Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest
Copy Link
The word MARKETING does not exist in SOCIAL NETWORKING!
Ok, this is more of a rant; I’ll admit it.
I just read a great article courtesy of a Facebook post by Rich Jacobsen.
“How to Take Your Social Networking to the next level”
The article was about social networking and had five really great points that we can all benefit from. No where in the article did it say take your listings and post them to your friend’s list and advertise. This really drives me crazy that agents continue to do this. Ask yourself this question: If every time you were invited to a cocktail party you showed up with an A-board, a card table and flyers for all your listings, how many times do you think your friends would invite you back to their party? You know the answer.
We know you are in real estate, and we know that you have homes listed. If we want to see your listings we will go to a real estate website and look at them. Stop putting them on Facebook. There is one exception; if you happen to bring on a great listing that is unique or has something about it that people would find interesting then point that out, but don’t just take your craigslist link or your flyer page and paste it to your wall. Please read the article I referenced above, be engaging, get connected with your network and stop selling.
Thanks for taking the time.
One of our own becomes a Trulia Mayor.
So you don’t like to blog, or you wonder if blogging will really help your business. Well, if you ask Carl Medford he will tell you exactly how it’s worked for him.
“Carl Medford (Fremont, CA) – Windermere Agent – TruliaPro
With the motto of, “Helping You Write The Next Chapter In Your Life,”™ Carl is one of the “next generation” of Web-based REALTORS. Carl typically transforms any local coffeehouse into an office; meeting with clients in any location and conducting business while enjoying the best coffee available! Instead of focusing on a specific neighborhood, Carl has earned the distinction of being a “Regional Expert,” tracking trends and critical information in multiple markets, thus bringing the broadest possible expertise and service to his clients. In addition to being a REALTOR, Carl is a licensed general contractor and also owns “The Next Stage,” a fully professional and accredited home staging company. Lastly, Carl has developed “The Ultimate Home Buying Experience,”™. He is featured weekly in “Real Estate Reality” in the Real Estate section of the San Leandro Times and Castro Valley Forum newspapers.
Carl has a gift to deliver a great message through his writing skills. He took the Trulia Voices by the horns and now has become one of the Trulia Mayors on Voices. What does a Mayor get to do you ask?….” From his trulia profile.
The ‘Trulia Mayor’ program is a new initiative that helps strengthen and expand the Trulia Voices community including nearly 400,000 real estate professionals.
Trulia Mayors are great social media role models and innovators, and will represent the opinions of real estate professionals in various Trulia efforts. Mayors frequently attend roundtable meetings, get sneak peeks of upcoming projects and provide their input in content quality matters on Trulia Voices. Additionally, Trulia Mayors participate in various PR and marketing efforts, such as co-hosting local events and co-authoring newsletters and articles, to spread their knowledge and provide expert advice to consumers and professionals alike. Bottom line – it’s pretty cool.
You can identify the Trulia Mayors in the Trulia Voices community by a special Mayor badge. They continue participating on the Trulia Voices community by asking and answering questions and blogging. The Trulia Mayors are available to assist consumers when they have questions or concerns aboutTrulia or the Trulia Voices community, and they are happy to share their experiences and knowledge.
The inaugural Trulia Mayors are five real estate professionals who have led by example within the Trulia Voices community, and we’re thrilled that each of them accepted their volunteer Mayoral appointments! It’s a great start to a program that will eventually include a representative from each state.”
I would encourage to see what Carl has done so you’ll know that there is room for all of us to excel in the world using online social networking tools. The consumer is hungry for the information you have to share.
Understanding good facebook etiquette!
Recently Justin Waskow and I taught an advanced facebook class where we demonstrated how to use facebook to reach out to your sphere in better ways. One of the questions that came in was about putting links to your listings up on wall posts. Both Justin and I agreed that this is not a good idea. I think that with any social networking application there is common etiquette and some real good Do’s and Don’ts.
Just yesterday my good friend Jeanne Hasenmiller sent me over an article from CNN titled The 12 most annoying types of facebookers . This article makes some good points and I would encourage you to not be an annoying facebooker.
I’m not the only one not reading the News Paper!
Interesting times that we live in today. After going through our latest meetings with Windermere Owners about advertising in the world of realtor.com I still am shocked at how the newspaper keeps coming up in our conversations. I just don’t know what aversion we have to limiting how we participate with the news paper. Notice I didn’t say get out of the newspaper but rather how do we still appeal to that very small group that still read the paper and see a return on our investment? I realized that it starts with education.
Here is a great article that can help to explain what is going on with the newspapers both print and online. I think it is fair to say that News Papers are failing today in the print world. What about their online world? Many think they will just put the news on line and move the eyeballs over. This isn’t what is happening however. Subscribers on the whole are just plain leaving the paper both print and online as well. This graph below is from Comscore website. After reading this article you can see that as a company that has to market daily to our customers we need to be looking at different Internet based solutions and understand that as much as we may like our Sunday morning coffee and paper the eyeball isn’t there like it use to be.
As Print Newspapers Decline, How Does Digital Fill the Void?
So why is this happening? There are many reasons but let me just give you a few that show you just how the customer is getting news.
RSS feeds are pretty amazing. Today with handheld devices like blackberrys and I phones you really have access to real time information just a click away. Sites like NPR RSS. or Yahoo News RSS, and Newsgator the I phone app are tools that allow the handheld user access to real time news and lets me the reader choose what news I’m interested in getting. Yes the 3.0 world of News.
CNN just had an article talking about the decline on a national level but also states that
So my concern is that as we move forward in this ever changing world we can’t just be deaf, dumb, and blind to this change. We have to react and work together to figure out how we are going to market in this new age of Social Networking sites and the world of on demand news and advertising. I would love to hear what Ideas you as the reader has, please share.
I'm not the only one not reading the News Paper!
Interesting times that we live in today. After going through our latest meetings with Windermere Owners about advertising in the world of realtor.com I still am shocked at how the newspaper keeps coming up in our conversations. I just don’t know what aversion we have to limiting how we participate with the news paper. Notice I didn’t say get out of the newspaper but rather how do we still appeal to that very small group that still read the paper and see a return on our investment? I realized that it starts with education.
Here is a great article that can help to explain what is going on with the newspapers both print and online. I think it is fair to say that News Papers are failing today in the print world. What about their online world? Many think they will just put the news on line and move the eyeballs over. This isn’t what is happening however. Subscribers on the whole are just plain leaving the paper both print and online as well. This graph below is from Comscore website. After reading this article you can see that as a company that has to market daily to our customers we need to be looking at different Internet based solutions and understand that as much as we may like our Sunday morning coffee and paper the eyeball isn’t there like it use to be.
As Print Newspapers Decline, How Does Digital Fill the Void?
So why is this happening? There are many reasons but let me just give you a few that show you just how the customer is getting news.
RSS feeds are pretty amazing. Today with handheld devices like blackberrys and I phones you really have access to real time information just a click away. Sites like NPR RSS. or Yahoo News RSS, and Newsgator the I phone app are tools that allow the handheld user access to real time news and lets me the reader choose what news I’m interested in getting. Yes the 3.0 world of News.
CNN just had an article talking about the decline on a national level but also states that
So my concern is that as we move forward in this ever changing world we can’t just be deaf, dumb, and blind to this change. We have to react and work together to figure out how we are going to market in this new age of Social Networking sites and the world of on demand news and advertising. I would love to hear what Ideas you as the reader has, please share.
News Paper Advertising REALLY?
“The last time I read a news paper I was cracking my buggy whip and looking for fresh ground to plant my claim flag.”
All kidding aside, one of the challenges I see today in the world of Real Estate is based on how we market and where we market. I was in a meeting not too long ago where we had Windermere Owners trying to figure out the spend in a local news paper and I asked the question why? The response I got was “The sellers want it, it still helps us get listings.” I understand that thinking on the surface but if we dig deeper why does the seller have this perception that advertising in a news paper helps to sell their home. In my opinion the dollars used for that spend could have such greater impact if used elsewhere.
So what is the solution, it starts with educating the messenger. That would be the Realtor, in this day and age you have to be able to articulate your marketing program and why you do what you do and why your program limits the amount of traditional marketing and focuses more on the Internet and social marketing.
Here are some graphs to better articulate what is happening to the eyeballs in the world of print.
As you can see from the data above the drop in readers and the increase in Internet marketing is making the newspaper a tool of the past. I get it however it is hard to not use the paper if you do not have a good grasp of what your going to replace it with. You may want to read one of my older posts where I explain the power of craigslist and how Windermere is shifting our thinking and doing more with listing syndication and less with print advertising. It is really up to you the agent to use tools that you have today like, Google Analytics, Ubadoo/Listing express reporting tools, to help your clients understand where the best placement of their listing should be. You also will find that your spend will be less but with much greater impact and the traffic is actually trackable.
Also please let me know where we can do a better job of helping you better understand how to use these tools in your business.
Building relationships takes time.
As I’m out in the field with real estate agents talking about the importance of Social Networking, one of the common push backs I get is this. “Well you don’t sell real estate so you have time to be on facebook all day, I’m busy and don’t have time for that stuff I have a business to run.”
I understand where the frustration comes from but the fact of the matter is your business is based all around the quality of relationships you maintain with your client base on an ongoing basis. I won’t deny that we live in a very busy world and that our time is precious. That said the numbers of individuals who look to social networking to connect to get information and share information with their close friends are growing by leaps and bounds. A recent study I read talking about how we tend to trust those that are more like us.
So how do your 250 friends know how alike you are to them unless you interact on a regular basis. Keep in mind when I say interact I’m not talking about interacting with your friends on on a professional level but more on a real basis. Friendships and relationships are not just about keeping in touch on a topical level but more about all the stuff that makes us who we are. Your hobbies, your interests, likes and dislikes. The deeper the connection the more comfortable people are to work and interact with you on all levels. How strong is that message when it is sent on a post card or on a calendar vs seeing a picture a few times a week of you enjoying a hobby that happens to be a hobby that 30 of your friends also enjoy. Or getting a link to a great article about whats going on in a specific community that you happen to live in along with 20 of your friends who also just read that link you sent to them. It is about getting involved and contributing value. Relationships don’t last if they are one sided. In order for relationships to exist you need to be involved so the point to my post is real simple. Embrace change and understand that Social Networking is here to stay and it can be a big advantage for you to enhance the current relationships that you don’t seem to have time for now, just by making micro connections through out your day. You might end up being surprised how much time it doesn’t take.
Similar idea from Amy Chorew “the conversation is important“
Don't under estimate Craigslist when it comes to Real Estate.
Again Windermere is leading the industry when it comes to online marketing. Recently we ventured into a partnership with an amazing company called ubadoo. Ubadoo unlike companies like postlets and others has a unique value proposition when it comes to listing aggregation.
As real estate professionals it is our responsibility to represent each property as best as we possible can. In many cases listing aggregators do not understand this part of our business and tend to sale the agent on the idea that taking a listing and pushing it out to every possible real estate portal on the Internet seems to be a good idea. That would be similar to 5 years ago trying to advertise your listing in every news paper that existed. It may sound appealing but with the Internet today we know where the real estate audience is located and so lets be calculated and smart about how we advertise. Ubadoo gets this and so it seems to be a good fit between the two companies, Ubadoo and Windermere.
Ubadoo has the most sophisticated listing push tools for craiglist. What I have found amazing in the short time we have been working with ubadoo is the traffic that craigslist generates above and beyond large real estate portals like Google and Yahoo, and Trulia. Not to discount these sites at all they are truly important to the whole online marketing campaign but none the less I’m just amazed at the concentrated traffic generated by Craigslist.
here are some interesting numbers you that might surprise you.
Daily we feed Trulia, Google, and Yahoo around 37,000 listing of which the click through traffic is as follows (time frame 6/5 to 6/11)
Google base is about 19,000 click trough’s
Trulia is at 3,410
Yahoo real estate is 6,320
Now craigslist is an opt in tool so we do not send all listing there. The listing count on Craigslist of Windermere listings is 10,482 yet our click through traffic is 23,461,
over 4000 more click troughs than google with less listings.
For those of you who are more visual here is a graph to show what I’m talking about
Windermere is always looking at how we can do the best job of marketing our listings to the world. Google, Trulia, Yahoo Real Estate are all important and now we add craigslist to that mix. Stay tuned as we are looking to bring on some more great portals in the very near future.
This tool is just another advantage that a seller would have by working with a Windermere agent.
Don’t under estimate Craigslist when it comes to Real Estate.
Again Windermere is leading the industry when it comes to online marketing. Recently we ventured into a partnership with an amazing company called ubadoo. Ubadoo unlike companies like postlets and others has a unique value proposition when it comes to listing aggregation.
As real estate professionals it is our responsibility to represent each property as best as we possible can. In many cases listing aggregators do not understand this part of our business and tend to sale the agent on the idea that taking a listing and pushing it out to every possible real estate portal on the Internet seems to be a good idea. That would be similar to 5 years ago trying to advertise your listing in every news paper that existed. It may sound appealing but with the Internet today we know where the real estate audience is located and so lets be calculated and smart about how we advertise. Ubadoo gets this and so it seems to be a good fit between the two companies, Ubadoo and Windermere.
Ubadoo has the most sophisticated listing push tools for craiglist. What I have found amazing in the short time we have been working with ubadoo is the traffic that craigslist generates above and beyond large real estate portals like Google and Yahoo, and Trulia. Not to discount these sites at all they are truly important to the whole online marketing campaign but none the less I’m just amazed at the concentrated traffic generated by Craigslist.
here are some interesting numbers you that might surprise you.
Daily we feed Trulia, Google, and Yahoo around 37,000 listing of which the click through traffic is as follows (time frame 6/5 to 6/11)
Google base is about 19,000 click trough’s
Trulia is at 3,410
Yahoo real estate is 6,320
Now craigslist is an opt in tool so we do not send all listing there. The listing count on Craigslist of Windermere listings is 10,482 yet our click through traffic is 23,461,
over 4000 more click troughs than google with less listings.
For those of you who are more visual here is a graph to show what I’m talking about
Windermere is always looking at how we can do the best job of marketing our listings to the world. Google, Trulia, Yahoo Real Estate are all important and now we add craigslist to that mix. Stay tuned as we are looking to bring on some more great portals in the very near future.
This tool is just another advantage that a seller would have by working with a Windermere agent.
