Real Estate SEO

Posts Tagged ‘Social Media’

The topic of last month’s LogicClassroom Webinar was on Personal Branding and SEM. Maybe you’ve taken time since then to consider your personal brand: but have you taken any steps toward realizing an end result?
Your real estate brand is more than just a logo on your business card or a custom real estate theme website. You also don’t need to be a superpower like Apple to make an impression. We thought we’d break down some steps you can do RIGHT NOW to start branding effectively for yourself. And to give you an extra push, we are also going to give an excuse before we show you how easy it is to get started.

Excuse: Branding Is Hard

Branding is not difficult. You simply must hone in on what exactly it is that you want your business to stand out for and to whom. You also must make the commitment to this message through every company message. Creating and maintaining your brand is simply a matter of assuring that your message is consistent and clear. If you are branding an office, make sure that all employees and partners are able to verbalize your message.
Excuse: Branding Is Expensive
You can work with any budget to create an effective brand. The key is not cash, but more about defining the specific target audience that you want to receive your message, and to make sure you have identified their needs and offered a solution to be delivered through your brand.
While your brand is reflected in your business logo, it is often more in that. The other extreme when considering branding is Apple, as they have an overwhelming brand presence and budget to back it up. However, creating a consistent and clear message, identifying a target audience to brand to, and sponsoring what you can afford, such as those 2 or 3 highly targeted events will prove to be a very effective means of marketing.
You can also pull back and live your brand through everyday business practices. For example, your company’s message on your voicemail, or signature on every outgoing email. Do these reflect your brand, and the message that your company (or you) stand for?
Excuse: Branding Isn’t THAT Important

Ever hear about those private equity firms that buy brands for millions to acquire the loyal customer base? Brand equity is a substantial piece of your business identity. You can also see this when customers purchase an outfit for 3x as much at Express instead of the Gap. Your brand, if effective, can potentially translate into bottom-line sales.
A strong foundation and targeted message are important. Eventually, your brand will guide all other company marketing decisions to grow, including your product’s price points and who to partner with.
Excuse: I Can’t Find the Right Designer To Express my Brand
While you can create your own brand and brand strategy, it may be worth investing in a designer to create the best execution of your brand’s vision as possible. The best place to start? Your  real estate website design.

Sequoia especially specializes in custom real estate website design. It’s essential that you communicate the right message visually, and our developers can make that happen with customized themes and templates for website design. Good designers will create a theme that will convey the message of your company effectively, and is absolutely worth the investment.
Excuse: Branding Doesn’t Work Immediately
While this is true, there is a huge difference between direct-response marketing and branding. Your customers need to experience your brand several times before it becomes memorable. Branding is also about “mindshare”, which is the space in your target market’s mind when they see your logo or hear your name. And that takes time to build up.
While it’s important to revitalize your brand and keep it updated, try to avoid changing your branding every quarter in order to raise sales. You’ll make slight tweaks to your brand, but you’ve already put in the thought and effort, remember?
You also need to give your customers a chance to respond to your brand. While things may be quiet the first three months, many potential leads haven’t heard your message through the noise of your industry.
Bottom line: Put in the effort and research, stick to it, be consistent and patient. In due time, your brand will pay off!

Source Article: Shattering Branding Myths

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.

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?