Social media is, of course, all the rage these days and it plays an important role in marketing. I’ve stated the obvious but that’s not what this post is about. I’m going to touch on a marketing strategy a number of agents don’t seem to take advantage of. I am, however, very sorry for potentially causing a larger work load in your life!

long tail seo

There are all sorts of social media networks, apps and tools out there that have a great deal of ranking clout. This can most definitely be used to your advantage, although I will warn you it is not always a long term strategy. Some social networks lose their authority status so taking advantage of their ranking power will have to be gamed at the right times.

This is by no means a “black hat” method, it’s simply providing awesome content on other platforms. It’s no different than publishing on Facebook, Tumblr or anywhere else, just make sure you provide great, unique content every time.

I’ll go through a few examples in this post, but do keep your eye out for new social sites you see in your search results. Just imagine, you could potentially have more than one search result leading back to your business!

PDF Marketing:

There has been a surge in online PDF hosting over the past couple of years and there are a couple sites out there that do it well. These two sites quickly grew into mega traffic content websites (I’m talking sub 1000 on Alexa) and have stayed that way. The best part is that you can get great looking PDF documents covering all sorts of topics ranking quite well….with little effort I might add.

Scribd.com – I’m sure a lot of you already have seen this site, and I imagine some of your are even using it. It’s the biggest of the PDF hosting social apps, and it allows you to do all sorts of neat things with your content. There is a real estate section willing and waiting for your uploads, so don’t wait any longer!

DocStoc.com – This is pretty much the same thing as Scribd, but it does have its differences. I really like their real estate section as well, and they provide a lot of great tools for marketing your business here. This site makes for a great place to upload market updates, sales reports and other useful data.

PowerPoint Presentation Marketing:

Now I know that real estate agents have done a PowerPoint presentation or two in their day, and now they can be web ready! You can utilize a very powerful web app called SlideShare.net to upload yours and rank it very well in most cases, depending on your keyword.

There is a real estate section on this site as well, and it’s something you definitely don’t want to ignore. Slideshare isn’t a site that will be gone by next year, so make the effort to try just one presentation out before passing this off. Title  your presentation well, share it socially and watch it rank quite well for most long tail keywords!

There are other platforms out there for sharing your PP presentations, and by the looks of it there will be more. While SlideShare will continue to dominate the market, but you can also check out SlideBoom.com, MyPlick.com and AuthorStream.com.

Youtube:

Okay, I know this one is quite obvious but I mostly want to remind agents to properly title, describe and tag their videos here. Youtube videos can rank very easily for long tail keywords and it only takes a little bit of effort.

How do they rank higher? It’s a combo of views, embeds, ratings and, I imagine, links to the video. I always share my new videos on Twitter, my Facebook page, my blog and usually on StumbleUpon. This is normally enough to get good things in motion, but you’ll have a wait a bit for some decent results.

For example, let’s take a look at the long tail keyword “Manhattan luxury loft” for the sake of this post. This is a pretty great long tail term to have a top 10 ranking for if you were selling these. You know a couple sales a year in this department is going to make some serious bank. So, what does Google yield for this? Check this out:

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As you can see this is a great spot to have if you’re selling lofts in Manhattan. Now how many other long tail terms are waiting out there for you to take over? Lots! If this isn’t inspiration to beef up your video marketing campaigns then I don’t know what is.

Press Releases:

Press releases are perhaps not classified as social media websites, but they usually extend into the social media webosphere. This long tail tactic can work in a couple different ways when it comes to press releases, so let’s take a look at those options.

Use An Authority Wire Service!

Places like Marketwire.com and PRWeb.com have great distribution channels but best of all, your properly titled news can rank very well. I’ve seen a huge rise in Google putting latest news for #cityname real estate lately, and this can be used to your advantage. I’m by no means telling you to pump out some spammy press release just for the sake of getting in there. That’s going to reflect on you poorly in the long run!


To pick on the Manhattan real estate keyword again, we can see yet another example of a top 10 listing that’s yours for the taking. Keep in mind if the news cycle is an active one for a certain keyword, you’re going to have to think of strategies that will keep your news fresh. So here’s that keyword’s news result:

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I recommend taking note of all your long tail targets that display news and getting out there and test test test! I will tell you from experience that sometimes certain keywords will bring in no ROI so make sure that the keywords you are targeting have potential to convert and go from there.

Widgets For The Win!

Widgets have long since been a link building method used by almost every industry and  they’re still going strong today. Widgets can be programmed for your own site or you can use a service like WidgetBox.com.

The first goal of a widget is to provide information and the second is to get a link via the widget’s embed code. This is where you have to be careful because Google doesn’t like anchor text gaming all that much.

widgetbox

WidgetBox does a pretty dang good job in ranking for long tail keywords. It’s too bad the creators of the app above didn’t know. Obviously the more downloads/installs it gets the better off your ranking is, but you’d be surprised at how easy this is. If you’re feeling really adventurous, check out their mobile app creation options for a quick app solution.

Real Estate Social Sites:

Everyone by now should be using one of the real estate social sites either for leads, links or general networking. Raise your hand if you don’t have an account on either Active Rain, Zillow or Real Estate Webmasters… It’s okay if you don’t, I won’t laugh. I will question your sanity, though, if you still don’t by the time you finish reading this article.

The better you utilize these real estate social networks, the more powerful your profile is and the better your content can rank. Pretty simple stuff. So for my post example, we’ll pick on Active Rain because they have a really active blogosphere. How Active? Roughly 1.8 million indexed blog posts…booyah!
active rain blogs

I know form experience that you won’t have an easy time with competitive long tail keywords, so write wisely. If you’re feeling brave, and have some extra time on your hands, throw some links at your content from other areas of interest within your marketing network. Since it’s on such an authority site, it won’t take many links to see some great things happen.

Where To Go From Here:

This is really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what social media sites you can use to rank hard. Keep your eyes peeled for the new guys on the block because they’ll come up fast and that’s a prime opportunity. You can also look to other areas for long tail ranking. Have a look at my article “Smarter Classifieds Marketing For Real Estate Agents. If you have a tip, then by all means share away in the comments below.