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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In a move I suspect may be followed by many of the other big real estate brands in 2009, last week at Real Estate Connect in New York, Century 21 announced it was shifting its television advertising dollars to support its online marketing efforts.

You can see the announcement made by Tom Kunz, president and CEO of C21 in an interview done with Susie Hale of Frogpond TV. (The announcement comes at about 3:00 minutes in).

This shift should not come as much of a surprise to many readers of this blog. But what is surprising (and refreshing) is that C21 has come out so publicly in their endorsement of new media. C21 plans to spend the bulk of their advertising investment in 2009 on display advertising, search engine marketing and enhanced listing partnerships with real estate web sites, which no doubt bodes well for companies like Zillow, Trulia and Frontdoor. Their goal, ultimately, is to generate more leads to their franchisees, affiliates and brokers and agents.

Over the last couple years we’ve seen the technology providers and pundits (myself included, natch) talk about the need for real estate industry to fully embrace the Internet as the channel of choice to connect with consumers.

The web provides a platform for brokers and agents to connect more meaningfully and, more importantly, more measurably, with the buyers and sellers who are now predominantly searching for real estate information online.

This wave has been cresting for a long time and while the smarter agents and brokers have ridden the curl of this trend for many years, and have prospered because of it, this announcement sends a clear signal that the big brands are fully committing to this new world as well.

2009 may just be the year that the wave finally comes crashing down and we see the end of big real estate’s old media habits.

Photo by prgibbs.

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Got a map based real estate site? Vancouver-based lat49 lets you monetize that asset with its geo-targeted advertising network.

It’s pretty simple really, as a publisher you simply sign up to join their network, incorporate their API and then begin earning ad revenue passively. Think of it like Google Adsense for maps.

It raises the possibility for brokerages (many of whom have invested heavily in map-based real estate search tools) to develop an alternative source of revenue and offset some of those costs, by being able to bring advertising directly to their maps.

What would make this offering a real winner, would be the option to offer premium map-based ad space to ancillary service providers, vendors and even local merchants. The key aspect would be to be able to control who and what advertisements would appear on your site.

In addition, Lat49 also give real estate companies (even individual brokers or agents) a unique opportunity to create regionally-based branding campaigns across multiple web properties by embedding ads at a local or even hyperlocal level.

Lat49 gives advertiser several IAB approved sizes including a 728×90 Leaderboard, a 300×250 Medium Rectangle, and a 468×60 Full Banner ad.

Sites currently using this technology include Hotpads in the US and HomeZilla (see Neighborhood Search Comes Back) in Canada.

lat49, real estate marketing, online advertising

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It used to be if you wanted to build your own ads online you were stuck writing boring text ads like Google AdWords or Zillow EZ ads.

Not any longer. AdReady is a self-service platform for marketers that’s aiming to change that. It lets you build out a targeted banner campaign in literally just a few minutes and a few clicks.

Basically it’s bringing Google Adwords-level simplicity to banner advertising. 

Using AdReady you start an ad campaign for your business using a library of ready-made creative, which includes a number of pre-existing ads in the real estate category. You can choose your base design based on the most successful CTRs (click through rates) or simply pick whichever design catches your fancy.

The site lets you customize the basic design; change background colors, modify text and upload new photos through a slick Flash interface. When you’re done customizing it applies your changes to a series of IAB standard banner ads.

Just like with Google Adwords, you’re then ready to customize your media buy by choosing the length of the campaign and pegging a dollar figure on how much you’re willing to spend.

When you’re ready to publish, AdReady places your ad on a number of sites through its relationships with third-party ad networks. While you don’t get to choose the exact sites you want to appear on, you can geo-target your ad to a particular area and/or pick certain categories of publishers on which you’d like it to appear.

AdReady just announced a deal to bring the service to the New York Times and it’s not too much of a stretch to see that more publishers will go down a similar route self-service to add new options to small advertisers (and presumably, offload some of their excess banner inventory).

The downside of course, is that your ads will be fairly generic. But nevertheless, it’s interesting to think how you could use AdReady’s platform to create a flexible advertising campaign really quickly and inexpensive. You could advertise your blog, your business and even your listings.

This is definitely a growing trend I’m seeing. Online tools like AdReady, widget builders like Sprout (see Sprout Lets You Build Single Property Widgets) and video tools like Spotmixer (see Video Advertising to Dominate Online Ads) all give you loads of room to get creative, on the cheap.

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by LXPK

The Flipping Pad, a social networking site that is designed to help people “share and discuss real estate investing” is putting a stake in the site up for bids.

You can place a bid on Sitepoint, an online auction site for web properties. What you’d get:

1. Outright Purchase: PM us for an est. and more information
2. Equity Parter: 75% ownership for a qualified candidate. Negotiable.

—————–

Our site is nearly out of the beta stages. We’re looking to sell an equity stake to a new partner and remain on in an advisory role. This person would ideally be an experienced Real Estate Investor and/or community builder.

Other real estate web properties available for sale on include Duru (see Sitepoint’s listing).

We’ve seen a flood of Real Estate 2.0 sites over the last few years driven, I suspect, by much more accessible technology (Google Maps API for example) that’s made sites easier and cheaper to build and by greater willingness by brokers, agents and MLSes to share their listing data (i.e. free content).

The challenge, no doubt, is for anyone to start to monetize any of these new sites in a serious way, especially since the deluge of social sites has resulted in declining CPMs.

But hey, if you think you can make a go of it – place your bid.

(h/t Gundy Group Blog)

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