As home sellers and buyers become more and more Internet savvy, real estate agents and brokers look for ways to stay ahead of the pack and attract a bigger share of potential leads. And as we ALL know, Facebook use continues to grow worldwide, with the lion’s share of the users logging in to their account at least once per day. Combine the fact that there are more than 700 million Facebook users worldwide and that over 90% of all homeowners begin their home search on the Internet and anyone can see that Facebook is simply the place to go for networking of all kinds. Real estate marketing also now has a clever way of becoming a part of day-to-day Facebook social networking activities. 

Since searching for homes almost always begins on the Internet, it seems natural to give those shoppers (and those who have homes listed) a leg up by providing a searchable IDX MLS Home Search right on a real estate Facebook business page.  Leads, potential leads, friends, and anyone within a given circle of influence can hop on Facebook anytime and now have the capability of searching for homes. Because they are already on Facebook, agents are giving shoppers and buyers something extra that will assist them in either finding a home or providing a unique way to market a property. 

Because searching takes place right on Facebook, anyone looking at homes is already on a website they know and trust. The cool thing about this home search is that it contains advanced search features and a registration page. At any point, someone searching can click a button to register to get more information and the lead info will be sent right to the agent. This particular home search approach is not overly aggressive. When searching a specific home, a potential lead has the option to contact the agent at any time by leaving their name, email and phone number. They can also request information specifically on an individual property. The Facbook IDX MLS home search does not force a user to register, thus making it very friendly to the person searching.

Another great benefit to this relatively new feature on Facebook is that all of a company’s information and culture is right there! Because a lead or potential lead is already on a given Facebook page, they can read about an agent, see their photos, read what other clients and friends are saying and get a good idea of what the agency or brokerage is all about. It makes for a very warm and fuzzy environment where there is no pressure.

Dynamic Page Solutions offers this unique Facebook feature for clients and non-clients. Call 888-782-8184 for a special introductory offer.

I am consistently at a loss to explain why it seems that so many real estate agents and brokers don’t use Twitter. As a well-established and unique social networking platform, it is a very convenient method of sharing short messages and a superb way of sharing links, photos and videos.  Twitter took flight six years ago (can you believe it?) and it still seems to be looked down upon as a place where people spew their ever-changing location, breakfast entrees or endless political opinions. But when I see how great and helpful Twitter is to real estate marketing, it makes me wonder why more people don’t take advantage of it.

In questioning a general lack of Twitter love from agents and brokers, I’ve had a chance to do a bit of research and I do see the issues.  Real estate agents and brokers simply need to learn how to use Twitter to their advantage and they need to stick with it. The road in Twitterville is dotted with “dead birds”–abandoned accounts where an agent posted a few times, never to return. I have also seen accounts where agents posted a handful of their most glorious home listings and then migrated away. Perhaps as a baseline to this blog post, it should be understood that the only people that will receive your news on Twitter are those who “follow” you (or if someone searches a keyword that happens to be contained in your post). Just because you “tweet” something doesn’t mean a hill of beans if no one is following you. Therefore, building a group of followers should be a long term goal.  Here are four helpful tips for fledgling tweeters in the real estate industry.

Take Flight-Anyone who has used Twitter for any amount of time knows that you have to just keep flyin’. Building your audience “nest” doesn’t happen overnight, no matter what any automated program promises you. The most important thing to remember on Twitter is to be interactive. If you only post links to your listings and nothing else, it sends the message to others that you’re just going through the motions and you don’t have much of value to offer. A strong account engages with and mentions various followers, includes news, trivia, photos, videos and industry information and contains links to a variety of sources. Not only is that the goal of a successful Twitter channel, it’s also the hallmark of a great person or business to follow.

Go Link-Twitter is great for links. But do followers really want to see the same link over and over again? Instead of only linking to the front page of your website–link to blog posts, individual website pages, YouTube videos, industry news stories, etc.  That will encourage Twitter followers to return to you as a dependable source of a variety of information.

Get Engaged-The best way to gain more followers is to engage with them. “Retweet” (RT) others’ news when you think the news will also be of interest to your followers. Mention your followers by name and suggest new “tweeters” to your current followers by adding ‘#FF’ at the end of your post. Go to established Twitter accounts that you know and enjoy. See those that they are following to find others with similar interests. You can also search Twitter for any kind of subject (city, community, neighborhood etc,), which will also help agents hone in on potential homebuyer leads.

Hash It Out-Placing a hash tag (#) in front of any subject (#PhoenixHomes, #HomesForSale, #RealEstate, #WoodbridgeCommunity, etc.) in your tweet will allow others to find your posts by those given subjects. Routinely using a hash tag for a community or neighborhood name where you are selling is also an easy way to assert your selling savvy and give potential leads an easy way for to find you.

You can follow Dynamic Page Solutions on Twitter at @DynamicPS.

When I heard a few months ago that Facebook was implementing some sweeping changes, I could nearly hear the collective “groan” from the some of those in the real estate industry. Probably because the changes represented more time learning something new in social marketing. The good news is, I had a chance to review all the new changes and I was thrilled with what I saw. It seems that Facebook has really stepped up to the plate and given real estate agents and brokers a way to really “brand” themselves and incorporated some great new features, too.

I’ve found five features that will help those in the real estate industry to further support their marketing endeavors and assist them in supporting their own real estate website. So why is this important? Entering the social networking conversation in a valuable way as a business is different than posting what you just ate for breakfast on your personal Facebook page. Let’s review my top five favorite changes on Facebook and how those of us in the real estate industry can best take advantage of those new opportunities.

1. The Cover Photo-Most compelling from a marketing and appeal standpoint is the new cover photo.  It is designed as a Facebook “welcome mat” to tell the story of an agent’s business, what they do and how they do it. This is a very unique chance for an agent to make a visual statement. As a Facebook best practice, the cover photo is not supposed to include a website address, contact information or arrows that point to a chance to ‘Like’. Rather, an agent can impart humor, professionalism,  sales results or convey the spirit of how they conduct their business.

2. The Power of the ‘About’ Box-The About box will now be more central and less of an afterthought because of where it has been positioned on the page in a more visible area. This should now contain a valuable summary about the business as well as links. Links can include all the social networking sites where the business is active, plus the official website. With its new position on the Facebook page, users will rely on the About box to see the summary of a business in a condensed way. For an agent or broker, it will be important to include a link back to your own website and/or blog. By listing your social networking sites and web address all in one place, visitors won’t have to skip all over your page trying to figure out how to find more information about you or where else they can join you in social conversations.

3.  The Pin Feature-Another great bonus that has been added is the ‘Pin’ feature that allows you to stick an individual post to the top of your timeline. This is perfect for agents who have had a popular blog post, maybe have news that has gone viral, a huge success story or a coveted home listing. By pinning a particular story to the top a business timeline, it will be the top story that visitors see when they come to your page.  In a similar fashion, businesses can now ‘highlight’ specific posts. Highlighting will a specific post and visually spread that post across the full width of your page. You could have a post pinned to the top of your timeline and just underneath that, have another post that is highlighted. In theory, let’s say a lead visits your page and sees a pinned post offering a free homebuyer’s tips seminar that you will be giving next week, followed by a highlighted post showing an exceptional new listing that you just acquired. Those two posts back to back convey something of value to visitor (or potential lead) and assert your expertise in your field.  (Note:  it is best practice not to post your new listings over and over. Rather, use your leverage on Facebook to strategically market select listings with compelling photos.) Give your visitors a well-rounded Facebook experience by posting a wide variety of things: photos, tips, the occasional new listing, information on seminars or webinars, surveys, compelling questions that provoke conversations, etc.

4.  Direct Messaging Feature-In the past, if someone were to follow your business page, they were unable to converse with you directly without posting right on your wall. This sometimes resulted in a diluted message on your Facebook business page or posts that were of little or no interest to others. Now, if others want to post on your business page, there are a few options that are being offered. If someone wishes to reach you directly, you can enable a business page to receive private messages. This is huge because it allows others to keep private or less important matters under wraps instead of letting it all hang out on your Facebook business page.  As best practice, it is always a good idea to not post any personal information about your clients, your home sale deals or any type of sensitive details which could jeopardize your position in a sale.

5.  Visbility of Apps-The location of specific apps have now migrated from the left hand column of the Facebook page to underneath the right hand side of the cover photo. What is so appealing about this is that app icons are now more visible and visually appealing. An agent can showcase their YouTube videos, invite others to events, include links to training courses, offer e-books and so much more.

Navigating a wide range of Facebook changes can sometimes be frustrating, but as an agent or broker, I feel that there are many ways to take advantage of these new changes. I would also offer the suggestion that if you haven’t tried it before, run a Facebook ad, if even for just a week. With Facebook ads, it is a great way to showcase your new page to your existing clients and fans and attract new leads. Ads can be targeted (and even micro-targeted by interests) to those who already follow you (as a way to welcome back visitors that haven’t stopped by your page in awhile) or to attract new fans that have specific real estate-related interests.  Just trying a Facebook ad for a few days will re-invigorate your page.

This is going to be a mostly macro view of search engine optimization with the hopes of helping real estate agents that are interested gain a good understanding of what SEO is and why it’s more important now than ever before to be successful in the real estate game.

There are billions of searches being performed across search engines every day and we have to really embrace the fact that the web is integrated into our daily lives and that it’s the best platform to reach the widest audience possible to sell our product or brand.

Some of the topics that I’m going to cover include onsite and offsite optimization for higher rankings for keywords that can result in transactions. I’m also going to go into the importance of localized search engine optimization which is a huge vertical that is relatively untapped but is going to become increasingly competitive as mobile overtakes traditional search. Lastly, I’m going to talk about Google+ for Business as there is really some exciting stuff going on with this and a few other overlooked opportunities for SEO’ing your web presence.

What is SEO? - SEO is literally an acronym for search engine optimization which is the organized attempt to get web pages to rank highly across search engines. I’m going to reference Google a lot because frankly, they have most of the market share when it comes to search because their search engine is far more sophisticated that Bing or Yahoo or any of the much smaller search engines. Gaming the system or exploiting weaknesses in Google’s algorithms has been the goal of search marketers from the beginning, but there really is a right way and a wrong way to go about making the most of your potential on Google.

Google’s webmaster guidelines are quite plain as far as telling the web community to create good, organized, searchable web pages with good, quality content.  Going outside of these guidelines and trying to build your web presence from the roof down is the wrong way to go and unfortunately a lot of people get waylaid by cheap and easy as an approach to web marketing. This is a poor long term strategy since Google is constantly updating its algorithms to make sure their users that are looking for products or answers have a good experience. When attempting to rank for keywords, you really need to use the approach of creating relevancy for keywords that you’re targeting so Google can award your pages with rankings.

Recap: Search engine optimization, in part, is trying to create relevancy on pages for critical keywords. It’s also making sure that the search engines can easily and quickly determine what a page is about through an optimized tagging of the page or link signals. This gets into site architecture which many search marketers and social media enthusiasts ignore because it’s the really tough stuff that requires a deep understanding of how pages interrelate. Typically the biggest issues are page titles and the biggest mistakes that people make with them are duplicating page titles because you dilute the strength of important keywords.

Click thru Rate = Rank Matters-Something to take note of is that there is a tremendous difference in the click through rate (click through rate is the percentage of clicks on a result for a search term) between result number one on a search engine results page and every other result following. It drops significantly after that so the question becomes how do people rank for search terms, especially in real estate, where the perceived “big money” keywords are ultra competitive. I’ll get to that solution in a minute.

How do I Rank for Keywords – Ranking is determined by relevancy and a bunch of other factors that the search engines take into account such as an optimized website, and a SEO strategy which really encompasses both offsite and onsite factors. They are both quite critical and being aggressive in your approach can make a tremendous difference in real estate simply because most real estate agents are eons behind the curve because they don’t take it seriously. Here is your opportunity to gain dominance over even your well established competition by taking control of your online marketing and using real estate technology that’s progressive enough to make the most of onsite ranking factors. Commitment and consistency is a key component for success in almost anything that you take on and web marketing is no different. I understand that many real estate agents have a lot on their plates but strong web presence is not something you should put on the back burner. Ranking is not going to get easier; it’s going to get harder. In fact top level domains such as .com, .net, .org are being created every day, I just checked this morning and there are 167,632 new domains registered today!

Optimized Websites- I really want to go over value of content on a web page and stress the importance of original, unique content as one of the most devastating algorithm updates Google has ever released is highly focused on eliminating useless pages from the index (the index is essentially all the pages that Google has record of in their databases). For the longest time, content, however minimal, was somewhat, to very valuable so people would use software that would take a well written or not so well written article and replace much of the content with synonyms or worse, create word soup to try to get traffic to their website. Much of the time, the site simply housed advertisements so the webmaster was gaming the system to make easy money on clicks. The problem with this is that it was getting increasingly frustrating for Google’s users, you and me, to find good results for searches, so Google took some pretty drastic measures to clean up the index. So now, making sure that all of your important pages have quality articles that are themed around what the page is optimized for (page titles, meta data) is super important. This means no copy and paste or using content libraries that your real estate website company provides to fill out your pages. You need to make sure the content that you do have is unique to each page and not repeated on other pages, this is really the worst thing that you can do for yourself.

Lots of keywords are important but the thing to keep in mind is that lots of keywords doesn’t mean use the same keyword or phrase repeated all over the page, you can come up with derivatives of the keyword, I’ll use the example “Austin homes for sale”, you can also state this as Austin Houses for sale or Properties in Austin TX or real estate for sale in Austin or MLS listings for Austin. There are a lot of different ways to express the same keyword.

Moreover, you can do this across pages by breaking the market into many niches of real estate such as Austin gated homes and on that page, (of course supported by MLS listings that match that property feature such as what our technology provides), Austin gated community property, gated real estate in Austin TX, etc. This sounds like a tremendous amount of work and it is, but we have the big picture completely under control and see fantastic results in markets using our automated real estate technology that does all of this for you. You simply choose your market and desired niches.

Aggressive Offsite SEO Strategy- Really, today, you have to approach marketing real estate with an overall strategy and that definitely includes social media, the usual channels that we’ve all heard of but what you may not realize is that having powerful social media profiles can directly impact your ability to rank for your websites keywords. Google+ is being pushed very aggressively right now by Google. There’s some really exciting stuff being done and right now, if you create a profile and a business page there’s some huge opportunity to get noticed in a good way and quite easily for once. This is their baby so you can bet they are going to go all out promoting it and making sure that people adopt it and new algorithm changes have a lot of people in the SEO world predicting that the social graph is going to become a highly significant ranking factor. If the links to your website don’t show a blip on the social graph, it’s going to look kind of funny to Google especially if you’re paying to get a bunch of low quality links pointed to your site.

Create a YouTube Channel and post on it; we have an Animoto tutorial on our real estate marketing training page that goes over how to use this easy program to create videos simply from pictures. Claim your company profile on Google Places or if you’re an individual and you have a dedicated address to use, list yourself.  Andy Rubin, Senior Vice President of Mobile at Google posted recently that 850,000 Android devices are being activated every day. That’s staggering! Since mobile search results are based heavily on GPS location, you’d better think about using some of the free resources out there to get your NAP, (name, address and phone number) sorted out and standardized. Fill those profiles out 100%, not just the bare minimum, there’s huge opportunity there if you just use it! Start posting pictures anywhere and everywhere and make sure to tag them appropriately. A good strategy is to take pictures in and around the area you want to sell or list homes, tag them with the community name and if your picture is compelling, you may get traffic from your picture that someone finds on Google images while researching the area for relocation.

Be Realistic- Ranking takes time, even when going very aggressive, don’t expect a flood of traffic – search engines move at their own rate, typically we tell clients to wait at least six months before expecting to see a difference in web traffic. Going overboard and buying a lot of low quality links to your site can get you noticed in a bad way so whether stopping or starting your marketing efforts keep in mind that search engines can see the trend. 1000 low quality links overnight, you can bet that will get noticed and your ranking might go on a vacation down South. Use a good real estate website provider that offers indexable IDX, write good content both onsite and off, use social media intelligently and consistently and localize your web presence.

One of the biggest challenges we have faced as a company is getting people to talk about us. The reason is always the same. People don’t want their competitors to know their secret which of course is our indexable IDX MLS technology. When clients get excited about the results, they will share their enthusiasm in glowing terms with one of our sales or customer service reps but it stops there. We also have clients ask that we white label our technology so that no one can trace their success back to Dynamic Page Solutions. So you can see that it becomes a real challenge to promote our business through word of mouth…or in the later case, even through branding…so we have to do it ourselves so pardon the blatant self promotion in this post.

While we are preferred vendors with Prudential Corporate and are considering preferred vendor status with other franchises, everybody in the industry knows that preferred status is almost exclusively a paid ‘privilege’. We do have one fast growing, up and coming International real estate franchise that actually promotes the use of our real estate websites heavily to their franchisees.  This is solely based upon the actual performance of the technology, it’s not a relationship we pay to be in. We’re promoted because the technology works and everybody that is successful in their corporate structure gets a piece of the pie. Now if you received a piece of your colleague’s success, wouldn’t you want them to use the best possible real estate IDX website to get homebuyer leads?

I’d like to share one fo the more colorful and humorous responses we have received from our awesome but secretive clients – note that this client is willing to promote us out of state!

“Hey Ms. Jennifer, Ms. Leeann & Ms. Dababneh, & the big boss man-

S**t Hot!!!  Le Fish(ssss) is on the way! Please be on the lookout!!!!!   Ms. Westlake & friends, I shipped your gift to the address below-

You share now Ms. Jennifer, plenty for all! ( sharing is caring!!!!!  )

I’ll try and get you guys & girls some out of state clients. ( realtors) hey… why don’t you send me
A list of the states that you play ball in-  In ending, THANK YOU BIG for your help & promptness!!!!!

S**t Hot! Site well done!!!!  A+++++++

Tons of Salmon are coming your way… or at least enough for 3 girls to enjoy.”

Indeed, sharing is caring and we thank you for the kind words. To quote Douglas Adams, the very memorable author of

‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’

Thanks for All the Fish

“So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.”