Real Estate SEO

Posts Tagged ‘twitter’

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.

If you’re one of the hundreds of people who follow us on Twitter, know that you’re not alone. Based on statistics just published yesterday, Boston Logic is among the most followed on twitter. Fewer than 1% of twitter users have more than 500 followers. If you’re reading this on Twitter, you’re one of more than 1700 and counting!

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

Like most web application, 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 our there and grad some more followers some percentage of them will be active.

In fact, I’m going to assume that only10 or 20% of our followers will actually read this blog post when it’s syndicated as a tweet (This happens automatically via rss). That’s ok that 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. That’s all we want.

If you found us through twitter, let us know!

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

Thanks!

If you are in the real estate business and you are involved or are thinking of being involved in social media, you’ve come to the right place. You may have found yourself thinking that with so much new stuff out there, which sites are the right ones for you?  Should you join Facebook? How about LinkedIn? How much good does a Trulia profile do? And what the heck is Twitter?

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?

How many ways do you think Social Media can contribute to good real estate SEO? Jot down a list and then compare it to mine. If I left off any major ones, please let me know. Here goes:

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.

We’re in a recession, most of us have less money, does that mean that we can’t afford SEO?

Au Contraire!

When cash capital is scarce, human capital is abundant. It’s a great time to invest your human capital in SEO and social media. In this post, I wanted to mention some great ways to get the most bang out of your time.

Great blog posts take time and effort
A great blog post is more likely to be read, linked to, and syndicated. This is the essence of great SEO. If you’re a real estate agent and you spend some real time and effort creating a great post about the real estate market conditions in your town, it’s going to get read. I mean real quality. Make some graphs, give real stats, include photos of listings that characterize the points that you make. A great post goes a long way. A weak post will only take you so far.

Video
Did that word scare you? Creating video is getting easier by the day. There’s lots of free video software out there. You could use a camera or just do a screen capture. If you’re reading this post on a computer with a built in camera, then you have no excuse. Videos are highly engaging, users watch them, and you can post them on other sites - like YouTube and Facebook - and folks will see your material there too. FYI, the Obama campaign put up hundreds of videos on YouTube. By the end of the campaign, they’d been watched a combined total of 77 Million times!

Update your profiles on Facebook, Linked In, Twitter…
Take the time to make sure your profile on Linked In is up to date. Same goes for Facebook and Twitter and the other sites that you use to promote yourself. Make sure your blog is syndicating to those spots too. There are easy instructions on how to do that on each of those sites. If you don’t think people look at those sites to check you out, you’re wrong. Referrals have always been a big part of real estate client generation. Now, in the social media age, potential clients are going to check you out before they meet you. If you haven’t had someone tell you, upon meeting you, that they read your profile on one of the sites I’ve mentioned here, they day can’t be far off. This happens to me all the time. My profile proceeds me.

Establish partnerships
Let’s go back to our premise. We can’t increase our SEO budget. Maybe you’re cutting the budget in other places like print ads (smart move). It’s also time to take a few notes from the business 101 playbook. Partner with other real estate firms and real estate agents. They’ll probably be eager to partner with you too. Talk to folks in neighboring cities and towns. Remember to exchange links on your websites so that you get the link juice. Also, become friends on Facebook and follow them on twitter. Do everything for them that you want them to do for you and they’ll do it in return. Then go do the same with 10 other great real estate agents.

Get the most for your time/money/SEO
Finally, I mentioned this in a post the other day. I’m going to assume that you’re investing in some professional SEO services. If you’re also following some of what I’ve written in this post, your SEO marketing team will be able to take these contributions and make them go even farther into the reaches of the web. This is the most efficient way to invest your time and money into SEO. As I’ve mentioned before, you’ll see a multiplicative effect. Very soon.

Thanks for reading.