The new real estate widget allows MRED members to share real estate listing domains on Facebook, Twitter and other supported social media sites. The widget also enables the creation of embedded links to connect listings to real estate blogs, Facebook business pages, and real estate websites. According to MRED, since the first of the year the widget has generated 175,000 web hits from potential clients in 387 Illinois cities, all 50 states and 101 countries worldwide.

Realtors and real estate brokers that want to quickly expand their social medial reach might check with their local MLS provider to see whether a similar widget is available in their area. However, there’s no need to wait on your local MLS provider to tap the full power of social media. Properties Online has developed powerful social media widgets that allow real estate agents and brokers to expand into social media immediately. Easy to use, real estate agents can expect quick results when they add our Facebook app and Twitter widget to their real estate listing services on Properties Online.

• Our Facebook app makes it easy to post all your listings to your Facebook business page. Our Facebook app automatically creates links from Facebook postings to your website or listing domains and updates your Facebook tab whenever listings are updated. One-click publishing makes it easy to publish new listings to your wall.
• Our Twitter widget makes it easy for you to have a “conversation” with clients. Twitter is an excellent real estate tool for answering client questions and notifying them of new listings.

Data Sharing Widgets Expand Realtors’ Social Media Reach is a post from: Properties Online Blog

In an analysis of actual Twitter usage posted to his blog, Zarrella found that broadcast tweets generated a higher re-tweet rate than conversation tweets. Zarrella equated higher re-tweet rates with superior ability to spread information and disseminate marketing messages. In his study, Zarrella discovered two interesting correlations that real estate agents should be considered Twitter Best Practices:

1. Tweets that contain links have a noticeably higher re-tweet rate. Zarrella found that Twitter feeds with a 60% to 80% link percentage resulted in the highest re-tweet rates.
2. Tweets that generate few replies also enjoy high re-tweet rates. Zarrella discovered that Twitter feeds with 0% to 10% reply rates enjoyed the highest re-tweet percentages.

Zarrella’s take-away: Broadcasting interesting and information-rich content is a more effective use of Twitter than conversation.

Twitter “conversations” appear to be a fad that is nearing the end of its 15 minutes of fame as Americans tire of the glut of trivial tweets that clog Twitter feeds. The ascendency of far more versatile smartphones as the nation’s go-to communication device has ensured the eventual demise of Twitter as a conversation medium. However, Twitter’s broadcast value still makes it an effective real estate tool. Sending out 2 to 3 information-rich tweets per day can help you build your brand and expand your client base.

For information on how Properties Online can help you optimize the use of social media to grow your real estate business, visit our website.

Twitter Best Practices for Real Estate Agents is a post from: Properties Online Blog

If your like most real estate professional, you like the idea of social networking but finding the time can be daunting. When it comes to social networking, remember quality is better than quantity. You don’t have to spend all day on facebook or twitter to be a good social marketer. Here is a fabulous infograph brought to you by KissMetrics that highlights a few key concepts when it comes to social media. This graph will tell you when to post and how often. Here are the highlights:

• “The best time to tweet is 5PM ET”
• “1 to 4 tweets per hour is ideal”
• “The best days to tweet are midweek and on the weekends”
• “80% of the US population is in the Central and East time zones”

Are you using HootSuite? Armed with this information and hootsuite,  you can now schedule your tweets and facebook posts to go out during the times you are most likely to get seen, liked or retweeted.

View a larger version

Best time for Real Estate Professionals to Social Network is a post from: Properties Online Blog

Many of us were quite suspicious about social media at first, taking a “wait and see” approach, unwilling to invest the time and work needed to participate in social media. But it’s becoming very clear that social media is here to stay, and that not participating in social media is quite costly in terms of lost business opportunities. Here are a few tips to help you leverage social media to promote your real estate business.

Accept That You Need To Be There

The first step is accepting that you need to have a social media presence – that social media should be part of your marketing mix and is just as important as email marketing or printed brochures. The main reason you should be there is that a big part of your audience is there – more and more people are using social media, and many are using the Internet, including social media, during their search for a home.

Choose Your Social Media Channels

There are lots of ways to connect and interact with prospects, including a blog, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Foursquare and more. But you don’t have to be everywhere. We think that a blog and a Facebook page are a must. All the rest are optional, and you can experiment with them as you go along and see if they work for you.

Why You Need a Blog

A blog is great for helping your search engine rankings, especially if you make sure you optimize your blog posts for search engines – figure out your main keywords, the words that people will use to find your agent site, and sprinkle them throughout your blog posts, but don’t overdo it! Always make sure your text reads naturally. In addition to being great for SEO, a blog is also a wonderful way to build your brand, show your expertise and establish credibility.

Why We Love Facebook

Facebook is such a rich social network, no wonder people are putting up with its less-than-stellar customer service.  You can create a personal Facebook portfolio, or start a Facebook page for your business. In either case, you can fill your Facebook page with notes, photos, videos, comments, and lots more – there are tons of Facebook apps that make this platform an amazing tool for showcasing your expertise and for interacting with others.

Do it Gradually

Social media can be overwhelming at first. Our advice is to enter this space gradually, starting with just one channel, and adding more channels to the mix only after you have mastered the previous social media channel.

Manage Your Time Wisely

Our last tip is perhaps the most important one. Social media can be a huge time suck – it’s very easy to spend hours writing your blog, adding plugins and tweaking with your blog’s theme, and the same is true for Facebook.  But you have a business to run after all, so make sure that you limit the time you spend on social media activities each day. We recommend spending no more than an hour each day doing social media activities.

Leveraging Social Media to Help Your Real Estate Business is a post from: Properties Online Blog

Foursquare

Foursquare is a mobile social network that allows users to share their location with friends by “checking in” on their mobile device when they go into a location such as a restaurant. Foursquare is also a game, enabling users to earn points and badges. Foursquare is fun for users, and good for businesses, many of whom adopt it as part of their customer loyalty program. Foursquare can be a great tool for real estate agents because of its location-based focus.

KWKLY

KWKLY provides homebuyers an easy way to get rich property information straight from the MLS to their web enabled mobile phone. Kwkly  connects agents with buyers, delivering buyers the property info along with participating agents’  contact info. It can be a great lead gen tool for agents.

TweetDeck

TweetDeck is a Twitter app that enables users to access and use Twitter from their mobile devices. It’s ideal for agents, becuase agents are always on the go and need to be able to access Twitter from a mobile device. TweetDeck also has a Facebook integration that enables users to access and use Facebook from their mobile phone.

Zillow

Zillow is one of the largest real estate websites in the US. It offers users free real estate information.  Agents have many ways to promote their business on this site, including adding their listings, advertising, and being active and helpful on the Zillow community. Responding to the mobile revolution, Zillow offers free mobile apps to its users, enabling them to access real estate information from their mobile devices.

Yelp

Yelp is an online community that enables users to rate local businesses, including real estate agents. Every business owner can set up a free Yelp account to post offers, photos and to message their customers. Agents can also advertise on Yelp. Yelp has responded to the mobile revolution by creating mobile sites and apps for mobile Web users, including http://m.yelp.com for cell phones, Yelp for iPhone, Yelp for BlackBerry, Yelp for Palm Pre, and Yelp for Android.

Our Top Picks for Mobile Apps in 2010 is a post from: Properties Online Blog

So you have a blog, a Facebook page and a Twitter account. Great! You’re already doing better than the majority of agents, who have yet to leverage the power of social media to promote their real estate business. But now that you’re actively participating in social media, you should keep in mind that there’s a reason it’s called “social” media – you should be social! Even if in real life you’re an introvert and don’t particularly enjoy socializing, you should view social media as your opportunity to develop an alter ego and be much more social than you are in real life. Here are a few tips on how to be social.

Be Active

A blog, or a Twitter account that never gets updated could actually hurt your brand. If you have social media accounts, be social by being active on them and updating them frequently. Social media is not the place to be shy or quiet! Get yourself out there and TALK.

Listen to Others, then Respond

Another golden rule of being social that applies both to real life and to social media: listen to what others have to say – truly listen – then respond. To be social, it’s not enough to talk and spread your own agenda and ideas. You need to have real conversations with others.

Be Helpful

You could call it Karma, or you could call it “tit for tat,” but whatever you call it, it works. If you help others in social media, linking to them from your blog, retweeting their tweets on Twitter, sharing their facebook postings with your own network, in many cases (although not always) it will come back to you in the form of others promoting YOUR content. It’s a win-win, really, so be generous.

Be Polite

We’ve mentioned it before – one of the golden rules of social media is that you must respect others and treat them the way you would want to be treated. Sounds familiar? Yes it does, because this golden rule applies outside of social media too! The most important thing to remember is that even though you’re interacting via a computer screen, you are talking with real people who have very real emotions and reactions. Be mindful and respectful of that.

How to Be Social is a post from: Properties Online Blog

Twitter is a fascinating phenomenon. When it just started, many were wondering, “What’s the appeal?” You’re basically limited to posting VERY short messages (140 characters including spaces is NOT a lot!) and it’s not as rich as Facebook – you can only post text, although there are tools that enable posting richer media such as photos to Twitter.

Twitter’s Power: Its Simplicity

But Twitter has become a hugely popular social media service, and people LOVE it. We think that the ultra-short messages are actually part of the appeal – people today have a very short attention span, especially on the Internet, and the way Twitter is built is just perfect for that. It’s a constant stream of information and messages, and you just dip in and out of the Twitter stream throughout your day, posting short updates and responding to tweets made by others.

In other words, Twitter’s power is in its simplicity. While other social media channels are rich and complex, Twitter is such a bare bone service , that it really brings the focus into the content of what people are saying – there are no annoying apps or silly games like you have in Facebook, for example.

Following People

Another big advantage of Twitter over other social networks is how easy it is to find and follow new people on Twitter. There are several tools available to find new people to follow based on their bio, keywords they use in their tweets, and there are also thousands of Twitter Lists, created by users, that make it very easy to follow people in a particular space. Not everyone you follow will follow you back, but you can periodically clean out your account from people who haven’t followed you back using tools such as buzzom.com.

Finding Local People

As an agent, it’s important to you to find people on Twitter who are from your own city. This is easy with Twitter advanced Search – you can search for tweets from a specific location, mentioning specific keywords, and you can also subscribe to this search and get daily results into your inbox.

Will Twitter Last?

While most in the social media space are fairly certain that Facebook is here to stay, some feel less comfortable with investing a lot of time into Twitter, saying that they’re not sure Twitter will still be here 5 years from now. Perhaps, but it’s here now, and can be very useful to agents.  Just make sure you don’t spend more than 10-15 minutes per day on Twitter – that’s all it takes to create a vibrant, effective Twitter account. Give it 6 months, and if you decide that Twitter is not working for you after all,  then just delete your account – at least you’ll know you gave it a try.

Find Us On Twitter!

Here’s our own Twitter account – would love to have you follow us!

Real Inventive on Twitter

Why Twitter? is a post from: Properties Online Blog

Got your own agent website? Good! But now you need to make your website interesting to users. People these days expect much more from their Internet experience than they used to expect just a few years ago. These days, a website needs to be fresh, fun, interesting, and – above all – interactive. Here are a few free tools you can use to provide Internet users with what they’re looking for. They will reward you by staying longer on your site, and – hopefully – by referring friends and by becoming your clients.

ActiveRain

ActiveRain.com is a large real estate network that allows agents to blog. A blog is a wonderful way to establish yourself as an expert, so whether you blog on ActiveRain or or any other blogging platform, make sure to blog regularly (once a week is good) and to share your thoughts and observations with clients.

PhotoSynth

Photosynth.net takes your photos, mashes them together and recreates a 3D scene out of them that anyone can view and move around in.  It’s a wonderful tool for real estate agents and a great way to showcase an area, a neighborhood or a home.

Twitter

Twitter.com enables you to send out short messages with updates. It’s fun and interactive, and you can update it as often or as seldom as you’d like. One of the best things about Twitter is that you can reach out to people in your area and follow them. You can also set up regular searches for your local area and respond to questions of people who are looking for a home. Being helpful is always a good idea and will help you establish yourself as an expert.

Facebook

Facebook.com is a much richer social platform than Twitter. It enables you to post longer messages, notes, pictures, videos and more. You can create a personal profile on Facebook, or you can create a page for your business.

Flickr

Flickr.com lets you upload photos and share them. Needless to say, it’s an ideal tool for an agent. You can add comments for each photo, and others can make comments on them too.

AgentWidgets

AgentWidgets.com offers free Web widgets for the real estate professional. Adding widgets to your site or blog is a great way to keep users engaged and to make the site more fun and interactive.

Google Analytics

Unlike the previous tools which are interactive, this tool is meant for your own internal use and is a great way to monitor your website traffic, see which pages and keywords are getting the most traffic, and fine-tune your online efforts accordingly.

Overwhelmed? Don’t be! Start with just one of these tools, focus on it, and after a few weeks, once you’re comfortable using it, move on to the next.

Free Internet Tools for Agents is a post from: Properties Online Blog

Social media works very well for real estate marketing, because it’s natural. You join a social network such as, say, Twitter, and you start posting useful information and following relevant people.

In just a few months, you can build yourself an impressive network of online friends, who are very loyal to you, because they have come to see you as a good source of relevant, reliable real estate information.

But where is the connection between social networking and your ListingDomains single property website? Simple. Each of our property websites comes with a built-in posting tool that enables you to quickly and effortlessly add your website to your favorite social network.

So, for example, if you’ve been active on Facebook and have a couple hundred friends there, you can post each single property website to your Facebook profile to let people know about it. Now they can spread the word around about your new listing.

But it gets even better – our social networking tool allows your website visitors to also add your website to their own social networks, spreading the word even further. The potential is unlimited, and you can reach a far larger market than you have ever anticipated.

Use Social Media to Promote Your Listings is a post from: Properties Online Blog

Twitter for Beginners is a post from: Properties Online Blog