By sending visitors across to the major portals, agents are diluting their marketing message & sending potential customers to a website full of their competitors.  At least if agents send them to their own website the customers can read more about the agent & the agency. Plus, the customers have the opportunity to opt-in to receive more information from the agent via newsletters, blog posts, etc.

Real Estate Agents do more than enough advertising for the major portals via posters in their windows, talking about the major portals at listing presentations, etc.

If agents are going to post a link for one of their listings into either a blog post or onto Social Media sites like Twitter, Facebook, etc then they should make sure that they direct the traffic back to the listing appearing on their company website.

I can understand why there would be  some agents unintentionally sending visitors across to the major portals from Twitter, mainly because posting listings onto Twitter is still a relatively new concept for a lot of agents & many agents aren’t aware that they can use a URL shortening service, but when sharing listings on Facebook there’s really no excuse for it.

“URL shortening is a technique on the World Wide Web where a provider makes a web page available under a very short URL in addition to the original address. For example, the page http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=TinyURL&diff=283621022&oldid=283308287 can be shortened to http://tinyurl.com/mmw6lb .” Source: Wikipedia

The URL shortening services are free & most have stats so you can use the shortened URL to measure the response from your Social Media marketing campaigns at the same time.

There are over 100 or more sites to choose from. Here’s just a few of the URL shortening services that make it really simple to link across to a web page on your company website.

tr.im
bit.ly
ow.ly
budurl.com
tinyurl.com
su.pr