Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category

5 Facebook Tips you should follow

Saturday, February 6th, 2010

5 Quick Facebook Tips you should follow

1. Post good content daily. This is the No.1 one thing that I see agents NOT doing. They spend time calling or e-mailing clients, but they drop the ball on their Facebook page. You should be posting two to three times a day. A good formula for Realtors on Facebook is: two parts personal and one part business.

2. Have a plan and stick to it. Make a list of the top 10 sites you like to visit — include news sites, recreational sites (gardening, travel, etc.), and, of course, your Web site or blog. Visit this list daily. This makes it very easy for you to link to interesting stories and post good and relevant content daily.

3. Do it yourself. As a Realtor you can’t hire out someone to manage your Facebook account for you. You have to make time — every morning and every evening — to manage your account. You can, however, hire someone to enhance your page and make custom tabs with HTML.

4. Comment on what others post. This is KEY! It is not all about YOU! Take five minutes out of your Facebook time each day to comment on what some of your friends or fans have said.

5. Be engaging. Ask questions, post photos, be a part of the conversation. Remember: Facebook is like the ultimate dinner party. At a dinner party you wouldn’t sit in the corner and not talk to anyone right? Nor would you JUST talk about real estate. By Katie Lance

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The Power of Web IM

Thursday, February 4th, 2010

The Power of website IM

Reading Inman News today I glanced over an article about Instant messaging. (http://www.inman.com/opinion/letter-to-editor/2010/02/3/the-power-im)
Barrett Powell makes a really strong point here that I feel warrants a commentary on my part. I am a strong advocate for bringing true value to my clients businesses.
Whether that be through creating a solid brand or even a quick marketing tip that helps you utilize a free tool or idea in your business.

People are social creatures. Let’s face it, the great majority of us love to interact with others.

Am I the only one who wants to pull my hair out whenever I pick up the phone to call my service provider and it takes 5 minutes of navigating through an endless cue of automated choices just to get someone on the line? I think not.

Your website should be a tool for you to generate leads. End of story. It is your 24 hour a day, 7 day a week sales executive. Imagine not only being able to get information from people who sign up on your site, but making a chat option available to interact with them live. I think it’s brilliant and it works. 58% of visitors on average will gravitate towards using chat before emailing. Perhaps it’s because we’ve become instant gratification based? Perhaps our time is so valuable that we want answers now so we can move on to the next thing? Take your pick. Bottom line is the facts are the facts. Let’s pay attention to modern human behavior for a change and adjust our marketing plans accordingly.

Put yourself in your web visitors shoes. Your users want to get in touch with you now, not tomorrow. Where you miss an opportunity, another professional will take the initiative. Provide them with that option. It allows you an opportunity to increase your value to that potential client and make a great first impression. A great first impression can lead to a sale, and more importantly a fantastic relationship. We all know that fantastic business relationships equal referrals right?

So, Website online chat? SOLD.

YOU can IM ME with any questions about integrating a chat option into your current website. My AIM/gTalk is tschuettdesigns.

I hope you found this useful. Until next time.

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Social Media as a Sales Tool

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009

It really is all about opportunity and looking for that new approach to reaching your customers. Below is a great article about incorporating social media into your game plan. With this ever evolving world of business and technology staying on top of the new tools is a full time job.

Turn Conversations Into Sales
People are talking about your brand online–find them and make them your customers.
Marshall Sponder: Web Metrics Guru

Social media is all about having conversations, while search marketing is about identifying and taking action on what customers already want or need. So, if you can mine that data from social media, why not use it to build search campaigns (paid and organic) and include copy on web pages that will foster conversations?

Conventional keyword tools are a good place to start finding conversations. One good place to look for keywords is in your own product pages. Google’s keyword tool is good at picking phrases from any page, but it doesn’t help with social media. A keyword phase is not a conversation–it’s the words around a keyword that tell the most about what someone wants, not the keyword itself. Search engines can, however, extract terms that are good ways to find conversations between your potential customers. The key is to figure out where these conversations are happening and become part of them. Techrigy SM2 is an extremely powerful social media monitoring tool that can help you do just that.

Techrigy’s free account will allow you to the first 1,000 results on a given day pertaining to your brand. Based on those results, you can see which social media platforms you should focus on: blogs, message boards, photo sharing sites like Flickr or social networks like Facebook or MySpace. You can also see how often your brand shows up on Twitter, but keep in mind that Tweets are much easier for users to generate than blog posts. The software will also mine demographic information, including the physical location of people who are talking about your brand and, based on semantic breakdown, educated guesses about their age and sex.

One way to use this information is to go after individuals who express positive opinions about your brand by reaching them on Twitter, in blog comments and in e-mails, when appropriate. You can also work on sending different e-mails to women and men, and determine when to send them. For instance, Techirgy might tell you that sending out an e-mail on Thursday night or Friday is optimal, especially around mid-month. You’ll need to examine the data for more insight, but it’s clear that good timing is part of the equation. And the best-case scenario: You can combine all this data to craft the perfect offer at the right time, sent to people who already like what you’re selling–so much so that they take time to talk about it online.

Search engines can be a good starting point for identifying keywords around which conversations revolve, but social media needs another type of approach that focuses on conversations. Those conversations might not lead to customers right away, but they can foster brand loyalty and, eventually, sales.

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