Are you working smart with social media?

As a real estate agent or broker – you have to ask yourself: “Am I spending my time wisely or is social media a ‘time suck’?”

Can you track views, clicks, likes, and conversations? Can you track when your name or company name is mentioned across all platforms? If not, keep reading!

It’s one thing to have a Facebook page or Twitter account, but it quite the other to be able to make intelligent choices about content, time of day of posting, what works and what doesn’t and so much more…. AND not consume all of your time!

Recently, there are two companies that have caught my eye:

1. TwentyFeet

TwentyFeet provides detailed analytics AND aggregates all your stats into one place. It gives you an overview of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, bit.ly, Google Analytics and more. The key here is “all in one place! The other thing I really like is that they “nudge you” via email when your metrics change significantly – brilliant!

They offer a free 30-day trial and them you can order their services which start at $2.49/year. It is a simple, straightforward program that could help a lot of real estate agents and brokers track their social media success.

Here is a quick video that highlights some of the features:

2. Postling

I started using Postling about a month or so ago and I think it is an extremely useful tool.

One of the nice things about Postling is you can use it to publish to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Wordpress, Tumblr and Flickr. You can also schedule your posts out which is nice for real estate agents – you can “drip” their posts out over the course of a few days – just like drip marketing. Also, Postling brings all of the comments your readers leave on your blog, Facebook, Twitter, or Flickr into one place. Every morning Postling will send you a daily digest email recapping the recent activity for all of your social media accounts.

With Postling Tracking, they dig through Twitter, blogs, mainstream media, RSS feeds and more to find every time your name comes up.  Are there certain phrases that you know lead to potential new customers?  Save those phrases within Postling Tracking and they’ll notify you when you’ve got a match – very cool!

What do you think? Have you used either one of these tools? Are their other tools that you are using that you love? Leave me a comment below!

Written by: Katie Lance, Senior Marketing Manager, Inman News @katielance

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Whether you are new to real estate, or a true veteran – the expertise you have is one of the key things that sets you apart.

Here are a few simple keys to help build your credibility and expertise online:

1. Consider creating a “how to” video.
One of the most popular phrases searched for on YouTube or Google is “how to.” That means that if you want your video to be found by the most people, make sure you use the words “how to” in the title of the video. In terms of the content for the video, think about some of the questions you most commonly get from your clients. Think of the tabs on your website – I bet you have information on site such as:

• Getting your home ready for market
• Pricing your home right
• What to look for in a Realtor®
• Who pays for what (closing costs, etc)
• Why you should stage your home
• When is the best time to go on the market

Any one of those topics could be quick 30-45 second videos. You could easily shoot a short video and edit it with a Flip Cam or the Kodak PlayTouch. Upload it to YouTube and then post it on your Facebook page, web site, blog, etc.

Quick Video Tips:

• When you shoot your video practice what you are going to say a couple times before you shoot it and keep it short and to to the point – under a minute is best!
• Make sure you start your video with something like:

“Hi this is ____ from ______ (company)”

This is very important because video (especially if done right) becomes viral, so when your video gets forwarded around, you want people to know who you are and how they can reach you!

2. Answer questions online. There are tons of places where people are asking questions about real estate. Here are a few of  my favorite:

• LinkedIn Answers
• Trulia Voices
• Zillow Advice
• Quora
• Your own Facebook page!

Each of these is an opportunity for you to demonstrate your expertise – whether it is with 1st time home buyers, luxury listings, vacation/second homes, people downsizing, REOs/short sales, etc. You can also speak to your expertise within a certain county, city or community.

Create an account at one of these sites and then search for relevant questions. Try to make it a point to answer one to two questions per day based on your expertise. The key, just like anything else is time. I recommend starting with just one site and getting your feet wet. If it’s something you are comfortable with then spend more time on there or expand your expertise to the other sites I mentioned.

3. Publish content that is “evergreen.”
One of the best things you can do is to create a piece of content that is “evergreen” – meaning it has a very long shelf life. Consider writing a paper on something you are the expert at – something people ask you all the time. Perhaps you create a white paper, or a short PDF – something that is uniquely you.

You can leverage this in many ways. You can keep it on your website or blog or use it as a “carrot” for people to sign up for your email newsletter. You could easily take one of the topics mentioned above and expand upon them in a 1-2 page document that becomes your evergreen content.

One last thing…

Nothing turns off more people than touting “I am the expert!”Instead, use these tools to prove your expertise without actually having to say you are the expert. Actions speak louder than words, right?!

I’d love your feedback on this subject. Have you done any of the above? Leave me a comment below!

Written by: Katie Lance, Senior Marketing Manager, Inman News @katielance

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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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What if Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Skpye existed 40 years ago? These fake vintage ads for Facebook, Skype and Youtube created by Brazilian ad agency Moma for a media seminar called “Everything Ages Fast”. Enjoy!

The Facebook Company:

The sublime, mighty community with just 140 letters:

Your films will last forever on YouTube:

The fabulous voice system able to put your family together:

What IF these companies existed 40 years ago? How about just 10? Sometimes I am still amazed and how young these social media companies are. It’s exciting to think where we will be in another 40 years! Now where is my flying car?! 

Would love your comments! Leave me your feedback below!

Written by: Katie Lance, Marketing Manager, Inman News

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YouTube is giving video creators a deeper look at the viewing trends of the videos the publish on the site. From the Official Google Blog:

…uploaders can see how often their videos are viewed in different geographic regions, as well as how popular they are relative to all videos in that market over a given period of time. You can also delve deeper into the lifecycle of your videos, like how long it takes for a video to become popular, and what happens to video views as popularity peaks.

I think this is a critical step forward in evaluating the ROI on video in general, but especially real estate video. The geographic statistics alone are worth their weight in gold; you can now see where people who are watching your videos are coming from.

Video is an emerging medium in real estate – one that I’m convinced will gain greater and greater traction over the coming months/years.

Contests like the one that Century 21 is hosting (see Century 21 Puts Open Houses in Youtube) or the one that ActiveRain is holding (see ActiveRain Video Contest – best prize yet, I promise) serve to introduce real estate professionals to the power of video on the web. Many will try their hand at video, and many more will certainly be put off by the production effort required – but I believe it will become an essential tool in a Realtor’s arsenal whether they are producing the videos themselves, or outsourcing to a third party.

At the REtech South conference in Atlanta today video is a hot topic of discussion (The Real Estate Bloggers has a great run down of the conversation) – and it’s one that will surely come up at future events (like Connect, natch) as well.

I’ve written before about how you can integrate video into your real estate marketing strategy (see Why Having Real Estate Video Distribution Strategy Matters or Creating a Real Estate Video Channel on YouTube) but a missing piece of the puzzle to date was the ability to evaluate and measure how your videos were being consumed beyond the simple number of views. Previously, you had to rely on web sites like TubeMogul.com to get that information (still a great tool though).

I’m definitely encouraged by this step Youtube has taken and look forward to experimenting with the new Insight.

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Real estate video is definitely a big trend this year. Producing and directing a great real estate video is a subject best covered in a another post – but if you already have a video you want to show, the big question is where to host it?

I’ve suggested a few options in the past (see Video Hosting Alternatives to Youtube) but I thought, instead of writing about them, I’d show you instead.

WellcomeMat

Pros: High quality video, multiple players available for embedding
Cons: Slightly longer encoding process

Blip.TV

Click To Play

Pros: WYSIWYG HTML editor for descriptions, Creative Commons licenses for videos, integrated advertising with revenue share

Brightcove

MSN Soapbox

Video: Future of Real Estate Marketing

Pros: Integrated with Hotmail/MSN account – no new signup needed
Cons: Slow upload

Jumpcut

Cons: Slow upload

Metacafe

Future Of Real Estate Marketing – The best home videos are here

Cons: Slightly laborious sign up process

Vimeo

Pros: Fast, easy to signup
Cons: Slow conversion

Veoh

Online Videos by Veoh.com

Adbrite

Pros: Video available quickly, can embed ads in video
Cons: Must use FLV (Flash) file, no encoding, no upload

Real Estate Video Shoot Out Also-rans

YouTube

Cons: Didn’t work! Got hung up on upload. The King is dead! Long live the King!

Revver

Cons: Video needs to be approved before being published

VideoEgg

Cons: Doesn’t support Firefox

The video clip used in these example was produced by Dave Herring of Florida DV – if you’re a Realtor in Florida and you’re looking for a great videographer to shoot your listings; give him a call at (727)686-3638, email him at gulfshooter [at] yahoo.com or visit him on the Web at http://www.wellcomemat.com/florida

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If you haven’t realized yet that online video is a force to be reckoned with… check out this graph from a recent report by Hitwise.

During the week of February 3, YouTube’s traffic surged above the combined traffic to all of the television network websites. [emphasis mine]

I find this amazing – especially because, in general, I find YouTube saturated with a ton of garbage and weighed down by terrible navigation. Furthermore, their site wide search is basically unusable – unless I have the exact URL of what I want to watch, trying to find content on YouTube is next to impossible. (This is something I’m hoping their partnership with Google will fix shortly.)

Nevertheless, those traffic numbers don’t lie and this an impressive statistic.

One way YouTube can fix this situation is to to silo their videos into different channels. Not unlike how a traditional cable provider does really. And they’ve already begun to do this, like the deals they’ve made with NBC and the
National Hockey League (Go ‘Nucks!).

So it begs the question then, who will be the first to roll out a real estate video portal on YouTube?

Existing real estate video sites like RealEstateChannel.ca are a natural, more polished evolution of the homes channels you often see high up on the cable dial of your local cable provider. But they don’t even come close to offering the potential reach that YouTube does.

It seems to me that any of the Realogy brands (Coldwell Banker, Century 21, Sotheby’s etc.) might have the cachet (and deep pocketbooks) to pull this off. RealLiving would be a good candidate too – it shouldn’t be too hard to repurpose the videos they’re having produced by MLPodcast (see Real Estate Video is Here to Stay, Video Podcasting Maybe) so they could fed into a branded YouTube page.

The secret to creating a successful real estate video portal will be to make sure the videos are placed in the proper geographical context (state, county, neighborhood) and figuring out a way to present viewers with the most relevant videos to them individually (i.e. extensive filtering options).

For more on this, read The User As The Center Of The Universe: Integration Of Real Estate Video And Geolocation by For Sale By Locals

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