Keeping up with new technology is a challenge even for those of us whose jobs rely on it. I find it helpful to scour several of my favorite industry leading blog sites to hear the word on the street about the latest and greatest and to generally get opinions from professionals in closely related fields. I ran across a very enlightening blog post written by Joe Hall of 22 Media LLC and wanted to share some of the information that I thought might be helpful to real estate marketing. Some of the suggestions can have a measurable impact on how search engines qualify media signals from satellite sites like Google+ Facebook, a WordPress blog and your Twitter profile.
When posting blogs or engaging in online media like Google+, Facebook or Twitter it’s hard to stand out from the crowd and going “viral” in a professional capacity is the equivalent of climbing Mt. Everest. A more attainable goal is to get customers to respond with likes, shares, thumbs up’s or +1’s. Making your conversation or statements interesting is essential to facilitate this.
Facebook is now using an internal algorithm known as Edgerank which determines where a post appears in the feed of anyone that has liked your page. Getting an edge on Edgerank is determined by how much a user interacts with your page – so if your Fans aren’t engaging with your page, your posts will likely never be seen by the Fan. Photos are the root of most interaction surpassing even video, so in the case of Facebook, a picture truly is worth a thousand words. My favorite resource for photos is stock.xchng.com. Once you create an account, you can gain access to high quality photos – many are free – but do fall under a terms of service agreement.
Another way to catch attention is the use of an automated GIF which I’m trying for the very first time in this blog post. It’s surprisingly easy to use and I hope you are intrigued – the danger with animation is annoyance – so I picked a slow motion one. Even though this image has nothing to do with real estate websites, the idea is that someone might find it of interest and forward, share or retweet and getting 
your message and brand out there is the goal.
When you do use content, try to pose open ended questions. People are opinionated by nature and enjoy sharing their point of view so don’t be afraid to have a provocative or opposing stance on an issue. Simply asking for people to spread the word with statements like Please Re-Post or Share may seem awkward to you, as it is for me, but getting some action to take place on your media platform of choice is the point, so save the humble pie for Thanksgiving and please, if you’ve found this information useful, spread the word.
Fantastic, practical advice that we can ALL use, no matter the profession or skill level. And I agree, ASKING over and over again is the most awkward part for so many of us but probably the most important!
Hey Joanne – I am getting over it as you see.
Just beginning my social media campaign and pictures are certainly on top of the list for my blogs.
Everybody like pictures – you should check out the photo site I referenced in the blog. They have high quality pictures and tons of them to choose from.
Love the article. I have visited the site and signed up. Already posted my photo this morning on FB, LI and Twitter.
Thank you for the info!
That’s great Kristen – social signals are proving to be very significant to ranking.
I like the idea of pictures, and I am hearing a lot lately of the power of pictures. I am trying to think of a campaign that we can do regularly, with pictures, that has a theme. Something like, “where in st. louis am i” but not that one because someone already uses it.
I like the idea of a campaign Adam – something different from what others are doing.
cool guidelines, hope you may also come up in choosing the right keywords for real state blogs guidelines. Thanks a lot!
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