Real Estate SEO and Technology Blog

“Social Bookmarking”. What the heck is “social bookmarking”? Well let’s break out the term. It’s bookmarking that is “social”. Let’s say that you were reading a book and you found a really interesting part that you wanted to not only remember, but to also share with others that have common ideas and beliefs (thus the term “social”). Well you would want to “bookmark” it so that it could be easily recalled by not only you but your “social” group as well.

I know that you’ve heard about Twitter, but if you’re not using it for marketing, you’re leaving money on the table. You know how to send out Tweets, but how do you market with Twitter? Easy. Let’s start with one basic concept . . . influence. If you want to get your message out to the most people possible, you have to accumulate a large list of followers. In addition, these must be followers that you can target market. So you don’t want just anyone following you, but you want your prospects following you. How to do this is the real trick.

As most successful agents know, social networking is much more than just establishing a group of “friends” or “contacts” and chit chatting or mentioning that you just got back from your niece’s 13th birthday. No. Social networking is much more than that. While much can be gained by the everyday (and fun) communication of the “personal” aspects of social networking, the real muscle is in the business aspects of these programs.

 One of the most powerful and well attended webinars that we do is “Building a Facebook Business”. Unfortunately, most people don’t understand that Facebook can be used specifically for business purposes. But you have to know the difference between “Personal” pages, “Fan” pages and “Group” pages. The first is for personal use only, but can occasionally be directed at business situations. The later two are for business purposes. “Group” pages are used for things like your “neighborhood farm” where you put together a group with a common cause that you can control. Because this is a smaller group by definition, it fits within the constraints of the 5,000 member limit.

Facebook, Twitter and other Social Media outlets have changed the way effective real estate agents are marketing their listings. With social media, we now have a much broader net to cast to not only explain our story, but to also make it more compelling. I know that many will tell you that these sites are just a bunch of nonsense about what people do in their off time. While this is a major part of social media, there is much more to it.

Mash-ups have become the new wave of selling listings. The term “mash-up” is a techno geek term for the combination of two or more different technologies to create one overall application. The mash-up that is used most often in real estate is the use of the Google Map with “pins” or “balloons” to pinpoint the MLS listing information. When used all together, the agent can showcase all of their own listings, their company listings or even the MLS listings in a particular area.

I’ve often commented in these posts about how you can increase the effectiveness of your website. Basically, you must make it compelling to your viewer. One of the best ways to make your website compelling that I haven’t mentioned so far is to add video to your website. Video can combine all aspects of multimedia, being, visual, voice-over, motion and music.

There are several ways that you can utilize video. Most people just think of the typical home walkthrough as a source of video. While this is one of the more heavily used aspects of video, there are some other rich areas that you should be looking at as well:

So you’ve got a website . . . so what? So you’ve got traffic to your website . . . so what? If you know even a little bit about what you’re doing, these things are easily done. Having a website and getting traffic to it are now no longer the problem areas. The biggest problem area that most agents have is with their website itself. The biggest problem with most agent’s websites can be stated in one short sentence.

It’s not “compelling”!

Having been in the world of developing effective and productive websites for the past decade, I’m often asked an interesting question. If you could only focus on doing one major feature in your website that would make you money, what would it be? I never have to think for even a second on this one. It’s something that every single agent should have in their website. In fact without this feature, I’d realistically ask you, why even have a website?

QUICK! Who is your target market for your website? Buyers? Sellers? (The answer is buyers). The reason why “almost” the entire website should be catered to buyers is that they are the ones that initiate the transaction and who are looking on the Internet. But what about our title here with “Featured Listings”? Well this just happens to be the only part of your website that you are going to focus on for your sellers.

Don’t you even think for a minute that your buyers will be looking at this feature in great numbers. You should be giving them access to the MLS, and if so, why would they want to constrain their search to a subset of the entire MLS listing database?

If you don’t already know this little gem of information, you HAVE to have “Search the MLS” on your website. In fact NAR tells us that the number one thing that your buyers are looking for when they come to your website is the ability to search for listings. The problem is, while many agents are aware of this need, they seem to hide the link behind such vague navigation links as “Buyers”, “Search Homes” and “Tools”. Want the tool to work for you? Here’s the secret:

I’m often asked “What is the easiest thing for me to do to my website to make the biggest impact in my visibility or rankings?”. Well I can tell you that this is an easy one. The answer is your Page Titles. Note that I said Page Titles in the plural sense. Many people know that they have a Page Title on their Home Page, but did you know that all of your pages have Page Titles? So what must you do?