Real Estate SEO

Posts Tagged ‘social media marketing’

The argument that  a digital identity is just as powerful as your true persona has some merit when it comes to social media. So how can you leverage social media for your real estate marketing campaign, and get more hits to your website?

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

Facebook’s new ‘Like’ buttons explained, in plain English.

By now you’ve probably heard that Facebook has done away with the idea of ‘Becoming a Fan’ of a Facebook Fan Page, and has instead replaced that function with a ‘Like’ button.  So now, you can ‘Like’ a friend’s photo or status update, and you can also ‘Like’ the Fan Page of your favorite businesses or products, such as Boston Logic or Dunkin Donuts.  When you ‘Like’ a Fan Page, it’s the same as ‘Becoming a Fan’ used to be in that you will now receive messages from these Fan Pages in your News Feeds (unless you ‘Hide’ them).  Most people have no trouble understanding this change; it’s more of a name change than anything else, right?  Right.

But what about the OTHER ‘Like’ buttons?  The new ‘Like’ buttons you’ve been noticing on several websites all over the internet, on sites like BostonLogic.com, Yelp.com, NHL.com, Levis.com, etc.  These new website ‘Like’ buttons were announced at the F8 conference this past April and are part of an expansion of Facebook to help you personalize your entire online experience. These new ‘Like’ buttons can be added to any website, even specific and multiple pages of your website.

So now, not only can you choose to ‘Like’ the Boston Logic Facebook Fan Page while on Facebook, but you can also choose to ‘Like’ our website, or our blog, or a specific blog post (like just this particular blog about ‘Like’ buttons), or even our listing on Yelp.com when you’re browsing the internet.  Basically, anytime you find one of these new ‘Like’ buttons somewhere on the web, you can click it to show that you ‘Like’ whatever content is on that web page, much like when you share something on Digg or Yahoo Buzz, etc.  But that’s not all!

If you’re already logged into Facebook (I know that I, for one, keep a browser page with Facebook up for most of my work day) clicking the ‘Like’ button will post a notice on your Personal Profile Wall (aka Mini-Feed) stating that you’ve ‘Liked’ whatever it is you’ve clicked on and provide a link to that website.  If you’re not logged in, a popup window will appear and prompt you to log into your account, and then a notice with a text link to what you’ve ‘Liked’ posts to your Profile Wall.  If you change your mind, you can click the ‘Like’ button again, and it disappears from your Profile Wall automatically.  You could also go manually delete it from your Wall, but that would not undo your click on the website, so your click would still count on the tally for that button; this difference is actually significant, here’s why:

That ‘Like’ button on the web doesn’t necessarily have to be associated with a Fan Page on Facebook, which is a good thing, because otherwise there’s be a Fan Page for every style of jeans Levis offers!  Instead, the webmaster (or owner) that installed the ‘Like’ button on the website you’re visiting is given an invisible back-end Admin Page (using their personal Facebook Profile ID Number), which actually functions much like any other Facebook Admin Page.

From this ‘secret’ Admin Page, the webmaster can see who has clicked on their various ‘Like’ buttons and send out notifications to each group of ‘Fans’ (anyone who clicked any ‘Like’ button) that will appear in each Fan’s Facebook Newsfeeds.  So, even if you never ‘Liked’ or ‘Became a Fan’ of the Levi Jeans Facebook Fan Page, you DID click the ‘Like’ button on the Levis.com website next to that wicked cute pair of shorts- essentially granting Levis permission to send you notifications regarding the shorts you liked or related items, promotions, etc. via your Facebook News Feeds.

Currently, the ‘Like’ buttons you click while browsing the web don’t show up in your friends’ Newsfeeds, only ‘Liking’ a Facebook Fan Page does.  This is good news for people with lots of interests/ ‘Likes’; you’re friends won’t hate you for spamming them with all your internet window shopping, but you are giving the companies, websites, and brands you’re interested in a quick way of reaching you with cool offers and such on your own terms.

If you DO want to share whatever it is you’ve found to ‘Like’ on the internet in your Friends’ News Feeds, many ‘Like’ buttons display the option to ‘Write a Comment’ once you’ve clicked it.  If you do this, it will broadcast your comment and a link to the page you were on to all your Friends.

So, like, feel free to ‘Like’ what you ‘Like’, like wherever and whenever you want, and share it however you like!

To learn more about Facebook’s other new features that you can also utilize for your social media marketing campaign, visit the Facebook blog.  If all this new ‘Like’ button stuff sounds like something you want to implement, but you don’t have the time or know-how, let Boston Logic help you by signing up for an Online Marketing Campaign!

In light of a recent query on how to optimize video, and a recent launch of some demo videos on YouTube, we wanted to shed some light on the topic. Especially considering that if YouTube was a Search Engine, it would easily be the second largest in the world after Google. If you are lacking some technical experience, resources, or budget to host your own video, creating it and uploading to YouTube is an excellent way to get great SEO results for your videos. We’ve written this post to make sure you do everything you can to maximize influence, ratings, and views.

When you upload a video onto YouTube, the algorithm that the site uses to sort results in a search is based on three criteria:

• Having Text in Descriptions and Titles
• Recent Trending and Total Number of Views
• Ratings for your video

So what can you do to optimize a video you have just uploaded? Here are some tips!

1. Optimize your Title Text. Did you know that you have 99 characters to optimize your title text? Use your keywords selected from your SEO campaign and any additional keywords or phrases you’d like to rank for when users conduct a search. Also remember to include your branding and additional descriptive text for your video. Lastly, check out the #1 spot for your keywords: aim initially for #2, as related videos can substantially boost your views.

2. Optimize your Description. After your title, you have another additional 5,000 characters. Use all this space to be as descriptive about your video as possible. As stated before, user ratings also influence ranking, invite others to rank your video and share the embed code.

3. Tag Optimzations. Again, using relevant keywords in your tags Useful for search terms you use in your title text and description, including names and branding.

When you upload a video, you are often prompted to select or deselect sharing options. Here’s how to make the most out of each!

Privacy – When you work on a video, it is understandable to put the video under a “private” setting. Don’t forget to switch this to “public” when you are ready to show the world!

Comments - It’s up to you whether you want to enable comments. Just remember: if you disable commenting, users will go elsewhere to talk about your video, your brand, or your message.

Video responses can also help boost your video’s  views because they are linked to your video

Ratings directly impact your ratings, so make sure to select “yes”.

Embedding via social media and blogs can seriously boost views, in addition to get your message to users outside of YouTube, so we recommend that you keep this enabled.

Syndication also through social media to boost your views will help your video rank higher in Google and YouTube,  so make sure to keep this enabled.

To Get Views:

Have a great “hook” After a user views the first 8 seconds of your video, YouTube considers this video “viewed”. Be sure to hook potential viewers to have them watch past this time, and ideally your whole video!

Embedding video on product pages or in your blog can encourage discovery of your website and boost video views.

Distribute the links to your videos in your company’s online press releases and embed them into your  social media releases.

Promote more views of your video by purchasing Google AdWords.

Use Playlists to chunk your videos into smaller segments and then link them all together.

Getting ratings:

Rank your own video. We promise we won’t tell.

Encourage others to rank your video by including the request within your video or its description.

Video may be a valuable tool to consider when evaluating your real estate search engine marketing mix. If you have succeeded with uploading a video, let us know! Be sure to check out our YouTube video channel, where we have more helpful tips and tricks for real estate SEO and other assistance with real estate websites.

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:

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.