Fortunately, following the Google Analytics example, Twitter will not be charging for its analytics feature, which was a concern as the company’s execs had alluded to the feature’s potential revenue as a possible business model in the past. Ross Hoffman of Twitter’s development team commented that Twitter would also incorporate the technology it’s using to measure tweet “Resonance” for search results and other similar features.

When the idea was first broached in December, the announcement of the Website Analytics feature was in reference to use of commercial Twitter accounts, which you would have to pay for, that contain premium features like multiple Twitter authors and an Analytics Dashboard – similar to LinkedIn’s premium accounts. However, this notion was also born out of the idea that Twitter would one day be a paid service, and as of yet there doesn’t seem to be any indication that there will be a Twitter business model.

Since that late 2009, Twitter has also matured significantly. It has been steadily competing with third party developers, and the company has consistently grown by purchasing and launching new software, such as mobile products. As for the Analytics offering, the Twitter App lists 151 applications to better understand the Twitter component of your real estate internet marketing campaign. This is great news for those of us in real estate marketing to help manage and understand Twitter presences.

Source Article: Twitter Analytics

Facebook recently announced a new geolocation feature for its users, Facebook Places.  You may be familiar with other geolocation services, such as the start-ups Foursquare, Gowalla, or Hot Potato.  Hot Potato was recently acquired by Facebook, which has brought all eight Hot Potato employees on-board, presumably to expand and develop Facebook Places.

In a statement released to Mashable.com, Facebook announced, “We’re excited to confirm that we recently acquired Hot Potato, a service that helps people socialize around live events and share what they’re doing with friends.  We’ve admired for some time how Hot Potato is tackling this space and look forward to working with them to bring Hot Potato innovations to Facebook.”

Will Facebook Places eliminate these other small geo-location services?  Only time will tell.  Foursquare and Gowalla offer fun game-like features with their services, and often work with business to offer discounts for users.  Facebook Places doesn’t offer any of these features yet.  One thing’s for certain, though- Facebook serves over 500 million users compared with Foursquare’s 3 million users, and Gowalla has even less.  Also worth noting is the strong relationship between Facebook and Yelp.  I can only imagine there will be more integration with Yelp and Facebook Places in the future.

But how does Facebook Places work?  How will this new feature be implemented and effect user privacy?  How can Business Owners capitalize on Facebook Places?

Facebook Places Basics:

Facebook Places is currently only available to some users in the united States and on the Facebook iPhone app.  Places will be available to other smart phones that support HTML 5 geolocation, such as the Droid, in the near future.

Facebook Places on the iPhone

Places works by allowing Facebook users to ‘check in’ to the various locations they visit, such as restaurants and bars, your local library, a friend’s home, etc. by logging into Facebook Places from their phone application or via touch.facebook.com.

Upon checking in, Facebook will announce to your friends that you have arrived at this destination.  You can also ‘tag’ your friends that are with you, much like you would tag someone in a photo, and find out who else is currently ‘checked in’.  If you tag a friend that is not using Places, it’s just like mentioning their name in a status update.

If you tag someone who is already signed up for and using Facebook Places, it will mention it in their Newsfeed and add them to the ‘checked-in’ list as if they checked-in themselves.  The first time you are tagged, Facebook will send you a notice and give you the option of allowing your friends to check you into places or not.  You are always notified of when someone checks you into a location, and you can always selectively delete check-ins, much like you can delete a comment on your wall or a status update.

Privacy Concerns with Facebook Places:

Facebook learned a lot (the hard way) when it changed the structure of its Privacy Settings, automatically setting all users’ accounts to share EVERYTHING with EVERYONE as the default setting.  This time around they have made the automatic sharing settings much more conservative, with the default setting only sharing your location with the people on your Friends list.  However, what if you still want more privacy?  Maybe your boss is on your Friends list, or you have an ex you’re trying to avoid.

Don’t go deleting your Facebook profile yet!  You can customize, or even completely disable the Places feature!  Facebook has even made a helpful demo video for you to show exactly how to customize your privacy settings.

Facebook Places for Business:

Right now, Facebook Places is in it’s Beta version, so there’s not too much information about how business will be able to interact with it and use it to promote their business, although when Mark Zuckerberg announce Facebook Places he hinted that there is more to come.  If Places follows in the footsteps of Foursquare, business could start offering promotions to customers that check in a certain number of times, etc.

In the meantime, if you’re a Business Owner, you should probably log into touch.facebook.com, add your business address, and check in!  There still aren’t a lot of businesses listed, and new users will be eager to test the software out and visit new places they find.  You should also make sure you have a business listing on Yelp, too.  Your clients/ customers can and will add your business to these listing services sooner or later, if they haven’t done so already.  It’s in your best interest to be an active member of these online market places.  By adding your business to Facebook Places, you are making your business easier for the 500+ million Facebook users- for FREE!

If you want to learn more about Facebook Places, visit the Facebook Blog.

Here are a few tips to help you navigate, protect, and capitalize on social media:

Facebook

Don’t accept every person who friend-requests you. It is with it to do some digging around and try to identify the person if you don’t immediately recognize them. While your online networks are not always exclusive, they should still be monitored regularly. Facebook also has an option to create lists to help you further organize your growing number of “friends”, and you can even publish certain content to certain audiences.  (To learn how to do this, check out our previous LogicClassroom slides on Leveraging Facebook for Your Business.)

Additionally, Facebook is becoming more than just a social network — it can be a search engine too. According to some recent statistics, it is the #2 most visited site after Google, and some days even surpasses Google in total searches. By creating special interest pages on this social network, you can increase hits to your business’ profile or Web site. For example, Williams King created a “365 Road Warrior Marketing and Technology Tips” page, which now has more than 200 fans.

Which Social Media Site is Right For Me?

Well, take a look at your personality and what your strengths are. Are you a great writer? You should write engaging real estate blogs and witty tweets. Enjoy being photographed (and don’t we all)? Maybe you could give YouTube a try.

Now You’ve Got a Presence. How Do You Protect It?

(Click here for some resources on Social Media Liabilities by NAR.)

Consider how you’ll monitor your social media sites. Who gets access to them? How will you handle negative postings? It gets tricky when deciding whether to delete these comments or address them online.  What will you do?

Sometimes a personal phone call to the party to discuss why they are upset can really help smooth things over . It can even motivate them to post something positive about your follow-up outreach.

Ready to Take the Plunge?

After all this data and through the online buzz about social media, and you still don’t think you need an online presence, you may want to reconsider. Social media will be one of the primary search tools for the next generation of real estate buyers and sellers. And if you want to get started and don’t know how, you can always ask a younger agent for some help, or contact us on how you can get started on some real estate SEO help and services offered. We’ll be happy to give you some guidance!

Source Article: The Right Way to Get Started in Social Media

We’ve all been there. We get a new website, new blog, and get inspired with new business growth and possibilities that we cannot contain our blogging excitement.

Then a month goes by. Then six. And we can get disenchanted with the idea of consistent blogging.

It’s okay.

To get back on track, here are some blogging ideas to get re-inspired and to keep blogging on a regular basis again – which will lead to fresh content, optimized pages, search-engine friendly pages and ultimately more leads to your website. Which is exciting.

1. Talk about the future of real estate by commenting on current developments within the industry.
2. Explain why it’s important for everyone to care about real estate.
3. List online resources for fellow real estate agents.
4. Make a list of the top myths about buying or renting a home through an agency and debunk them.
5. Attend real estate conventions or networking events and report on them.
6. Do real estate market comparisons for your area, the national market, and abroad.
7. Occasionally go off topic and link an issue from your life back to your business, i.e.“10 Reasons Real Estate is like A Box of Chocolates”.
8. Pose this question to your followers: “What would you like to change in [insert your product or service here]?”
9. Speak with other leaders in real estate and guest blog for each other.
10. Write a book review dealing with your topic that depicts thinking about real estate in an outside-of-the-box way.
11. Create short video to change things up – this can be fun, or you speaking about your business.
12. Take a common issue many people care about and explain how it relates to your business.
13. See which blog post received a lot of hits or attention and write a follow-up.
14. Look into social media sites (if you haven’t already) like Digg, StumbleUpon or Technorati and find out what’s trending right now and put a property-spin to it.
15. Tweet a question and blog about your favorite answers.

Blog away!

Source article and more ideas here.

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

Our next Logic Classroom will be on 12/8/09. Learn how to turn your blog into a lead generation machine!

If you missed the class here’s the slide deck:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/05/twitter-data-analysis-an-investors-perspective/ This is a great article by Robert Moore.

Like most web applications, a large percentage of Twitter’s users don’t do anything. Lots of them don’t follow anyone and don’t tweet at all. Less than 25% of twitter’s users make up probably 99% of the activity on the site.

But that’s OK. Twitter has over 50,000,000 users. The laws of large numbers tell us that a small piece of a big pie is still a lot of pie! So, if you can get out there and grab some more followers, the odds are some percentage of them will be active.

In fact, I’m going to assume that only 10 or 20% of our followers will actually read this blog post when it’s syndicated as a tweet (this happens automatically via rss). But that still means that over 300 people will read the tweet and a few of them will click to this post and read more. The tweet will only be 140 characters.  So, this very sentence will not find it’s way onto twitter. Only the first 2 or 3 sentences of this post will. Some of our growing follower base will then click through. And that’s all we want.

If you found us through twitter, let us know!

Also, we’re hiring: http://www.bostonlogic.com/careers

Thanks!

Well, all of those are indeed reasons to celebrate, but not too much. It’s like the old saying goes: That, and a token, will get you a ride on the subway.

At the end of the day, there’s no revenue generated directly from being at the top of the SERPs. No one is paying you to be your Facebook friend and Twitter followers aren’t a revenue stream. These are all means to an end. The end goal, of course, is revenue.

Let’s examine this process. A user is out there on the web, they’re tweeting, let’s say, or they’re searching for a real estate agent on Google. The first goal is for them to find you and click to your site. Great. Step 1 is implete, you’ve generated traffic. users are clicking on your organic listings which rank high because of all that SEO you’ve invested in.

Now, the user arrives at your site. What do they find? Is your site engaging? Can they easily find what they’re looking for? Are they compelled to sign up and become a lead? We’ve written many times on this blog about the fact that SEO is a WASTE if your site isn’t any good. It’s true that we often have clients contact us for SEO services and we tell them that we’ll need to redesign their website before doing any SEO. Otherwise, they simply wouldn’t see any benefit from our SEO services. Some folks out there, some in real estate and some in other industries, think that SEO gets you clients. Well, it doesn’t.

SEO is a means, not an end.

So, let’s be optimistic. The user found you, they arrived at your site. They became engaged. They even signed up and converted from a user into a lead. What now? Does a lead = money in your pocket? No, a real estate buyer or seller lead is only worth cash when the deal closes.

That said, it’s easier to understand the value of a lead. The closer you get to the transaction and the smaller the numbers get, the easier it becomes to assign a dollar value to each unit. If in a 1 month period you generate 100 leads and sell even just 5 of them a home, and your monthly marketing budget is $2000 that means you’re spending $20/lead and your customer acquisition cost is $400/customer.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. We have search engine ranking producing website visitors. The visitors are converting into buyer and seller leads. Now we want deals. How do we maximize the conversion of those leads into deals. Here are two ways.

First, email marketing is essential. Lots of your leads will not come back to your site unless they’re prodded to do so. Send them nightly listing updates. Send them your newsletter. Email marketing is the best way to re-engage a lead. It’s also the best way to stay in touch with your past clients, a source of repeat business, referrals, and testimonials (which are great for SEO).

Second, your site needs to be a resource to the buyer. They’ll keep coming back, and therefore be more likely to convert into a deal, if they are engaged with the tools on your site. Your property search should be fully featured. A user should create an account and save favorite listings, save favorite searches, take notes, save and edit their listing update criteria, and communicate directly with you, right through the site.

To review:

1. The user finds you on Google or Twitter or where ever
2. They become engaged by your site’s design and functionality.
3. Conversion from a user into a lead
4. User returns to the site as their buying or selling resource.
5. Conversion into a client signaled by a deal closing.

Remember, steps 1 through 4 are all means to an end. It’s like my football coach used to say, “you can celebrate when you cross the goal line.”

Social media is a great way to optimize an online marketing campaign, for sure. Though I advise you to tread with caution. It’s not for everyone. Meaning that if you are involved in real estate seo, have a well functioning website and blog, then yes, social media is a great next step and something that you should take advantage of. However, if you either (a) do not have a website with good usabilitly, and (b) are not committed to being involved online, then social media is not for you. Here’s why: Social media is not just some profile you create so people can stumble across your name. No. Social media should involve you actively engaging with your readers, fans, friends and followers.

One of the most important aspects, besides engagement, is listening. You need to pay attention to what people are saying online. Whether it’s through direct communication or setting up something like Google alerts and responding in turn, you need to listen and respond appropriately.

Social media groups for real estate:

• Facebook: You can create a facebook profile for every agent. Each should manage their own because it would be too much for one person to manage. Create one Facebook “Fan Page” for your business, to which you can upload blog posts (your own and those worth sharing), you can share links, invite friends etc. Facebook provides a very detailed and useful help section if you need guidance on setting up accounts. Take a look at existing real estate pages for an example and take the best practices from each.
• Twitter: You may have heard it referred to as a “microblog”, and what you write is referred to as “Tweet”. Oprah even joined Twitter…but that doesn’t mean that you have to be on there too, nor that your readers are part of her followers. However, Twitter offers a great opportunity for realtors to listen to what home buyers, sellers and renters may be looking for or need. If you search the term real estate, house, or apartment via www.search.twitter.com you can see all the things that people have to say. Follow those people in your market and respond by offering advice, resources, tips etc. It will go a long way.Tip: please be sure to post a photo and write a brief, professional bio. Most won’t follow you if you don’t have one.
• YouTube: You don’t have to be Susan Boyle to become an internet sensation, but as a realtor it’s really easy to pick up a camera and shoot a video of your open house, a neighborhood, or a walk-through and then post that video on your site, youtube, and/or vimeo, and others of the sorts.
• Flickr or Picasa: Very similar to posting online videos, I encourage you to create an account for your agency and post photos of homes or at least your featured homes.
• LinkedIn: Another online networking community. How’s it different? LinkedIn is much more professional than, say, Facebook. You can only post your employment background and up to 3 links. What’s great about this group is that you can make a direct connect with your blog through their applications, and you can join additional real estate related groups. This way, each time you write a blog post worth sharing or you have other exciting news, you can share that information with those groups that you joined.
• Trulia: Like Zillow and Zip Realty, Trulia is already one of the most widely used real estate resources online. So why not go where you know your audience is? You should sign up for a free account. Create your profile and all that jazz, and recycle your old blog posts here (liven them up with some new content etc) and re-post those article through your Trulia blog.
• Other real estate sites include hubpages.com, squidoo.com, and activerain.com. Whenever possible also join local groups through either your local paper, community centers, chamber of commerce etc.

Within these social groups it’s important to remember that you should create and complete your profiles to show that you are there for the long run. No one will care what you have to say if you only show up and leave a message once a month. Instead you should engage your readers, follow your fans, and listen to what people have to say.

Social media like all relationships requires time to build, consistency and an ongoing effort. You don’t have to tackle all of these sites at once, take a stab at what you can handle, distribute some work throughout your team, and build up from there when ready.

Like its sibling, real estate SEO, social media will (in due time) help drive quality traffic and ultimately increase quality leads to your site. The great thing about social media is that people will only follow you or engage with you if they are truly interested, so that means that those who engage are already a good lead. You’ll be amazed by what you learn, and you’ll be even more amazed when you see how much traffic these sites will bring over time.

Are there any groups that I missed that you would suggest? What groups are you currently involved in? What have been some suprising things you’ve learned?

1. Blogs are social media. Blogs only get read when there’s new content. New content helps your search engine placement.
2. You can syndicate your content (let’s say from your blog) to social media sites. You could even feed your real estate listings, by RSS to your twitter and Facebook profiles.
3. Many social media site pages are public. These pages are bound to have links back to your site. Linking will improve your SEO.
4. Social bookmarking links on your site will produce back links from those sites (Digg, Reddit, Stumble, etc.) to your site. Again, these links will improve your SEO, your rank, and bring you more traffic and more leads. Remember real estate buyer and seller leads are the goal, not just ranking!
5. Users spend a lot of time on Facebook, Twitter, and many other social media sites. The referral traffic will help you gain more visitors, more clients and sell more real estate.
6. Promotions have more power with social media. Post a promotion on your site, edit your PPC ads accordingly to drive clicks, broadcast the promotion to your Twitter followers, Facebook friends, and LinkedIn connections and watch your traffic spike.
7. Remember that real estate SEO is about leads and customers. What you care about isn’t always ranking but leads and real estate transactions that come from those leads. Use your analytics system, like Google analytics,  to look at the social media sites that are driving traffic and leads to your site. My money says that you’ll see a good conversion rate on this traffic.
8. Chatter on Facebook and Twitter can fuel your blog. Look at what the people are saying about your real estate market, your real estate business, even you as a real estate agent. You’re likely to get inspired and find a topic to blog about. Also, here’s another post about blogging inspiration that could be helpful.
9. Social media is all about linking and showing the world what you’re up to. As a result, your friends and followers are likely to check out the stuff that you’re pointing them to. So, engage your community, send them to your site – full of great resources and information – and they’ll convert into leads.

Ok, that about exhausts my list of how Social Media can improve your Real Estate SEO. I’m sure there are many others that I forgot, but I have to get back to SEOing a couple of sites today. I look forward to your additions to my list. Leave them as comments please. Thanks.