Guest blog post by David Cummins co-founder of Faceified

Frequently updated Twitter account? Check. Slick Facebook Page? Check. Dedicated YouTube channel? Check.

Here’s the thing: your potential customers don’t go to these respective social media sites looking to buy or rent property.

Let me repeat, buyers don’t shop on social media sites!

While having a strong social media presence enhances your personal brand, social media should be utilized as a compliment to your other online marketing efforts. Selection is what attracts buyers. When it comes to breadth of selection of real estate on the web, Craigslist reigns supreme.

Below I will discuss how cross-promoting, personalizing, and measuring your listings’ performance will help you build your online reputation and generate more leads on classifieds sites like Craigslist. I will also describe how Faceified can help you get started generating more leads.

Cross-promotion: Show buyers what you’ve got. Before potential customers even begin to care about your brand or reputation, they want to feel like you might have the property they are looking for. If you don’t have what buyers want, they’re on to the next listing. The best way to give buyers that warm a fuzzy feeling is to use each listing as a window into as many of your other listings as possible.

Cross-promoting your listings will maximize the number your listings that each person sees and increase the number of leads you generate. When someone views one of your listing, this should just be the tip of the iceberg. Make it easy for interested parties to discover your other listings.

Personalization: Buyers want to see the person & reputation behind the listing. Once you’ve demonstrated to buyers that you have one or more properties that roughly fits their requirements, buyers will then ask themselves “can I trust this real estate agent?” Your reputation is your biggest asset, and you should proactively use it to help you sell.

Just like in the offline world, your face and reputation should be visible and accessible from all of your listings. It isn’t enough to have static testimonials tucked away on your website or ratings scattered around the web. Your reputation must be consolidated, portable, and visible in all of your listings. Buyers looking at your listings want to see your face, read reviews from your past customers, and get a sense of who you are via your social media presences while they are looking at your listings (i.e. in the buying mood). Make it easy for them to do that!

Performance: Do more of what works and less of what doesn’t. While it is true that it doesn’t cost anything to post listings on many classifieds sites, that doesn’t mean that posting is free. Your time is valuable, so it is important to clearly understand which strategies for posting to classifieds sites move the needle and which ones are holding you back.

A classifieds listing is an ad. Like any other online advertiser, you should be constantly measuring the performance of your listings. Many real estate agents know how many phone calls they get per day but not much else. For instance, do you know how many views each of your listings receives? Do you know which title or body generates the most interest from buyers?

Without this type of insight, it’s impossible to know if the 5 calls you got yesterday is a good yield or not. Actively measuring, testing, tweaking, and optimizing your classifieds listings is essential for making the most efficient use of your time and generating more leads online.

Ok, I get it. How do I get started? We built a free tool called Faceified to help you generate more leads by personalizing each listing, cross-promoting and measuring listing performance, and unlocking your online reputation with customer reviews.

Here’s how it works:

1. Personalize your classifieds listings with your Faceified Seal. Inserting your Seal into all of your listings will bring instant personalization to your listings, helping you to stand out. Simply create a Faceified account (it’s free), fill in your profile information, and copy the code of your Faceified Seal. It takes 2 minutes.

Paste your Seal code into your Craigslist listings, and your Seal will be visible to buyers

People who view your listings can click on your Seal to read your profile information on Faceified and discover your social media presences on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and more.

2. Cross-Promote your listings and track performance. People who click on your Seal are able to see all of your other listings that also contain your Seal. Inserting your Seal into as many of your listings as possible enables you to expose you listings to as many people as possible, maximizing the leads you generate.

You will also be able to see valuable analytics data about your listings (i.e. # a views today, # of views overall, etc.), which will help you to tweak and optimize your listing performance.

3. Enhance your reputation by requesting reviews from customers. No reputation is complete without reviews. Potential customers love to hear what your past customers say about you.

Use Faceified to request reviews from your past customers. When buyers click on your Seal they’ll be able to read real reviews from your past customers, increasing trust and helping you to stand out. You have complete control over who reviews you.

Now it is time for you to get busy building your reputation and generating more leads by personalizing, cross-promoting, and tracking the performance of your listings. Give Faceified a try www.faceified.com and let us know what you think.

Feel free to send your thoughts, comments, and suggestions to support@faceified.com

About the author: David Cummins is an entrepreneur and co-founder, along with Manyu Lui, of Silicon Valley-based Faceified ( www.faceified.com ).  Faceified is a service that helps real estate agents unlock their reputations and generate more leads on classifieds sites.  You can follow Faceified on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/faceified

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Guest Blogger, Geordie Romer is a real estate broker in the mountain town of Leavenworth Washington where he specializes in selling vacation homes to folks in the Seattle tech scene. Geordie has been blogging about Leavenworth Real Estate since 2005.

As tech savvy real estate pros we all spend an inordinate amount of time and energy making sure we get found in the search engines. Of course, there are a few places you probably don’t care to make an appearance:

Photo By Bark

1. KeepinitRealtor – It’s a little sad that this snarky blog hasn’t posted since 2009. They describe themselves as “a non-profit organization devoted to championing and promoting excellence in all forms of real estate advertising and design.” In reality, they are championing the use of bad puns in real estate ads. Getting mentioned here is probably not a good thing.
2. Lovelylisting.com- There are some real doozies here. I think this is the best (worst?) collection of bad listing photos on the web these days.
3. Seattle Bubble’s “Real Actual Listing Photos” – Yet another ongoing collection of bad listing photos.
4. Your State’s List of Infractions (California for example) – It’s one thing to be made fun of by a bubble blogger, but being on this list is probably the worst press you can get.
5. Craigslist Rant and Rave A few years ago, I saw a competitor’s name show up here and it wasn’t pretty. Though I’d love to show you some examples, “Craigslist postings may be explicitly sexual, scatalogical, offensive, graphic, tasteless, and/or not funny. “

What are some websites that you hope to never appear on?

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From Ars Technica, a judge rules in favor of Craigslist in discriminatory housing ads case, saying

It is not a “publisher” of housing ads, but merely a provider of online “interactive services,” and therefore is not liable for the content of users’ posts under the 1996 Communications Decency Act.

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Craigslist is the undisputed king in the online classifieds market. Its marketplace has a depth and scope that very few other sites can even come close to matching. As amazing as the site is however, there are a few little roadblocks that the site throws up in front of you if you really want to get the most out of your searches there. Luckily – these are easily overcome using a couple of other free tools.

One of my minor annoyances with craigslist is when you want to move beyond a simple query in a single city. Unfortunately – the way craigslist is designed, it requires you navigate to a whole new site every time you want to see a new city’s postings.

Thankfully, craigslist provides feeds of each of its search results pages. So if you are trying to keep an eye on real estate listings from a number of different cities or counties for example, by using a customizable RSS aggregator like FeedRaider – you can put all of those feeds on a single page.

Check out this sample page I made for real estate listings in Oregon.

Using this method you can stay on top of the newest postings from each of the areas you’ve identified.You could do this in separate markets, showing different prices ranges, different types of housing – the options are virtually limitless.

While not especially hard to navigate – the one thing Craigslist definitely is not, is pretty to look at. Thankfully, there are a number of other sites out there that can help relieve grey and blue tedium of Craigslist’s pages.

Transparent Real Estate blog recently reminded me of one my favorites that I’ve been meaning to blog about for a while. Listpic is a site that let’s you navigate through craiglist’s postings using the thumbnail images associated with each listing. Clicking on any of the thumbnails displays the full text of the details as well as any additional photos. Very cool.

Though the images are small, I find scanning through them is much easier than lines of text. Plus, since I rarely bother exploring any listings that don’t include pictures, this site acts as a sort of filter for me right off the bat.

So whether it’s for real estate or other needs, these two tools can really help you managing the results of your craigslist searches. Used individually or in conjunction with each other, they definitely are two easy steps you can take to take your craigslist experience to a whole new level.

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vFlyer is a new startup that aims to help you create a virtual flyer and post it to online classifieds sites like Google Base, Oodle and Craigslist, as well as to a number of other paid sites too. It’s very similar to the service Postlets.com already provides, but adds a number of unique features.

Like Postlets, vFlyer allows you to use a number of very nice templates to display items for sale or listed properties. (e.g., Beautiful Pacific Heights Flat for Vacation Rental). Creating a vFlyer is very simple, just a matter of filling in a number of fields with the appropriate information. The whole process takes little time and is very straightforward. Using vFlyer, anyone can easily have a professional looking listing ad in minutes.

Hitting the publish button automatically creates a unique URL for your listing and sends it out to all of vFlyers partner sites, but unfortunately there does not seem to be a way to be more selective about which sites you can send it to. Right now, it seems to be an all-or-nothing approach. vFlyer does give you some bookmarklets and the raw HTML code that will allow you to post your listing to other sites (eBay, craigslist) – but overall this solution seems a little kludgey to me.

Once you’ve published your listing however, vFlyer has a number of advanced feautres you can use, including sending your listing to more people via email or downloading it as a HTML or PDF document (which you could then use in your flyer boxes). On the backend, once your vFlyers are live, their statistics tab gives you traffic statistics on all your published listings for analysis. This is all pretty slick.

One very cool thing is that vFlyer is partnering with RapLeaf, an online reputation service which I wrote about earlier, so that Realtors can market and benefit from their online reputations.

vFlyer is currently in Beta, so creating a flyer and using the service is currently free. No word on whether they plan on charging for the service in the future.

Read more about vFlyer here: Wanted: A Way to Profit by Simplifying Web Classifieds – New York Times

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Newspapers ad spending is still strong, but for how much longer?

According to the NAA’s print classified ads breakdown, real estate ads jumped 18.5 percent to $1.2 billion.

While print still has a stranglehold on most local advertising dollars – I suspect it won’t for very much longer. Traffic to online classifieds web sites is booming right now, according to new report from Comscore. Over 37.4 million internet users visited an online classified site in the past year. It should be no surprise to anyone then that real estate classifieds are moving online.

Craigslist is the uncontested category killer, but Oodle was a surprising ninth place finisher with a startling 463% growth figure. edgeio, another of the new crop of classifieds sites, is nowhere to be found however.

In any case, getting your listing onto any of the sites is great marketing exposure for your listing. Remember, you can also use postlets to help you submit your ad to these and many more sites.

More Reading:

The Real Estate Tomato: 13 Ways To Post Your Listings For Free

sellsius° real estate blog » New York Real Estate Listing Sites

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