I will not join your mafia, tend to your crops, find your lost puppy or swap aquariam fish with you. Can’t you get the hint…. Knock it OFF and LEAVE ME ALONE!!! Everyone must understand that all of these addictive little games they sign up for spam everyone on their contact lists.
Stop sending me requests to be a fan of your favourite causes, celebrities or your friends businesses.
If we have never met, never ever talked, in fact I dont even know you existed till now why would I be your Facebook Friend. Facebook is for personal contacts. I share my personal photos, thoughts and information to FRIENDS ONLY…. GET IT! Stuff I want to share with anybody who is interested is done through either a fan page, Twitter or a blog.
If you are an affiliate marketer just wanting to flog me stuff, a spammer of any kind, a pornographer trying to get me to watch your latest video……. I WILL DELETE YOU!!
There is no prize for collecting the most Facebook Friends or Twitter Followers. How can you follow 20,000 people on Twitter? Have you no life at all that you spend all your time reading other people’s tweets? I WILL DELETE YOU!!!!
Exactly like in real life I dont like being stalked on Twitter or Facebook …. If I delete you, say no to your request to be my friend and you keep coming back trying to be my friend and follow me I will block you and report you…. I PROMISE
Linkedin is a Business network of people you have done business with. You say that we worked together in your company but I would remember it if we worked together taking photos of properties in Perth I really would…. BUT I DON’T KNOW YOU!
You absolutley do not have to ReTweet everything. I checked out Twitters terms and conditions and nowhere does it say that you have to retweet everthing that someone sends you. How about being an individual and just SHUT UP IF YOU HAVE NOTHING TO SAY YOURSELF.
I know I have a profile on LinkedIn but that does not mean that I want you or your recruitment company to find me a new job. I dont want to meet with you, I dont want to send you my CV … JUST LEAVE ME ALONE!
Whether it be on Facebook or Twitter, if you post 10 or 20 times per day you are ANNOYING THE HELL OUT OF ME and you should know by now what happens next..
One of the biggest real estate auction events in the Southern Hemisphere is about to happen on the Gold Coast.
Ray White Broadbeach – Mermaid Beach are holding ‘The Edge’ on Saturday 17th April 2010 at the Gold Coast Convention Centre.
Brett Clements from PropVid sent me the ‘Hot Off The Press’ promo video yesterday.
Now for such a big event I’m sure that there has already been a lot of promotion done by the Gold Coast Network in the lead up till now & it looks like there is going to be a whole lot more promotion done between now and ‘The Edge’.
But I thought I might throw my 2 cents worth in & share some ideas on how Ray White Broadbeach – Mermaid Beach could leverage Social Media & the web more effectively to help spread the word.
Here’s ‘The Edge’ video promo.
The video went live on the PlatinumHD.tv site a few days ago & was uploaded onto YouTube 3 days ago. Whilst I think the video is really powerful there are a couple of things that could be changed to improve its conversion.
Changes to the Video: Within the video I’d have the agents website address GoldCoastNetwork.com.au appearing underneath the Ray White Broadbeach, Ray White Commercial Broadbeach, Ray White Mermaid Beach slide (which appears at the 2 minute mark within the video).
Also, towards the end of the video a slide appears saying “Spaces Limited Book Now”
Whilst I think it’s great to include a call to action. It’s important to define what you want people to do. Are they wanting vendors to book their property in now for the auction? Or do they want buyers to book their seat now? Or both?
On the web there is no room for confusion. It’s important that people watching the video know how to Book Now.
Improve Online Conversion: One suggestion could be that if you include the agency website address within the video, then on the home page of the Ray White website they could embed ‘The Edge’ promo video into the top right hand corner (probably cutting out the end of the surf life saving flag or surfer image) and then have a button underneath to say Click Here to Book Now for ‘The Edge’.
I would then send them to a long copy sales page that features some of the benefits of why they should be involved in ‘The Edge’ and provide an opt-in section which identifies if they are a buyer or a seller.
This will allow Ray White Broadbeach – Mermaid Beach to leverage the traffic that they already get to their website from Google and their other marketing, plus improve conversion from the people who view their professionally produced ‘The Edge’ promo video.
Obviously, with only 6 weeks to go till ‘The Edge’, to allow for the 4 week cut-through marketing campaign that they mention in the video, all sellers would need to be contacted straight away to include their listing in ‘The Edge’ marketing campaign.
I can imagine that the agency will need to have all properties listed by 20th March, but due to the size of the promotion & the incredible exposure there’s a possibility that they could include a few extra listings within a few days after this cut-off date. But, that’s obviously up to them.
Here’s a few other suggestions…
YouTube: One of the first things I noticed is that the video could also be optimised a lot better on YouTube. The wording used in the description & tagging has no chance of being found on Google by someone searching for real estate on the Gold Coast & I’m not sure that having it uploaded under the Entertainment category is going to help either?
Blogging: They should integrate a WordPress blog within their company website. This will not only help to market ‘The Edge’ but it will help with their SEO.
They should write a daily blog post about some of the build up towards ‘The Edge’ and ask all the staff to tweet or share each article with their followers on Twitter & their friends on Facebook.
When sharing the articles on these sites they could also ask people to click the like button when uploading onto Facebook and ask the followers to ‘Please RT’ their tweets on Twitter.
When posting daily updates on the blog it’s important to leave the comments section open on the articles because this may get people asking questions about how to be involved & could provide an additional lead generation strategy.
This could also provide an opportunity to set a deadline for the last day before properties will be allowed to be submitted & could create an extra sense of urgency for potential sellers and/or could encourage friends to tell friends to contact the agency so they don’t miss out on ‘The Edge’.
To protect the integrity of the event, Ray White Broadbeach-Mermaid Beach are the administrators of the blog so they have control to monitor comments too.
Facebook: I also noticed that Ray White Broadbeach-Mermaid Beach have a personal profile on Facebook. Whilst they currently have 67 friends, they should really have this as a Fan Page, because Facebook has a limit and once you get to 5,000 friends you have to change to a Fan Page.
Any company thinking about creating a presence on Facebook should start off with a Fan Page. They are better for business.
Celebrities, etc should also create a Fan Page. eg. One of my friends on facebook, Jack Canfield sent me an email the other day to ask me to join him at his fan page because he had reached his limit of friends.
Jack now has the task of getting all 5,000 of his friends that he has built up on his personal Facebook profile to go over & connect with him on his new Facebook Fan Page.
( Update: I found their company Facebook Fan Page – See Update at bottom of this article )
Twitter: With regards to Twitter I can’t seem to locate a company profile for them. At this point there appears to be no Twitter account linked to their site & no blog within their site.
Whilst ‘The Edge’ is an amazing concept, there are so many different things that Ray White Broadbeach – Mermaid Beach could do to make this the most incredible real estate event ever through Social Media.
(Update: I found their company Twitter account as well see Update at bottom of this article. I searched both facebook and Twitter for Ray White Broadbeach and Ray White Mermaid Beach. I finally found them under the Gold Coast Network.)
Print Media: Having seen the magnitude of the print media campaign from last years event, Ray White Broadbeach-Mermaid Beach should be advertising something like,
“For the daily inside scoop on ‘The Edge’ become a Fan on Facebook and/or follow us on Twitter” within their campaign.
This could help them to build a huge network of people connected to their company who live within their service.
It’s never too late: Even though ‘The Edge’ is only 6 weeks away, when you think about the real-time nature of Web 2.0, there is still a lot of time available for Ray White Broadbeach – Mermaid Beach to leverage the power of the internet & use this impressive Video Production from PropVid to generate the most amazing impression within their marketplace.
2 last things: A geo-targeted Pay Per Click campaign on Google could help overcome some SEO issues, plus a targeted Facebook Ads Campaign would help drive targeted traffic to their video campaign and/or their Facebook Fan Page.
The amount of ‘Free’ online PR that could be generated around ‘The Edge’ could be massive.
If Ray White Broadbeach – Mermaid Beach get this right, ‘The Edge’ could become so much bigger than they could have ever imagined.
And, if you tallied up every strategy that I’ve mentioned, they could make a huge difference to their whole campaign for around $500 – $1,000 plus time spent writing a daily update on their blog about ‘The Edge’.
PS: There’s a few more ideas I have about what they could do on realestate.com.au and other strategies, but at this point I just wanted to paint the picture of what is really possible, if a real estate agency embraces Social Media and uses the power of the internet the right way.
Please feel welcome to share your thoughts & ideas.
UPDATE: After writing this article I noticed that Ray White Broadbeach – Mermaid Beach do in fact have a Facebook Fan Page under ‘Gold Coast Network‘ and a Twitter account at Twitter.com/raywhitebroad with their username as ‘Gold Coast Network’. It’s great to see that they have established a fan page and a Twitter account.
At the time of posting this update, they have 97 fans on Facebook and 23 followers on Twitter, but unfortunately all the company seem to be posting is there sold listings & providing a link to the Open Homes that they have on each weekend.
Their Gold Coast Network Fan Page could become so much more engaging and simply because of its name, Gold Coast Network, it has the potential to become one of the biggest real estate fan pages on Facebook if they shared some other information about what’s happening on the Gold Coast as well.
When Twitter recently announced the ability to place all of your followers into lists I thought that they had struck a goldmine for future revenue streams and everything pointed towards a business model that made perfect sense – to me.
Then today it all went pear shaped as Biz Stone (Co-founder) announced a ‘non traditional’ way they will allow advertising on Twitter without telling us what it is – a great way to get spin going, especially when you are as popular as Twitter!
In my opinion Biz Stone and Twitter have just showed how dumb people can be when it comes to monetizing popular free programs. What did MySpace do? Sell advertising. What did Facebook do? Sell advertising. What is Twitter going to do? Sell advertising – albeit wrapped in a ‘non traditional’ catchphrase. The crux of all of this is that no-one has any idea how to make money out of free software that is popular and when you have no ideas, you turn to 3rd party advertisers.
Biz, I am sure advertising will bring in some revenue, but you have missed a golden opportunity here to take a different approach, it is a crazy idea, but people might actually be prepared to pay for software that makes their lives better. Here is the model I would have approached.
Premium Accounts
I know a premium account is just a stupid name for making more money than a normal account. Usually companies (think realestate.com.au and domain.com.au) create a popular site and then cut the throat of their core by making them look less important than premium companies. In real estate it is a joke, but with Twitter it would be different as it makes sense on top of a free model. Myhome.com.au do it with premium style listings on top of basic free listings. I don’t mind this approach as long as the user (the person looking for properties) is not getting search results compromised.
Basic
With Twitter nothing changes, you get all of the same features as you currently do, you are treated the same and all new updates are afforded to you. In other words – in other words we still love you and we understand without you – we could not operate successfully!
Premium – Multiple Accounts
You can create multiple accounts all under the one account. As an example. I have Agentpoint, Business2, Ginga and Zooproperty.com. Currently I have 4 Twitter accounts to manage. So I can now have a master account and merge others accounts under this one account – nothing changes for my followers.
When a user wants to follow me they can select what account(s) to follow or ‘follow all’. My default account is my master account – so if they do not choose any accounts, it then defaults to my master account.
Nothing changes when I Tweet as I have separate accounts to Tweet under and no-one gets annoyed.
Premium – Customise Theme
My “Twemium” account allows us to customise our Twitter theme some more. Better sidebar control, better backgrounds etc. All of my accounts now become a part of a left sidebar and can be click-able. I can also customise my background with a few extra features.
Fees
So what would a user pay as a premium price for these features? I would say $55 USD per annum is a fair price that most can afford for what essentially is a great service. Not everyone would need to upgrade and there is no penalty for not upgrading.
Revenue
Let’s say 20% of users upgrade to premium. Current estimates put twitter at about 5 million active users. So that would bring in around $55 million per annum. I would consider this a good return on what is essentially a 100 person company. How many companies could boast $550,00 in revenue per employee? This could easily grow to 100 million per annum.
If they get selfish and stupid they will fail. Twitter is no flash in the pan, but it we may get a little bored with it and if we are not careful only business will be interested and that will kill the platform.
Biz Stone tells us he is in no rush, well, he is in no rush to fail and everything they were doing up until now made sense. If advertiser revenue is their only idea with this software then they seriously need to take more time before making announcements.
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 »
Within each franchise network there are some real estate agents who have invested their time & money into increasing their online presence by improving the SEO of their websites, building blogs & using social media marketing, yet the franchise often receives a percentage of the traffic generated by these agents across to the franchises corporate site for Free.
Since the agents are paying franchise fees, should the traffic generated by an agent that subsequently clicks open the franchises corporate site be Free traffic to the franchise? Or should the franchise reward the agent for generating traffic to their site?
Free Traffic Means Franchises Receive Free Home Loan Leads
Most franchises now have their own home loan department & potentially the franchise can generate more revenue from their home loans than they do from franchise fees paid by their agents.
If a real estate franchise wants to increase its profile on the web they could provide a reduction in franchise fees for agents who include links to their corporate website or they could build in a monthly pay-per-click incentive for the agencies who send lots of visitors across to their corporate website.
If the Real Estate Franchises adopted this concept they could reward their own agents instead of paying Google for leads.
I’m sure some franchises will frown upon this idea, but the forward thinking real estate franchises should see that this provides a real incentive for their agents to build a larger web presence, send more traffic to the franchises corporate website & build a bigger corporate brand which could help to generate more real estate offices & increase the franchises home loan revenue.
I feel that anything which reduces the running costs of an agency & helps to encourage agents to increase their web presence at the same time is a good thing. What do you think?
In a recent press release, RE/MAX boast 99.9% of the national share of voice in TV advertising in the US for the first quarter of the year, but RE/MAX & other real estate franchises should take a close look at how ineffective their marketing of these TV commercials has been over the internet.
RE/MAX claims:
“While many of the real estate industry’s biggest players are scaling back their TV buys due to economic realities, the RE/MAX share of voice for national TV advertising jumped from 50% in 2008 to 99.9% in the first quarter of 2009.”
RE/MAX have done a good job with their new straight talking TV ads, but I can’t help but think that they could increase their audience by leveraging their video content across the internet via their huge network of agents/staff, databases of clients and via social media.
Whilst it was great to see that RE/MAX have taken the initiative & leveraged their video content by uploading the commercials onto YouTube, unfortunately that’s where their effective use of the internet for these videos seems to grind to a halt.
The collective online marketing power of a franchise like RE/MAX is enormous.
They have something like 100,000 Associates working within their company & their LeadStreet campaign successfully created a database of a Million More Leads in Six Months for US Agents, yet upon writing this post the Kick – 2009 RE/MAX Commercial is the video that appears to be their most popular out of their 2009 commercials uploaded onto YouTube so far, but it’s had less than 10,000 views over the past 4 months.
How to Promote Your Real Estate Videos Online
Here’s just a few ways that real estate franchises & independent offices could use the power of their existing network to help promote their brand, generate lots of Free traffic to their videos & enhance their online marketing presence.
Imagine the power of marketing that 100,000 RE/MAX Associates could have if they used some of these strategies to promote these professionally created TV Commercials out to their network of clients & associates via the internet.
If each Associate only got 10 people in a month to view the commercial, that would equate to approx. 1 million viewers per month for FREE.
In fact, if RE/MAX franchise really wanted to, they could get 10’s of millions of viewers to their videos each month at almost no cost. Now that’s what I’d call a powerful message.
Finally, there are over 100 alternative video sites other than YouTube. Real estate franchises should be uploading their videos/TV commercials onto some of these other sites as well to help generate even more FREE traffic & exposure of their brand.
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.
As a follow up to Glenn’s Twitter articles, I though I would discuss a Twitter application I stumbled across. TweetLister allows real estate agents to schedule real estate tweets for their property listings which are then published to their Twitter account.
The real estate tweet includes the sale type, suburb, bedrooms, bathrooms, price, 2 property features and a shortened url to view the listing on TweetLister. At TweetLister the user can see the remaining details for the property, including a photo and link to view the listing at the agent’s website. The user can even submit an enquiry through TweetLister which is emailed to the agent.
Click the image
TweetLister is so easy to use, to sign up you simply enter your Twitter username and password. You then add the details for your listing and schedule when a tweet will be created. Tweets can be created once, daily, weekly or monthly for a particular listing. You control everything through your Control Panel (sidebar on the right in the screenshot), you can cancel listings, view page views and also the number of enquiries submitted for each listing.
To demonstrate the product Business2 kindly created an account and listed a property belonging to one of Agentpoint’s clients. @BusinessTwo on Twitter you can see the published tweet and link to TweetLister for the property listing.
A quick glance around Twitter and you will see only a few agents in Australia are tweeting about new properties they have listed. Personally, I think there is no harm creating a tweet for every new property you list, however I do believe if you re-tweet a listing then you will start to annoy your followers. Saying this, re-tweeting may be appropriate if you have an auction in the coming days and you wanted to remind your followers about it.
One short coming of this software is that it is time consuming as it requires agents to manually enter property details into TweetLister. This creates an opportunity for real estate software companies who can easily develop a similar Twitter application. This application can be integrated into their property listing software, providing agents with real estate listing tweets that are completely automated and effortless.
Alternatively, Domain or REA could develop an application which created Tweets in an agent’s Twitter account for every new property listed by the agent on that portal. The shortened url in the tweet will link back to the real estate portal, increasing the portal’s traffic while providing greater value to agents!
Armed with the Twitter for Real Estate Twits ebook from the last article I posted I decided to jump into Twitter and give it a whirl. Take it for a testdrive so to speak.
The first 24 hours has been very enlightening and one thing has become crystal clear. Twitter is fantastic! It is such a simple concept that when done right is so powerful and for our industry it can work amazingly. After the testdrive I decided to take one two home :) Read the rest of this article »
Anybody who has not recently heard about Twitter must have had their head in the sand. It has literally exploded over the past 6-12 months and Peter first introduced it here on the blog back in March and couple of others have followed up with some great comments since.
One thing that seems pretty clear is that for what seems a very simple service, very few people in our industry really understand it and how to make the most of. That included myself.
So this week I decided to change that and learn a bit about Twitter and how we could utilise it. Thats when I came across this fantastic ebook called “Twitter for Real Estate Twits” which has just been released and is specifically about Real Estate Agents using Twitter. The author invites everyone to share, so here is the ebook to read and download if you want.
This is a fantastic resource and introduces and explains in some good details exactly what Twitter is and the strategies behind utilising it for a real estate business. You will know by the end of it all whether you want to invest your time in the Twitter phenomenon and what sort of rewards you will get from it.
Since: 29th May 2009 Company: Nerang First National Phone: 0414 675 566
Glenn Batten is the General Manager with First National Real Estate Nerang where he started in the industry in 1992 as one of the agency’s foundation sales associates. One of Glenn’s passions is technology, especially as it applies to the real estate industry and his responsibilities extend to the design, creation and implementation of a number of the agency’s systems and procedures, an integral reason why First National Nerang has been awarded the REIQ Queensland Agency of the Year for 2010. This is the third time since 2000 and now two years in a row in the medium agency category.
Glenn also operates a Personal Blog has created the Australian Real Estate Software and Solutions Directory and is a partner in a niche real estate software business called Sellercom.
Blogging: They should integrate a 
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