The Key to Social Media Networking

Now that you know the importance of utilizing social media networking for everything from selling and buying foreclosures to advertising distressed properties, it is time to understand how utilize these websites to promote your properties and services.

First and foremost you must build relationships. As you can tell with websites like Facebook, you have to have “friends” in order to share your information effectively. Therefore, the first step is building a network on the social media networking website(s) of your choice.

After building a network, you then need to ensure that you are providing high quality information that your network finds beneficial. For example, what information can you share about how to buy foreclosures or foreclosure investing? What real estate resources are available that you think would benefit buyers and sellers? Sharing this information with original content (aka from your own perspective and not merely copied from other sources) will greatly enhance your success.

The Importance of Knowing your Audience

Another reason for the move to social media networking involves adapting our sales and marketing pitches to target your new audience—younger generations. The most recent generations desire to obtain information with ease; however, they also desire quality. Those between the ages of 23 and 35 are more than likely looking to purchase a new home in the near future. Therefore, adapt your marketing pitches to meet the needs and desires of the newer generations if you wish to remain effective.

If you try to rely on your usual marketing methods such as commercials (which are outdated with the invention of DVR, Hulu, and on-demand) and newspaper/real estate magazine advertisements then you will fail to attract the new buyers. Instead, get involved online and promote your website, blog, properties, and services with social media networking.

Social Media Networking and Professional Development

Along with utilizing these social media websites to attract buyers to your residential foreclosures websites and blogs, you can also tap into social media websites for professional development initiatives.

In the end, social media networking is already part of the way we do business across the world and will continue to play a key role in real estate throughout the future. Therefore, if you have not moved your business to social media networking, then now is the time to do so—change the way you do business and attract more customers. For real estate professionals, social media is now a must for success.

Could I do this with Facebook? Yes. But they don’t make it as easy to group my friends like Google+ does — and people are often sharing different information on Google+ (more business related from what I’ve seen so far) than what they would share on Facebook.

And, yes, I know David may be a bad example for this since he has posted nothing to Google+ yet. But I could easily substitute Jim Marks (who I now work for at Virtual Results), Kris Berg (a client of Virtual Results), Mike Price, or a few other close professional connections I’ve made over the past 5 years.

Truth be told, what I’d really love is a merged feed of both Google+, Facebook, and Twitter for this specific group of people. Is anyone working on that?

The topic of conversation is “real estate blogging” — so come with your questions blazing.

How to join? There are a few options:

• Follow the #retechchat hashtag
• Add a search column to Tweetdeck for the hashtag #retechchat
• Join Tweetchat under #retechchat (recommended approach)

Make sure to place the #retechchat hashtag on every Tweet so that everyone following the hashtag sees your contributions.

Look forward to the conversion!

If the #retechchat active community gets big enough and we want to start a separate #reblogchat down the road, then we certainly can. But let’s start with #retechchat.

However, that said, Monday’s topic of conversation will be “real estate blogging”. Anything related to blogging is fair game – content ideas, blog promotion, SEO, building a local online community or anything else.

Details for #retechchat are as follows:

What: A weekly 1 hour conversation on Twitter discussing real estate technology. #blogchat with a real estate tech lens.

When: The first #retechchat will be this coming Monday at 7 PM PST/10 EST. We can tweak the time & day if needed, we just need it to be the same time every week so that everyone can plan accordingly. So, if Monday evenings suck for everyone, we can pick another day & time. And no, there was no real rhyme or reason for Mondays.

Rules: There are no rules other than staying on topic, and using the #retechchat hashtag.

See you on Twitter under the #retechchat hashtag Monday at 7 PM PST!! I promise, no more changes…

I’ve been “attending” the weekly 1 hour #blogchat conversation on Twitter every Sunday evening (at 8 pm Central) the past month or so. It’s always a lively discussion that has a strong community behind it (it started in March of 2009). Each week, there is a different topic discussed – such as analytics, blog design, SEO, importance of personal branding, etc – for one hour (and often people stay on longer to continue talking). If you want to learn more about #blogchat, head over to Mack Collier’s blog.

I’m a big big fan of the concept. And with so many real estate agents and brokers wanting to learn more about real estate blogging these days, I thought we should bring the concept to real estate. #reblogchat is the result.

Details are as follows:

What: A weekly 1 hour conversation on Twitter discussing real estate blogging. #blogchat with a real estate lens.

When: The first #reblogchat will be this coming Monday at 7 PST/10 EST. We can tweak the time & day if needed, we just need it to be the same time every week so that everyone can plan accordingly. So, if Monday evenings suck for everyone, we can pick another day & time. And no, there was no real rhyme or reason for Mondays.

Rules: There are no rules other than staying on topic, and using the #reblogchat hashtag.

Feedback: If you’d like to propose a topic for week 1 or want to suggest another day and time for #reblogchat – please do so in the comments. I’ll post a followup post in the next few days with a topic for week 1 once I get some feedback.

There are tons of amazing conversations on Twitter, often at the most random hours of the day. Off hour conversations on Twitter is where I first started to get to know Chris Smith (@techsavvyagent) and Matthew Shadbolt (@corcoran_group) — among others. #blogchat and my off hour conversations got to thinking — if we could somehow gather the most passionate real estate people on Twitter at a single time to discuss a topic, something good would likely happen. I hope I’m right.

I got a few retweets when I mentioned the idea on Twitter a few weeks ago, so I know there is at least some interest for this. Plus, I suckered two of my favorite clients, Kris Berg & Lori Bee, to participate even though they didn’t really have any idea what #blogchat or #reblogchat was. I know they are both early birds, so it’s still to be determined whether they can stay awake long enough to finish the whole hour .

Hope to see you on Twitter on Monday evening at 7 PM PST under the hashtag #reblogchat!!

Any help you can provide spreading the word to passionate bloggers or soon-to-be-bloggers in the real estate vertical would be greatly appreciated.

How many of you have been added to a Facebook Group without your permission? It’s happened to me, and I’ve done it to friends. In most cases, it’s someone you know that’s added you to a group they feel you should be part of. Likely, you find the group valuable and want to be a part of it, but sometimes a specific group is not something important enough to receive email updates every time anyone in the group posts an update. Facebook by default turns on email notifications, but you can turn them off with two clicks, and the screen shot below shows how.

Uploaded with Skitch!

Turning off email notifications allows you to remain part of the group and receive notifications within Facebook, but not be bothered with cluttering up your email.

For the newbies to Facebook Groups, hope this helps. For the advanced readers, back to your regular scheduled Geek Estate programming.

Hold on to your hats; today we’re going to take a look into Social Networking domination with Twitter.

Twitterfeed.com is a wonderfully awesome service that allows you to auto tweet content pulled from an RSS feed throughout any number of twitter accounts.  So, if you have 20 twitter accounts each with 300 followers that are all “tweeting” from the same RSS feed, with one new item in the feed you’ll reach 6,000 people.

Now, there are a couple of tutorials out there regarding using Yahoo Pipes or similar services that you can use in conjunction with twitterfeed.com to grab the tweets of one account and disburse it to be retweeted by your 19 other accounts.  But this is complicated and silly.

Here’s a solution: Simply create a free blog at wordpress.com that you exclusively use for your tweets.  Grab the address for your feed and use that in your twitterfeed account.  So creating a new post on your wordpress account = distributing this new post to your twitter network.

That’s great Justin, now where do I get the follower’s from?

There are a number of great tips out there regarding how to increase your twitter following – guest posting on high traffic blogs, giveaways, humorous and relevant tweeting are just a few, but aside from close friends and family where does one start to gather the foundation of a large Twitter network?

I’m sure that you can think of a number of ways to start yourself off, but one round-about way is through one of the open networker groups on Linked In: TopLinked.  With over 100,000+ members, TopLinked is one of the largest LinkedIn Groups.  They send out a list by e-mail that you can find here: http://www.toplinked.com/invitemelist/?p=freedownload with the e-mails of thousands of members.  And guess what, 99% of these networkers have Twitter accounts, and will re-tweet your tweets if they are worthwhile!

So here’s what we do – we download the list, upload those contacts into our e-mail account over at Yahoo or Gmail, and in turn import those contacts into Twitter automatically when we create a new account and follow them.  The majority will reciprocally follow you in return!  Give it a week, then methodically go through and delete those that don’t follow you.

I’d say start out with 300 – 400 followers to get the ball rolling on each account; you want your twitter following to be comprised as much of people that are actually interested in what you have to say as possible – this is the reason for creating 20 accounts – chances are much greater that one of your tweets will go viral.

Happy tweeting

I will create a Twitter search widget to show Walkscore Tweets for various neighborhoods. I have created these tweets using Twitter API and Walkscore API. Note that I am searching using a Hash Tag (see # sign before the search term), which is more powerful than a simple search.

Twitter Search Widget Generation

In the above page, customize various settings like colors, widget size and use Test settings button to preview the widget. Once you are satisfied, use Finish & Grab Code to copy the code and paste on your web site or blog. See it in action!

You can also create Twitter Profile Widget to display your most recent Tweets on any web page as shown below.

Create Twitter Profile Widget

See it in action!

Try Facebook widget and share your tweets on Facebook.

Get your Twitter button so that visitors to your web site can add your web content to twitter.

Or, show off your follower base using the button from Twitter Counter as shown here.

In my opinion, advanced Twitter search is one of the most powerful tools on the web, yet it remains one of the least leveraged.  One of the most important features for the real estate industry is the location-based search option.  Using this feature, you can refine your search for people only in your local market who are tweeting about topics related to your business.  Let’s say you’re a real estate agent in San Francisco, here is an example location-based search that I entered for tweets containing the word “realtor” within 10 miles of San Francisco:

And here is the search results for my query above:

While many of the results won’t be relevant, you’ll occasionally get a golden nugget like the tweet by @SFMomsLikeMe highlighted above – “Selecting a realtor in Bay Area-got any tips?” I’m just not sure it gets much more targeted than that.  You know this person is a mom, is located in San Francisco, is in the market for a Realtor, and is seeking advice on how to best choose one.  Seems like a perfect opportunity to tactfully engage them in real-time.  Follow this user on Twitter, tweet at her and point her to the valuable information you have on your blog/website about the local market.  You get the idea, use this as a window to share helpful knowledge with the goal of proving that you’re the best Realtor for the person you’re reaching out to.

At my local services start-up, SkillSlate, we’ve had some early success reaching out to and engaging with prospective members for our site by conducting location-based Twitter searches on the various categories of service providers in our test market of New York.  I hope that you can leverage similar practices as outlined above in order to better leverage the powerful hyper-local capabilities that Twitter offers in order to grow your business.  Good luck!

I thought this was a smart observation, but Eric’s post had to do with RSS feeds as they pertain to blogs and the reading of real estate articles. Today, I’m here to talk about RSS feeds as they relate to MLS data.

RSS Feeds + MLS Data = Leads & $$$

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a web feed format used to publish frequently updated content. Back when the original IDX policy was written, RSS technology existed, but how it applied to MLS data had not been discovered. If you’re not up to speed on RSS technology and how it works with MLS data, let me give you an example of how a brokerage or agent might use RSS to drive traffic and leads.

Let’s say I’m a real estate agent with an IDX feed and a Facebook account (this will work for Twitter too). I can Really Simply Syndicate all price reductions for any zip code covered by my local MLS, for instance Honolulu, and for any criteria that I desire, let’s say condos. I can then create a Facebook page called “Honolulu Condo Price Reductions” and attach my RSS feed to it. This new Facebook page will now display all price reductions for condos in Honolulu. Potential buyers interested in this niche can become a fan of this page and get price reduction updates displayed directly on their Facebook “Wall”.

Simple to setup (you can have a Facebook page like this up and running in minutes), and a very good way to build your fan base and social sphere. Which, in turn, generates more traffic, leads and money in your pocket.

So what’s the problem? When a real estate agent signs up for a MLS feed, the agreement is that they will display MLS listing on the URL specified in their contract for which other brokers have agreed to share their listings with (this does not include Facebook or Twitter). Let’s remember that advertising another broker’s listing (outside of the website specified in your MLS agreement) requires written consent from the listing broker.

Also, IDX policy does not speak to RSS feeds. And NAR rules and regulations say that if something isn’t specifically allowed within policy, then it is not allowed…period. So, for the time being, distributing MLS data through RSS is not OK.

The NAR does understand RSS is an issue, however, and during their last meeting (roughly 1.5 weeks ago) the board spoke on this topic and eventually voted to form a task group around RSS to provide a recommendation for NAR’s next November meeting.

Will RSS feeds be gone for good? It really does look that way, unless Realtors speak up.

It would be interesting to hear how Geek Estate Blog readers feel about this subject. Should RSS feeds be allowed? If so, how far should property syndication be taken before we’ve gone too far…or is there such a thing?