Category: Online Marketing

Using Zillow To Give Your Reputation A Boost

Hey! Check this out:

Here is an agent using Zillow Reviews (and she has plenty) on her Facebook Business Page. Pretty cool, huh?! Would you like to do this? It’s easy.

The first step is to get a bucket full of good reviews.  Go to Zillow and log in to your Agent account (of course, if you don’t have one of those, you’ll need to sign up, but it’s free).  Click on the down arrow next to ‘My Agent Hub’ and select your profile.  Just below your picture there, you’ll see a star and a link to ‘Request A Review.’  Click it.  Now, look below the form and click the link to ”Send Multiple Requests At Once’.  You’re now at a form where you can enter the email addresses of all your former clients!  Quick and easy.  I’d suggest you reword the actual request – what’s there is pretty formal.  But click the send button and give it a couple of days for results.

Those reviews will show up on Zillow and will be available there for everyone to see when they are trying to decide which agent to call.  Very powerful.  It gets even more powerful when you respond to the review, like Ken Kopcho did here:

(Great Job, Ken!)

Now, when you have your handful of great reviews, go back to Zillow, log in, Click the down arrow next to ‘My Agent Hub’ and select ‘Widgets/Facebook Apps.’  There you’ll find a link to ‘Real Estate Apps for Your Facebook Page,’ and the second one of those will put a new Tab on the front of your Facebook Business page, like this:

That new Tab will take your visitors to that wonderful page of reviews you saw in the first image. By the way, did you notice the other Facebook Apps Zillow has for you?  The Listings tab, Local Info tab and the Contact Form are all pretty cool and might also belong on your Facebook Business Page.

I learned this in about ten minutes on a Zillow Academy webinar this morning.  You really should check this out:  Zillow Academy.

So that’s it:  quick, easy and effective.  I’ve heard from so many of you that the Zillow Premiere Agent program produces LEADS, but I’ve also heard over and over that it is the agent with lots of wordy five star reviews that gets the call.  Now you can put some of that great power to work for you on Facebook!

What I Learned About Twitter At Agent Reboot

From Katie Lance:

Twitter is about AMPLIFICATION. Used properly, it amplifies your message, your reputation and your visibility. The question is: what does ‘used properly’ mean?

It means, first, connecting with the right people. If you are in real estate, that’s a pretty localized business. How do you connect with local people?

    Sign into your Twitter account
    Go to search.twitter.com
    Click on ‘Advanced Search’
    Next to ‘Places’ put your town or target market name
    Experiment with the other search parameters

As you scan through your results, identify people who interest you (Persons Of Interest?) or who might be interested in what you might share. FOLLOW THEM. You’ll find that many will reciprocate by following you. And, oh, by the way, why not start following everyone who follows you?

So, you’re building your network on Twitter, creating a long list of people, mostly in your local market who will receive your tweets. What’s next?

Tweet Value. By that I mean make certain your tweets are short, relevant, interesting. Don’t overtweet and don’t constantly tweet. Tweet Value.

Maybe the best way to communicate what ‘Tweet Value’ means is by reproducing Katie’s list of Twitter ‘Don’ts’:

    Irrelevant and stupid content
    Tweeting listings
    Constant self promotion
    Spam
    Automatic responder messages (turn it off)
    Not responding to messages

Now, let’s talk about your Twitter Profile. You have exactly 140 characters in your Profile to describe who you are and what you do. Spend a little time on this. You want the people who view your profile to see you as someone who will ‘Tweet Value’, not junk. Something like:

‘Selling the Downtown San Diego Lifestyle for 17 years. Cyclist, Kayak-er and Dad to my kids. My wife rocks!’

That’s an active guy who loves his family and has a depth of experience in my geography. Probably worth following.

Finally: Twitter can be chaotic. Heck with ‘can’ – it IS chaotic. It screams for organization. Check out:

Hootsuite.com or Tweetdeck.com

Either of these apps can help you organize your Twitter experience into something manageable.

How to Rank on Google: One Thought

Yesterday, at Agent Reboot, I learned something I didn’t know – lots of things, actually.  But this one thing was so simple and so powerful . . .  and it was presented in less than one minute.  It’s a tiny sliver of Google history.

Google was started as a search tool for locating academic theses online.  The two guys who wrote the initial code and algorhythm wanted to discover the ‘importance’ of each thesis on any given topic so that all theses on the topic could be ranked from most important to least important.  That’s ranking – just like your website position on a page of Google results is a ranking.

Here’s the important part:  in coming up with a criteria to establish the relative ‘importance’ of any thesis, they settled in on citations.  Every time a paper was cited by another paper, its ranking improved.  If John Doe’s paper on ‘Negatively Charged Sub-Atomic Particles’ was cited in hundreds of other papers, then it was deemed to be pretty darn important and thus ranked higher.  My paper on ‘How to Dust a Lampshade’ was cited by absolutely no one and thus ended up at the bottom of the heap.

There’s a clue on how to improve your Google rankings:  it’s what we call ‘Backlinks.’  The more often your website is mentioned and linked on other sites, the more important Google deems your site to be.

So, what can you do to improve your ‘Backlink’ status?  You could go out and buy links – there are services that will link to your site from all sorts of places – but Google is not stupid.  She can spot that stuff in a second and you risk being Google-slapped and relegated to the dark corners of the 12th page of results.  Don’t do it.

A much better strategy is to FIRST:  have relevant, important, interesting and always changing content on your site.  Have something there of continuous value to others, something worthy of a link.  That can be a challenge on a typical company website (but not impossible), so thankfully there are other ways, notably:

Interact when you surf.  When you read something that causes you to react, comment!  Most times, commenting requires you to list some basic contact information and (usually) your website.  BINGO!  That becomes a link, a breadcrumb the Google spiders will follow right back to you.

I’m a pretty typical Internet user.  I’m on that spider Web every day and I’m always searching, reading, absorbing, learning.  But it’s very rare that I go to that next step:  interacting.  Why?  I am afraid I’ll get pulled into a discussion that will sap time and energy AND I’m afraid doing so will open me up to spam and/or viscious computer attacks.  The first concern is probably real but all that means is that I have to be disciplined and focused . . . and always aware of why I’m dropping this particular breadcrumb.   The second concern is something I don’t know much about.  But I do know how to deal with spam (use a filter) and I have a good, regularly updated virus and malware process.  So that shouldn’t stop me – or you – from taking your web experience from passive reading and watching to interacting and building your own online reputation.

Now:  I double-dog-dare you to leave a comment to this post and include your website address when you do!  Let it be your first breadcrumb!

 

Tame Facebook! Make Money!

I’ve ranted a bit about the overemphasis of Facebook and other Social Media in real estate marketing.  The ‘gurus’ would have us believe that we have to be all over Facebook and Twitter and Linkedin today to do any quantity of business at all.

While I still believe there’s a little too much emphasis on it, some recent stats gave me a reason to reexamine my beliefs.

NAR tells us the average member made about $34,000 last year and had about 100 friends on Facebook.

KISSmetrics interviewd agents who made more than $100,000 last year and guess what?  That group averaged more than 500 friends on Facebook.  And, oh, by the way:  82% of them have YouTube Channels!  74% have IPads (I think we have to face it:  there really is only one tablet on the market and it’s the IPad.  It’s very hard for me to admit that, but I’m afraid it’s true).

When ranking their top money makers, the $100,000+ agents cited the top three:

  1. Past Clients and Referrals
  2. Their Website
  3. Their Social Media Presence

Clearly there is something to this Social Media stuff . . . Clearly.

Yet most of us have given up on ever figuring out how to build our businesses with Facebook.  Still we’re spending, on average, 300 hours a year on Facebook (with no monetary return on that investment of time).  I think we have to examine why we’ve given up on Facebook and I believe I can explain it with one word:  CHAOS.

Facebook, by nature is Chaotic (Twitter, too).  I have slightly more than 200 friends and if I paid attention to everything every one of them posts in my NewsFeed . . . I wouldn’t have time for much else!  Imagine what it must like for those elite agents with 500 or more friends!

If you’re imagining that, your picture is probably wrong.

The difference between most of them and most of the rest of us is that they’ve taken the time to tame the Facebook beast.  They’ve done a few simple things to organize it, unclutter is and make it manageable.  Let me share a few with you right here.

Let’s do a little background work first.  When you login to Facebook, what you see is your NewsFeed. It’s what all of your friends and Liked businesses have posted and made visible to you.  Nobody else sees this but you, and you can get back to this NewsFeed at any time by clicking on the word ‘Home’ near the top right of your screen.  Next to that button is another button with your name.  Click that and you’ll go to your Timeline. This is what other people see when they seek you out, or search for you on Facebook.  The following tasks will all take place on your Home or NewsFeed view, so click that to get started.

Task 1:  Organize your ‘Friends’ into Lists

You have all kinds of ‘Friends:’ close friends, acquaintences, businss contacts, potential customers, past customers, and so on.  You want to keep up with all of them, sure; but not to the same extent.  For example, you probably want to see almost everything your closest friends post to Facebook but you probably only want to see the most important things your business contacts post.  We can control what hits our NewsFeed by first organizing our friends into Lists. 

On your NewsFeed, click on ‘Friends’ on the left column.  A list of your friend ‘Lists’ opens.  Most of these are default lists or lists that you inadvertantly created.  If you’re like me, you’ll be surprised you had any ‘Lists’ at all!  Check them out.  Remember, you’re going to be filtering the information that your ‘Friends’ post on your NewsFeed based on which ‘List’ they’re in.  If you find existing lists that work for you, fine.  I didn’t.  So I deleted Friends out of all of those lists (you’re just removing them from the List, not from your gang of Facebook Friends).

Next, create a few lists with names that will be meaningful to you.  Things like:  Close Friends (who will probably be the people who will restrict the least), Acquaintences (who you will probably restrict much more), Past Clients (somewhere in the middle) and so on.  You might consder a List for potential clients or for people who live in your target market.

Now, open the new empty list and click the link to Add Friends. Select people from your master List of all friends you’d like to put on this list.

Task 2:  Decide what kind of content you want to receive from the members of each ‘List’

Once the List is created and populated, click ‘Manage List’ and select ‘Choose Update Types’.  Then click ‘Manage List’ again and you’ll see the six types of updates you can get from this list of friends.  The initial default view will have all six checked, which is why (if you haven’t done this) your Facebook Newsfeed is crammed to the gills with stuff you don’t care about!  Simply unselect the items you don’t want to receive from this particular group.  For example, I elected to receive almost everything from my List of Close Friends.  Makes sense, right?  But not EVERYTHING.  I am not a computer gamer and have zero interest in the proliferation of games on Facebook.  So I unchecked that, even for my closest friends.  I also unchecked ‘Other Activity’ because this is usually your Friend accepting somebody else’s Friend request. Why would I care?

As you work through your new Lists, decide how much stuff you want to receive from each group and use the Update Types list to make your selections.  FYI, I ended up with four Lists:  Close Freinds (very little filtering of content), Medium Friends (a little more filtering),  Acquaintences (from whom I only receive Status Updates) and Help-U-Sell Family which is everyone in Help-U-Sell and is somewhere between Close Friends and Medium Friends in terms of filtering.

Task 3:  Fine tune your filtering

Now, back on your NewsFeed, you can do some further, more individualized filtering.  For example, I have a Close Friend who fills my NewsFeed with all kinds of political junk that he ‘Likes’ (thereby sending it to everyone on his Friend list who hasn’t done any filtering)!  I don’t want to demote him or, heaven forbid, Un-Friend him, but I don’t want the junk posts, either.  Find a post from that person in your NewsFeed.  Click the down arrow at the top right of the post and choose how much additional filtering you want to do for this specific person.  I now receive only ‘Important Updates’ from my political friend.  And it feels sooo much better!

That’s it.  Do those three things and I think you’ll find you can get through your Facebook work in 15 minutes or less.  And that’s a topic in itself.  Most of us login to Facebook and just react.  Maybe a better way to attack it (if we’re serious about using it to build our businesses) is to login with a plan.  We’ll do that in another post.

There is one thing that has nothing to do with Friend Lists and filtering I want to mention that will unclutter your NewsFeed as well.  There is a Facebook App called SocialCam.  Many people have it and it’s really rather insidious!  The default settings on the damn thing allow it to post a link to any video you ever watch on YouTube to all of your friends’ NewsFeeds!  I’m so sick of seeing what everyone is watching . . . and the few times the video seemed interesting, I couldn’t access it via the link without first getting the SocialCam app!

Please, go to your NewsFeed.  Click on ‘Apps’ in the left column and you’ll see your list of installed apps.  Look through it and if you see ‘SocialCam,’  open it up and change the setting that lets it post to all your Friends’ NewsFeeds!  Please!  And while you’re at it, why not review the apps in your list and eliminate any you aren’t using or don’t care about.  Remember, when you add an app, you’re usually giving that app all kinds of permissions to do things like post on your behalf.  That’s the kind of thing that can create tons of clutter!

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