Real Estate Virtual Assistant’s Tip of The Week – Bit.ly

April 30, 2010 By 1 Comment

Real Estate Virtual Assistant’s Tip of The Week – Bit.ly


Here’s a quick tip (and video tutorial) on how to use www.Bit.ly within your online marketing and social networking efforts. Bit.ly is a great resource that allows you to kill two birds with one stone. Here’s an example: You’ve just created a smashing blog post and want to take it to the (web) streets. However, the url of the blog post is crazy long and you need to both shorten it (to post it on Twitter) and customize it with a recognizable one-liner. This can be done via Bit.ly, plus they provide analytics, showing you how many clicks your newly created URL has had, where they originated from and which country.




Check back next week for another Real Estate Virtual Assistant Tip of the Week!

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Facebook’s New Social Plugins For Real Estate Blogs and Websites

April 29, 2010 By 2 Comments

Facebook’s New Social Plugins For Real Estate Blogs and Websites

The new social media plugins that Facebook introduced just one week ago have already taken their quest to become the central nexus of the world wide web to a whole new level! At a rate of more than 300 websites per hour (that’s over 50,000 websites in one week!) adding the new social plugins to their websites and blogs, along with Facebook taking over Google as the number one trafficked website, Real Estate agents should definitely take note and get on board today too!

New Facebook Social Plugins for Realtors Blogs

During last week’s Facebook’s F8 Developer’s Conference in San Francisco, the release of the new Open Graph API and social plugins, including the new “Like” and “Recommendation” plugins, were launched and took hold like wildfire. You can see the “Like” plugin at the bottom of this post – this allows visitors of your real estate website or blog to promote your content to their Facebook page with a single click (no sign in required!). This plugin can be easily incorporated into your site by using the html code provided at the bottom of this post.

After you have added this code into your real estate blog or various website pages, you can then also incorporate additional Facebook social plugins such as the “Activity Feed” and “Recommendations” plugins. By adding these plugins to your blog, you will allow your visitors to have a more engaging experience on your site, giving your website or blog a definite social aspect to it, plus increase the time they are on your site, which in turn will increase your blog ranking in the search engines.

Facebook Open Graph API

The Open Graph API is what allows all this to take place. By incorporating a relationship between websites and Facebook (much like Facebook Connect does), information is now shared all over the web, through these plugins. Some (including Government agencies) may find this to be too close for comfort and crossing lines with privacy control, however, if you don’t want to be social, then what are you doing on Facebook 7 hours a month (which is the average of the 400+ million users time spent)?!

There is also a more detailed analytics (called Insights) that Facebook has incorporated with the new Open Graph and social plugins. Described by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and newly appointed director of product (formally CEO of FriendFeed), Bret Taylor, Open Graph as being both useful to businesses and services. “On Facebook, users are connected to people they know, as well as public figures, services and products they like; Facebook’s new platform will allow websites and apps to share this information with each other.“

Ready to get even more social with your real estate blog? Here’s the direct link to Facebook’s new social plugins.

Here’s the html code to add the “Like” Plugin to your blog too:

Facebook Like Plugin Code

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Facebook and “Day Drinking”? How You Can Profit From This Too!

April 26, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Facebook and “Day Drinking”?



You’ve heard it all now, right?  How can you possibly profit from this and what does it have to do with Real Estate and social networking?   Stay tuned and I’ll reveal all.

I am driving home from a great social meeting that was held at the exclusive W South Beach hotel / condo residences tonight held by and for the Master Brokers Forum where three speakers presented their insight and knowledge (albeit brief and very superficial in content due to the limitation on time) about how important social networking and social media is paramount in today’s real estate market.  One of the speakers, Chris Smith, with the infamous Tech Savvy Agent crew (who you’ll be wise to become a fan of (still can’t get the new ”Like” bit neatly added to a sentence yet…) gave a short speach about the important of Facebook within today’s real estate business growth.

Master Brokers Forum 042610

During his talk, he asked the question, “Who’s seen this page before tonight”?  He was referring to Facebook’s Ad Creation Page.  Looking around, of the top 200 Miami brokers, managers and agents that were in attendance, I would have to say 90% of them put their hands up.   Wow!  Ok, so here’s the scenario that Chris gave:

Imagine you, a successful agent, decide to put an ad in the local newspaper and you place a call to the classified section of the paper.  The sales rep answer the phone and you inform her/him that you would like to place an ad, but you only want it to be shown to married couples over the age of 45, that have a bachelors degree, live within 10 miles of your market area and are boating and day drinking enthusiasts!  What do you think the sales rep would say to you?  “IMPOSSIBLE!” right?  Not with Facebook Ads!

Facebook Real Estate Ads

Yes, you can post an ad (with a full color photo, I might add!), that will ONLY be shown to a specific age group, a specific type of consumer, who lives in a specific area, that is interested in whatever past times you can think of, yes, even day drinking!  Personally, I didn’t know there was such a thing, but there really is!

So now, put this into perspective of your own real estate business and think about how specific you can get in your target market on the number one social networking place in the world, where people spend an average of 7 hours of their time a month!    And the even better part is you don’t pay unless your ad is clicked on!  So, if your first attempt doesn’t work, you’re no worse for the wear!  How many other ad opportunities are out there that can say that?!  Oh, and it’s even cheaper than Google’s pay per click ads – can it get any better?!

So, if you want to hone in on the Hatteras boating enthusiasts who like to indulge in a Mojito on a Sunday morning, get your Facebook Ads in place and get ready!   Here’s a link to get started:  http://www.facebook.com/advertising/

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Twitter’s Revenue Generation Begins Today

April 13, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Twitter’s Revenue Generation Begins Today

And so it begins. Finally! This afternoon, Twitter will begin their revenue generation through paid ads, similar to those you see on sites like Digg.

Online marketing for realtors - promoted tweets

Aptly named, “Promoted Tweets”, Twitter will now be home to search-result-induced-top-of-the-page ads – bringing the attention to their promotions versus getting lost within the milliseconds of updates of who’s eating what, where and why. Later on in the year the Promoted Tweets will also show up on platforms such as Tweetdeck, however, only one ad will be displayed at any given time, plus within the stream of tweets, not just on a search result.

I’m surprised how long they actually took to put together a paid program to gain revenue, but there must be good reason… the first advertising companies to take advantage of the Promoted Tweets will be Bravo, BestBuy, Starbucks (naturally!), and Virgin America.

Here’s how it will work – Let’s use Starbucks for an example – When a word is typed in to the search box, and that word is one that Starbucks has bought, the paid advertisement will show up at the top of the tweet results screen. The post will say they are promoted by the company in a smaller font size, and when hovered over with your mouse, the promotion line turns yellow (as seen in the example below).

Promoted Tweet by Starbucks

As with Digg paid ads, Tweeters will dictate the cost and length of time the ad appears under the advertisers paid words. Seems fair. Another way that the Promoted Tweets will be a way for companies to respond to both positive and negative tweets about their products and get star-power in their responses. Let’s say that McDonald’s comes out with a new veggie burger (did they already do that?!) and the response to it is really poor and Twitter gets filled with disgusted reviews and write-ups. McDonald’s can now (with their paid advertisement) come back and get center stage with their top of the page position with a response to the ad, giving away a coupon for a replacement Quarter Pounder with Cheese! You get the idea, right?

This will be great for Realtors all over the US to get some great exposure on another highly trafficked social networking site – keep your eye on this space for more information on your opportunity to dive into the the Promoted Tweets realm of online marketing for realtors!


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How Does Your (Google Search) Story Go? New Online Presence Listing Tool!

April 12, 2010 By 1 Comment

How Does Your (Google Search) Story Go?
New Online Presence Listing Tool!

Learned about this great little online presence listing tool from those ultra-tech savvy guys over at Tech Savvy Agent… What will they think of next?





When I first saw this on TSA’s website, my immediate thought was, “How can this be incorporated into a Real Estate agent’s business”? Imagine this: Take all your keyword phrases (either short or long tail will do just fine) and plug them into the Google Search Story creator and add this video to your listing presentation you give to your prospective sellers! We all know that 85% (personally, I think it’s more like 95%) of buyers are online looking for their new home(s), so doesn’t it just make sense to show your sellers that that’s where you are!? What a great, tech savvy way to do it too!


So, how does your story go? Go over to Google Search Story and create your new online presence listing tool and find out!

Filed Under: Social Networking Tagged With: , , ,
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