Just to provide some balance to the Hate Article.

1. There is absolutely nothing in this world like Facebook for connecting with all your old friends. The most successful people in real estate truly understand that networking is one of the real key’s to this industry and setting up a Facebook profile is drop dead easy thing to do to take advantage of it. Most of your old friends probably did not even know you were in real estate anyway. In sales the BIGGER YOUR SPHERE OF INFLUENCE THE BETTER.
2. Facebook and Twitter are truly opt-in marketing. There can be no chance that you can ever have provisions of the the privacy act thrown at you as they chose to follow you and they still WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU.
3. Testimonials are like gold for real estate agents and Linkedin allows you to write and receive business testimonials from other members. Testimonials that you approve become part of your profile for everyone to see. WHO DOES NOT WANT ANYMORE TESTIMONIALS?
4. Ensure your following the right people on Twitter as it is simply the best barometer on the real estate industry. Everyday you will get the latest training tips, strategies, news and commentary and all in just 140 characters each. On Twitter follow few and follow quality and YOU WILL BE REWARDED. Try to follow too many and it all just turns into noise.
5. Networking with others in and associated with our industry is just as important as networking with potential clients. When you are looking to contact someone you have never met Linkedin shows you who in your network already knows them and how. Linked in allows you to BUILD RELATIONSHIPS AND CONNECTIONS INSIDE THE INDUSTRY.
6. Twitter Search is a fantastic way to keep abreast of just what people are saying about your company, your brand or a recent advertising campaign. You get to see exactly what consumers are TELLING THEIR FRIENDS ABOUT YOU.
7. If they find it interesting or worth sharing,  your friends and followers will spread your news for you when they retweet, comment or like something that you post. The power of social networking is INCREDIBLE WHEN IT GOES VIRAL.
8. Tweets are now integrated live into the Google Search Engine Results Pages. Facebook Fan Pages and Twitter Lists are now in the Google Index which makes setting up a Twitter Account and Facebook Profile the EASIEST SEO ON THE PLANET.
9. If you dont like someone or they are posting or tweeting rubbish… you can just DELETE THEM!
10. Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin are 100% FREE…  at least for now.

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In the past I’ve overheard real estate agents talking on the phone, directing clients onto the major portals like realestate.com.au & domain.com.au to help a client find out more information about a property. I could never understand why the agent wouldn’t want to send the customers to the listing appearing on their own company website??? Read the rest of this article »

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Twitter is taking the Australian real estate industry by storm at the moment and I have to apologise about another post on the topic in such short time, but I think this is very important. Whilst its potential to do good is huge like most powerful web applications it has a dark side just waiting to come out and bite you for the wrong reasons. Social networking and the internet in general has allowed a voice for everyone including your biggest critics.

I searched all major real estate groups on twitter to see what they are doing on Twitter and two things really stood out.

LJ Hooker is getting really hammered on twitter right now. As at 8:48pm tonight , the 27th of May, searching “LJ Hooker” on Twitter (http://search.twitter.com) provides a total of 16 results. One of these had no relationship with LJ Hooker Real Estate and four where by LJ Hooker offices themselves. That leaves 11 posts by third parties nad 6 of those were negative damning comments. That’s more than 50%.. hell that’s still nearly 40% of all posts returned being negative. That’s got to ring alarm bells for somebody at LJ Hooker HQ. It may turn out to be an anomaly but they need to monitor it to find out.

Read the rest of this article »

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Twitter promotes itself as a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

However, ingenious people are finding a mass of different uses for Twitter. We are even building this into our new property platform Zoo Property, so that agents can automatically notify followers of new listings, price changes etc.

I am sure other platforms will do similar things and that’s the beauty of technology, there are a million uses for even what at first seems like a pointless tool and sometimes the company that makes these tools, do not even know what they will be uses for.

Even Google Maps did not even think about what people may do with mashing up the data and now there are millions of websites using mapping in so many unique ways.

Here is an other excellent Ted Talk from Evan Williams

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