impacted in some way by social media, there will be experts telling you, you need a profile on social networks like Facebook, and that Twitter is the best thing since sliced bread was invented, so you create a profile and you start to tell everyone and anyone who will listen about your latest listings and open homes, but is that really the way to approach social media, doing the same thing you do every day on more traditional mediums?

Taking this approach to your social media strategy will do nothing more than waste your precious time, time that could be spent prospecting for new listings and working with your clients face to face.

I know some younger agents who think that social media and the Internet will replace face to face contact, the reality is it won’t, however the very same principles you use face to face, apply to social media, the only difference being the method of delivery.

I know of some real estate groups who have launched their social strategy with profiles on this site and that network, yet  their sites are full of their member offices congratulating themselves on such forward progress, but where is the consumer?, where is the engagement factor?, where is the interaction with the people that count the most, your customers. This should be the reason you create your social media strategy in the first place, to create the local expert, the trusted advisor role, create and engage your community and to provide information and advice for the long term.

One question to ask yourself is, why do people interact within social network sites in the first place? Is it to get your latest listing, or to find out about your open homes, or to get an appraisal? No, No, No, they are there to connect, to engage and interact with other like minded people, to share experiences, to share activities and create a sense of community and to stay in touch with family and friends.

You as a business person need to understand this motivation and work with it to really maximise the return on your investment of time in creating a social media strategy for you and your business

So what is the best way to approach a social media strategy, firstly you need to work out why you want to have a presence on social networks, is it because everyone else is doing it? Is it because your competitor down the road is doing it so you should as well right? Well wrong actually, do it because it gives you another advertising medium to capture the attention of prospective customers, do it because it is a huge billboard of opportunity to take your message to the masses, do it for you and the exposure it can bring you and your brand, do it because you are an expert in your field and do it because people are looking for an expert to advise, coach and motivate them.

Start by doing a business and digital media strategy and look at ways in which you’ll start to build an audience, do you start a blog first, do you jump on Facebook and MySpace or do you start using Twitter and on what network sites do you create a profile.

How do you declare your brand identity? Remember, you should be focused on how you and your team help other people, being the agent to call when listing a property and raising the profile of you and your office on the web.

The first Step, is create accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and YouTube. Check in and see where you fit in to the community, upload or add all of your contacts into Facebook and start a routine of regularly adding “friends” to your page, the goal is to get your personal contacts engaged and to start to follow and engaging with other local businesses, build a schedule so that you can allocate time each week to this, otherwise you will find yourself becoming overwhelmed with trying to keep up with all the conversations that happen.

As you become more familiar with the sites you learn that Linkedin or Twitter may not be for you, that’s fine, at least you are now more informed than you where when you started. You are learning, next you can start to build your blog, your blog web site is your central hub with all roads leading to it, and everything you do should be designed to get people to your blog and interacting with you on your territory.

It’s great to have a Facebook page but even better when you have both working for you; you are in a win win situation.

Remember, with your blog comes responsibility, you’ll need to add content to it regularly and this takes time, so you should allocate at least 2+ hours a week.

Use the same strategy for all the social network sites you use, allocate time each week in your plan to update your sites and remember it’s about engaging your community not only about promoting your latest listing.

We can help you save time and money in building your social media business plan and setting up your pages and blog, we provide weekly coaching clinics that provide information and advice on content and tactics for social media. If you’d like to find out more about our social media integration plans and coaching clinics contact me at Mike Andrew Consulting and we’ll design and set up a coaching plan for you.

Great Words of Advice

Today whilst visiting a real estate office we got talking about social media strategies and why as a real estate office they should be working towards implementing a social media strategy, not just to farm new pastures, but also to help them in the optimisation of their web site. During the conversation we got on the subject of blogging, and why creating a blog would help their Internet marketing efforts.

Well I have to admit that over the last few weeks I’ve neglected this blog a bit as I explore new areas and work on my web site, so with a little bit of a guilty feeling, I’ve motivated myself to write this article, and you can probably guess what it is about, making sure you create and maintain a disciplined approach to blogging.

In my research I come across a lot of blog writers who after a period of time, and it’s often around the 12 month scenario, tend to get a little bit of writers block and lose interest in maintaining their blog, which is what happened to myself, and in a number of cases the blog gets abandoned altogether.

The Internet is full of abandoned blogs, left in the wilderness by writers who lose interest.

It’s not easy maintaining a blog on a regular basis, you also have to work hard at maintaining your audience and coming up with new content that appeals to your readers.

So today I’ve written a list of things that I will do to assist me in writing articles for my blogs and I’ve listed them below for you, if you are just starting as a blogger I hope they help set you on a disciplined approach and most of all don’t give up.

1. Set aside 1 hour each day to research for new articles – doesn’t matter what time of day it is, just DO IT! – Talking to other people also stimulates ideas for posts. Mornings I find are much better, I can sit in my pajamas and coffee and read.

2.Write when you get urge - A lot of times I’ll come up with an article idea and leave it till later, in most cases later never comes.

3. Create a list of topics and categories – Then write first about what you like or are passionate about. That way you’ll enjoy writing about your favourite topic.

4. Revisit your old articles - Some of these older stories can be updated and rewritten. As some of these topics are changing almost daily, providing updates on these old stories can generate new ideas.

5. Read other Blogs & Bloggers - This will help to create ideas as well, it gets the creative juices flowing and helps with topics and trends.

6. Subscribe to RSS Feeds - Make sure you get updates delivered right to your computer, and use some of these articles on your own blog. They help break up the style of writing and provide different opinions on topics. But remember, always credit the author of the article.

6. Commitment - Now here is the magic word, once you start you really need to be committed to your blog, so create that list.

That is what I intend to action from today, I put it up on my office wall so that every morning the first thing i see will be the list.

I hope that if you are just starting out, this little list will help keep your blog on track and if you have any additions to the list please share them with me.

Search Engines

Your blog will have a better SEO result when you utilise good SEO techniques such as link building, and one of the ways to do that is by creating internal links within your posts or content.

A good internal link structure can have a size-able impact on your rankings on the major search engines. Most blog writers either don’t use this strategy or don’t know how to create internal links and it is really quite simple. You want your readers, particularly new readers to discover all your great content, and by including links to your older posts, it gives them a whole new life, as well as maintaining your readers on your blog for a longer stay. For example, in February I wrote a post about Google Analytics and in January I wrote about how important an SEO strategy is to your business, as you see I’ve included internal links to both of these posts I’ve mentioned, knowing that when new readers visit my blog, they will be able to visit those posts and read the stories, effectively giving those older posts a new lease on life.

So here are a few tips for you on creating an internal link strategy and a few things you should avoid:

1. Avoiding Bad Anchor Text: Whilst adding “Click Here Text” may drive a better click through rate, it is not good for anchor text. You need to decide if click here or keywords are more important. In the examples above, I’ve decided that keywords are more important, you can of course mix them up, by including good keywords and then a separate link containing the words “Click Here”. So if you want to rank for “Red Widgets” don’t use the phrase click here. I’ll cover this in my next post.

2. Uneven Distribution of links: Make sure you spread your links around, promote all your old posts in your new content. But one word of advice, don’t over do it. One or two links per post is sufficient.

3. Broken Links – Make sure all your links work,there’s nothing worse for a reader than to click on a link in your post and it not work. If you change or upgrade your blog software it can cause broken links,so make sure they all work and test them regularly. If you are using Google webmaster tools on your blog, it will tell you if a link is broken. But beware, the search engines don’t like broken links.

4. Missed Opportunities: If you are blogging about a subject you’ve written about before, don’t miss the opportunity to link to your older content.

5.Edit Instead of Linking: Sometimes there is the temptation to go back and edit an old post, or you might even want to add some up dated information to it, Well resist the temptation, you are far better to write a new post and then include a link to your old one.

I hope this post on how to create internal links is helpful to you in getting a better result for your blog. You can breath new life into your old articles and posts by creating internal links, and it will help you in the search results.

Good Luck and if you need help please let me know by leaving me a comment on the blog. I’ll always respond to your questions.

You can now download and listen to this post as a podcast, click here to get the latest episode.

Overall, US visits to social networking sites increased 4% in February vs the same month last year, with Myspace and Facebook still competing for a share of the market. Myspace winning the overall battle according to Hitwise, with Facebook the big winner with a growth of 149% over February 2008. Facebook also achieved good solid growth from the 35+ market, which grew 23% in February, whilst Myspace’s grip on the older demographics is starting to slip.

The social media revolution is also affecting the way the average internet consumer uses the medium, with the use of the internet for on line entertainment decreasing by 29%, being replaced by on line communication sites.

So if all of this wasn’t enough to get you thinking about taking social media seriously, couple it with the on line consumers attitude to business and social media.

In a March 2009 Netpop Research study, 93% of social media users say companies should have a social media presence,whilst 85% believe companies should not only be present, but should actively interact with consumers via social media sites. 56% of social media users feel a stronger connection and better served by those companies when they interact in social media environment. So, there you have it. 

In my travels within the real estate industry, I still have business owners tell me they have banned staff from using Facebook and Myspace in company time, well my argument against this policy, is to employ your staff to work on your company profile as a trade off, so if they spend 4 hours a day on Facebook, get them to spend 50% of the time on building your business profile and updating the site, after all the fastest growing demographic using Facebook is 35+, right in the middle of the real estate buying public. 

As a start to creating your social media strategy, you can read my earlier posts here and here, these posts will help you enter the world of social media and show you how you can start to build a strategy for your business that will help you engage your customers more effectively and create the social media handshake.

Good luck and let me know of I can assist you in any way, to make this an easier journey for you. 

Hitwise Facebook Results

So what is more important, Blog readers or Twitter followers? Well the answer to that question appears to be very simple, Blog readers.  Problogger has been running a poll about this subject and the results which were released last week found that 84% of respondents preferred blog readers to Twitter followers and only 16% thought Twitter followers were more important.

To me, generating a good readership for my blog by providing good quality content and building relationships via that content, has always been my goal for this blog. My use of Twitter is to solely to promote and push new readers to my blog.  Twitter which allows short message updates of 140 characters is a great push tool and I find my readership and podcast downloads goes up when I tweet on new content.

I’ll continue to work on my content and my blog readership and my suggestion to new blog writers is to concentrate on good quality content and build your blog readership. Use Twitter and Facebook, which is also a microblogging site to help build on the foundations you set on your blog.

As always, let me know if I can assist you in anyway. I hope Darren Rowse at Problogger won’t mind but I’ve included the results of the survey for you below.

Bloggers are preferred to Twitters

For those of you just starting out, trying to get an understanding of how to formalise your social network strategy, can be a very confusing journey, So I’ve decided to post a few articles to help you understand how it all works. 

My previous post was to help you “listen” and “understand” how to start to engage, this post is to help you define your strategy. So firstly, before you go off and create lots of blog posts and join all the sites, lets set up your strategy.

You need to define who your target market is before you start:

People – Who is your target market? Look at their social activities!

Objective- What do you want to achieve out of communicating with your defined market? What do you want to accomplish?

Strategy – How are you going to influence your market, Plan for how relationships with your consumers will change.

Technology - Decide which social sites to use.

Apply the principles of POST to all the sites you decide to use, once you have done your homework, you’re ready to start.

Before you go and log in to all the sites available read this post first.

I’ll cover your first steps in the next few posts for you. If you need any help just ask.

Download this post as a podcast here

During my seminar presentations I probably sell the concept of a social media strategy like a salesman, get you on a high and all excited about the potential it brings to you and then leave you on your own to do it. That’s the impression I’m getting lately, the more i do of the seminar presentations the less time i get to actually spend time with agents in their offices advising on where to start, so I’ve decided to post about the steps to take to get you on the road.

If you are wanting to start your blog or social media strategy, first thing to do before you set up, is listen.

Listen to conversations on blogs that are of interest to you and your business or the area you want to enter into. Search for conversations from like minded blog writers and a good place to start is to sign up for Google alerts, create the alert on the subject you want to “listen” too, for example, if you want to follow real estate blogs, then create the alert on Google for “RealEstateBlogs”, sure your email inbox will fill up with blog posts in no time, but this is a great place start and to see what topic is being written about and who is doing the talking.

Follow the conversations and take note of the way the writer structures the information, more importantly, take note of the content and whether it provides you with really good information or advice that you find useful. Once you have decided what you like, then start to engage.

Do this by commenting on blog posts you like, giving a blog writer feedback joins you in the conversation that blog writer is having with his or her readers. Join Twitter and Facebook and any other social media site you’d like to participate in and listen.

Now, once you have all the research and are aware of how the conversations take place, is the time to get your hands dirty.  It’s time to create your own masterpiece and dive into the conversation.

Make sure your information is engaging, challenging and stimulating, continue to listen and join in conversations on other blogs, and you’ll be on your way.

Next, I’ll talk about designing your strategy and target market.

Last week I spent time in Adelaide South Australia and presented to a number of real estate groups, and it was for me an interesting exercise. Social media is not going to be for every agent or business owner, of that there is no doubt, because each person within the office needs to commit to the discipline of social networking.

It is vitally important that social networking is seen as a long term strategy and not a short term fix. It takes time and commitment to really work social media, to create the handshake and work the room. Traditional real estate marketing models are quickly becoming obsolete as the internet takes over so real estate businesses need to start to think more long term and think about marketing to the customer of tomorrow not just today.

This is the word of mouth brand building of 2020, so when deciding that a social strategy is part of your marketing plan, make sure that all staff are committed to its success. Social media very quickly sorts out the committed members in your office.

So where to start: First of all make sure you put a realistic time line in place,when integrating social strategies into your office, plan to have it integrated over the next 2 years. This allows you sufficient time to get it in place and build on the network.

Decide on who will be your target market - Because this is, in reality, what social media is, a corporate communication strategy for your business, and you need to plan what information will be shared by you and your company/staff.  This is really about people!!

Decide on the objective, what do you want to achieve and more importantly what do you want out of it as a business or sales person. Is it instant leads or sales or is it a long term plan to provide good quality content to your prospective clients, so that when they decide the time is right to buy or sell, you are the business they choose.

Plan your strategy, will it be combinations of social networks or just one, how often will you post to your blog, what type of information will be included and what is your ultimate plan?

Finally, decide on the technology you will use. Facebook, Bebo, Twitter, blogs etc or do you intend to use them all. If so, then make sure you have a plan and strategy in place for each one.

Once you have all of that laid out as part of a corporate communication strategy, then and only then, is the time right to start to implement your plan.

As always, if you would like my help on getting your strategy started, all you have to do is ask or send me an email via this blog.

Ever wondered how the consumer or real estate searcher when searching on your web site or real estate portal views themselves? Am i a lead? a prospect? a contact or am I a person?

How do you approach social media or Internet marketing in general with your real estate office? do you treat them as a lead or a prospect, a contact or a person? 

From the consumers point of view it’s, All about me!!!

Interesting thought starter isn’t it. How you approach your marketing efforts on the web really is about how you view your consumers, how you talk to them, how you respond to them, how you market to them and the words you use are all very, very important when it comes to on line marketing, WHY? because this is usually the first point of contact a consumer will have with you and your business or product, and how well you treat them or engage themwill depend on whether they come back to your web site, use your services or buy your product.

I often get the response from real estate agents when talking about internet marketing and social media of “all I want are leads” or “How many new prospects will I get” .

The buyer/seller will judge you on lots of criteria, including your knowledge of the area, your expertise in marketing and selling property, your negotiating skills etc, so how do you inform them of all your skills and provide them with the information to make the decision to use you or your business. Most real estate agents market for today, and I don’t for one minute suggest you stop that activity, but give some thought to the future and implement a longer term strategy and start to market effectively to the future.

From the real estate portals comes research that indicates up to 39% of the real estate buyer or seller can be researching up to 9 to 12 months on line before buying or selling, so when they do, have you been the one that constantly updates them, provides them with really helpful information on real estate, sells your expertise in the area and have you treated them as a person.

Here’s a really great video for you to watch on this very subject and after you watch it, you may just be tempted to engage your market.

I for one would like to see you do just that.