Real Estate SEO

Archive for the ‘Facebook for Real Estate’ Category

Thanks to everyone who attended our Boston Logic Classroom last night for our ‘Keeping Up with Facebook’ presentation!  If you missed the class or need a review, you can view a slideshow of the presentation below:

Tomorrow at 5:00 pm we will have our Logic Classroom covering some of Facebook’s latest applications and updates.

Facebook is now more than ever an integral aspect of any real estate search engine marketing campaign. The popular social media site hasn’t stopped growing – and neither can you. Facebook’s recent upgrades to privacy settings make it easier for you to control what your viewers can see, and who sees what. We have had Facebook training sessions in the past, at which you have probably learned the basics: but in this Logic Classroom, we are going to take this knowledge to the next level.

Little time and discipline is required to fully utilize Facebook for your real estate social media business strategy. We’ll talk tomorrow night about how to formulate appropriate campaigns and methods, and how to more effectively streamline the content production effort required for your real estate internet marketing campaign.

For this classroom, you are more than welcome to attend at the Boston Logic office (view map), or to participate through an online webinar at your convenience. This is an excellent opportunity to learn real estate SEO best practices and other means of search engine marketing to further grow your business.

Contact Katrina at ksierant@bostonlogic.com or 617-266-9166 to attend. Please also specify if you will be attending in the office or online via webinar. See you there!

I’ve recently learned some new things about YELP and I figure our loyal readers would want to know them too.

Some of you, I’m sure, haven’t heard of Yelp. You should check it out. Here’s a link to our profile on Yelp. Yelp is a site where you can write a review for any business with a physical location. People put up reviews, good and bad, of the businesses that they interact with. I recently reviewed a coffee shop that I like a lot. I mentioned that people like it too much and there’s  a long line almost every time I go, but it’s worth it. This is the kind of real world reviews you’ll see on Yelp.

BTW, we’d love it if you wrote a nice review about Boston Logic on Yelp. Click here to review Boston Logic. Thanks.

Here are some interesting and important facts about Yelp:

Reviews
First, the reviews that show up highest, by default, are the ones written by users who have written a lot of reviews. It’s not just the most recent review. You’ll notice above the reviews and below the profile of a company, there are sort options. The default is “Yelp Sort.” If you want to see the most recent just click on “Rating.” Notice also that there are lots of other ways to sort reviews. I don’t know how much this gets used, but while you’re on there, you may as well play around. If you like a review, then you can click “useful” the nice thing about this is that you can sort reviews by how useful other folks have found them.

Bad Reviews
Business owners, if you get a bad review, it’s not the end of the world. First of all, I’ve noticed that truly mean and bad reviews are usually short and often put up by people with fake accounts or accounts with little personal information and fake names. My account is linked to my Facebook account. So, I’m standing behind anything I say. Also, you can flag a review. This won’t make it go away completely, but it can put the review off your page and mostly out of reach of people. The casual user would need to dig in order to find it.

Paid Ads
Next, Yelp does sell paid ads. Or, really, they offer a ways to make your profile on Yelp more prominent and more engaging. For example:

1. You can pay to have your listing appear at the top of search results. This is like using Adwords to have your link come up on the first page of Google’s search results.
2. You can also pay to enhance your profile. So, if someone does find your biz on Yelp, then they’ll be more likely to stick on that page and maybe pick up the phone and call you.
3. Also, it should be noted that Yelp has tile ads on their home page and tower ads on other pages.

Social Network
Also, Yelp is more than just a site to post reviews. They’re a social network too. You can upload photos of yourself, give more details about your life, “friend” other members, become a fan, send a compliment, follow someone, and send a message all within Yelp. I’m not too sure how much this stuff gets used by the average user, but I’m sure the power users are making good use of it.

Like all Social Media sites, Yelp’s value increases as more people use it. If all anyone did was write a review, it would just be opinions stacking up. But Yelp has taken the time to make the more relevant content come up first. In some ways, this makes them a go-to search engine when looking for something great. I’ve often complained that Google is great for finding information, but horrible for rating that information’s quality, trustworthiness, and value.  Sure you can find pizza using Google, but there could be a great pizza place around the corner from you that has no website! This means it’ll never come up on Google at all!

Yelp is showing you the reviews by people who do the most reviewing and by the nature of the site and its use base, they’re probably showing you a more comprehensive results set. If you’re looking for a service provider, I highly recommend Yelp.

Competitors
To be fair, I wanted to point out a few Yelp-like sites. Maybe I’ll write a comparison post soon?!?

• www.citysquares.com
• www.yellowpages.com
• www.citysearch.com
• local.google.com
• Send me more and I’ll grow this list.

YELP PR PEOPLE – I’m sure you’ll find this article. Would love some feedback, thoughts, etc? Tell us how Realtors are using Yelp?

Just a few days ago, an organization created a challenge. The goal was to get 1,000,000 people to be their fan on Facebook. The results are truly spectacular. How did they do it. It was actually pretty simple. The key was that they gave instructions:

1) Click “Join”
2) Click “Invite People to Join” to the left
3) Invite all your friends.

Here were the results:

Day 1: 987 members.

Day 2: 2,191.
Day 3: 5,175
Day 4: 8,798
Day 5: 17,408
Day 6: 38,852
Day 7: 105,119
Day 8: 202,262
Day 9: 508,726 members!

It looks like by the end of today they’ll have their 1 million fans. http://www.facebook.com/group.php?v=info&ref=mf&gid=283600686512

Now, this is a group that supports same sex marriage. They produced a huge amount of awareness in just a week and a half. You might have heard about another group, supporting the fight against breast cancer, who encouraged women to post the color of their bra on a particular day. Millions of women were simply posting a color as their status update. Black. White. Blue. The results were incredible.

The other factor here that should not be overlooked is Cause Marketing. Lots of folks are passionate about same sex marriage. Millions of us would love to see a way to cure or prevent beast cancer. If you’re in a for profit enterprise, there are ways to get the same zeal behind your brand. Here are a few ideas:

1. Work with an organization. Think of how you can be carried along with the cause. RE/MAX is doing some good work with Susan G. Komen for the Cure, just as an example.
2. Create something that people want to be a part of. It doesn’t have to be a cause. It could be a conversation group. Could be a place where bragging goes on. it could be a trend that people want to be a part of, just make sure your company is associated with whatever you create.
3. Make it a challenge. These folks said “I bet we can get 1 million fans in 10 days.” And people took this on as a challenge.

Final note: Look at those numbers above. They’re experiencing exponential growth. they started with 1000 people and grew by 2x or 3x every day. Just remember, they started with 1000. Now, I have a few hundred facebook friends and so do most of the folks I know. If this sounds impossible to you, think again.

Thank you to everyone who attended our LogicClassroom presentation last night. We discussed how and why to leverage different social media platforms for your business. Don’t worry if you missed this session – the slides are below for you to view!

Please join us for our next LogicClassroom session 2/9/10 on Search Engine Optimization 101. Please email Katrina to attend.