Facebook can kill your Realtor business.

As a matter of fact, Facebook can drain a lot of your resources and can jeopardize your business entirely because you will be basing your major marketing efforts on a platform that you don’t control, that keeps changing and that could eventually kick you out if they deem that your activity is contrary to their policies. This is the warning we get from street-smart Facebook marketers.

So, do your really need to be on Facebook? Well, first of all you need to decide if you want to have a personal face to your business because Facebook is first and foremost about personal information and experience. It’s about sharing amongst individuals independent of their business.

And you definitely should not use your personal profile to pitch your properties and to look for business. You would be most likely in violation of Facebook’s term of service and even if you build your own Fan Page then you need to drive traffic and people to it and there will be a lot of exploration and testing on your part to establish how to make it work well for you. And in the end you will have increased the power of Facebook but you will have no intimate and real control on what you have built.

There is no clear and defined path on how to market successfully on Facebook, since the platform is still evolving continuously. Stay clear of gurus offering you a “system” that will work every time. I would definitely advise you to have your own personal profile on Facebook just to secure your name and expand your personal Web presence, but when when it comes to allocating your time to market your business online, I would start from building a basic presence you can control, either with your own blog or your own page on a general platform offered to you by your broker; by your Realtor association or some of the many online services for investors.

Secure a spot you can fully control and then make it known in places that have already a robust traffic of buyers: Craigslist, somebody else’s blog, on your business card, anywhere you can capture some meaningful traffic. Then, you can also add some Facebook marketing when the time is right and when you have already a platform you can control and you can drive people to. Remember, the first objective is to build a list of customer. Your own list. A list you can truly own and control.

Roberto Mazzoni

Why Facebook can kill your Realtor business is a post from: Using the Web and social media to sell real estate

Realtors with empty social media profiles have also empty hands.

Not everybody understands it and not everybody cares, but what I found out is astonishing. At least half of the Realtors who have an account on Twitter have not been publishing a single message for one year! Could you imagine, registering your account, putting your face out there along with a bio that clearly state you are a Realtor or a real estate investor and then don’t say a word for the following 12 months?

These people evidently don’t understand that a bad presence on the web is going to recoil on them. It would be much better for them to consolidate their presence, removing the profiles they can’t keep active and reducing their actions to what they really care to maintain updated, if anything. If myou can’t be there every day you can at least automate some content publishing so that you don’t seem to be totally devoid of things to say. There are free tools can do it for you.

Evidently the old approach of placing a sign near the property and wait for someone to call stays with them also in the on line world. Investors are a bit more active better, but not much. You can find some very big names, some “guru” or real estate investing let’s say, that with account that have been silent for months.

We all know that Twitter ha still to prove itself as a money making platform, pretty much like most of social media when it comes to pure selling, but it is also proven by now that most of the activity you do on social media and blogging is aimed at procuring leads and contacts.

Once you have the leads, you then develop business through a regular personal contact. What would you think if a customer was coming by your office every day, for one year, and always saw the sign “Ill be right back?”

I guess he would stop passing by pretty soon and would know that you really don’t care for your business.

Nobody is forced to be on social media. As a matter of fact, there are investors and Realtors who are doing perfectly fine with old style referral systems; but at least they have the good sense of not even trying to pretend to be there.

Possibly some people might even figure that they would not be found out, but today your have software and services that can give you the whole history of a person’s presence on social media. A complete picture of his activity and “value”. And it is like having a personal score that anybody can look at in a few minutes and build an idea about us even before they get in touch with us.

So possibly some of these Realtors that have a totally empty and dead account might wonder how comes nobody is calling them and that they are not getting so many leads as it used to be. They could believe that social media is not working for them. Well actually it does, but in reverse, shifting people away from them and into the hands of their competitors who maintain a decent social media presence.

This subject is important for any marketing positioning strategy in the real estate field and other business fields. Today people look much more at who your are and can immediately find out by resorting to the master of all referral systems: Google and see what comes up about you. If nothing comes up at all or if they don’t like what they see, you have gotten bad publicity right thene and you have lost business. Something to think about if you want to survive the crisis.

Roberto Mazzoni

Twitter, the big demise of the “accomplished” Realtor is a post from: Using the Web and social media to sell real estate

Managing their web site and social media presence can be overwhelming for Realtors and real estate investors if they don't have the right strategies and tools.

Lot of effort and in some cases also a substantial investment of time an money and so little results? It turns out that the majority of contacts with prospects and customers still happen through e-mail or text messages and the phone, but the site is recognized by many as an essential part of their business and yet it is not performing well at all.

It turns out that there is a major shift going on in the culture of a typical real estate buyer and of the typical investor, and Realtors, at the same time, need to keep up with it. It isn’t all about the merit of the individual property anymore, but it becomes more and more a relationship issue.

When we look at the figures, we see that the Realtors that fare better, much better, are those which have been in the business longer (at least 16 years) and who get a substantial amount of their business from past customers and from referrals. But even they can improve their performance particularly in terms of time spent to cultivate those referrals.

So how can a new investor or Realtor coming on the scene shorten the “learning curve” and start getting referrals and customers without working almost full time for just about 8,000 dollars a year? That’s how much a regular Realtor grosses during his first two years in business and it is no wonder that half of those who join the profession for the first time plan to leave it soon.

The problem here boils down to how you use the site and what kind of information you put in there. Of course listings are important, but I doubt a customer would need to go to an individual Realtor’s site to view  the listings. You have Realtor.com, Zillow.com and a host of other sites where you can get comparisons and and again it very seldom happens that the agent actually sells the property he is listing: it is usually sold by some other Realtor who brings in the buyer.

So why use the site just for the listings, when we already know this isn’t something customers are looking for and it isn’t what is selling anyway. Indeed lot of effort is put by Realtors in social media activities as well, but again there is no set pattern of presence, a little integration strategy and very little work on personal branding.

If I were to be giving a listing to a Realtor I would like to know what he would do for me to facilitate the sale. If I were  planning to purchase an investment property, maybe from a distance or even from abroad, I would expect my Relator to be competent and trustworthy.

The lack of personal branding is even more dangerous for new Realtors who don’t have past clients voicing for them and that cannot bring to the table a substantial amount of transactions, of experience and accreditations.

So again there is a huge space of improvement possible in the field of real estate, both for investors and Realtors looking for buyers and sellers. It is a matter of integrating and finding out what’s working and testing it as they move along. The current statistics tell us that it is definitely not working: only 3% of transactions are coming from the web. It is a clear indication that change is needed and the sooner the better.

Roberto Mazzoni

Realtors web sites don’t plainly work, why? is a post from: Using the Web and social media to sell real estate

Is the real estate blog really dead?

Should you provide valuable content that improves your image but drains your time and energy with no apparent immediate result or should you just focus on getting on the first page in Google no matter what the content and then try to convert your leads? My personal answer is that you probably need to do both, but the article describes very clearly that while SEO is the real deal when it comes to business generation,  a full fledged SEO strategy is well beyond the means of the average real estate investor or agent.

Also interestingly, Hann devalues the hyper-local approach that we have seen evolving in the last few years. We have been invited by the Internet Marketing “gurus” to go local, to focus on local search keywords. here is what Hann has to say about it: “When a Big Company decides that it wants to compete in SEO for some desirable keywords, it will simply outspend the little guy and just crush him.  The focus on hyperlocal and “long tail” strikes me as the result: small companies and individual agents pick up the crumbs that the big guys let fall from the table. In other words, their SEO-based strategies are viable only insofar as some Big Guy allows it to be viable.” (read the full article by Robert Hann)

So even if SEO has a key effect on your ranking it cannot be the backbone of your marketing effort as a little entrepreneur. Yet even blogging is not enough, and here we have the opinion of Garron Selliken, a technologist and broker in Portland: “When comes to generating leads from search, the past, present and future of real estate sites is SEO, not blogging, transparency, authenticity and finding your voice.  The way to get clients is to show up where the most concentrated group of most motivated buyers/sellers are hanging out and ask for the business. This is why SEO focused content kills blogging…it is targeted directly at the relevant phrases and lands on pages designed to satisfy needs AND convert into conversation.” (the full article by Selliken is well worth reading).

Gahlord Dewald, a SEO consultant, adds more weight in reducing the value of blogging as a business platform in this article: “Online business strategy and blogging” He says that “The real estate blog may have never been alive in the first place” and comments: “Though I don’t have any data to back it up, I’d wager that for every solid, compelling and meaningful real estate blog there are twenty zombie real estate blogs: packed with stolen/poorly crafted/duplicate content that is either devoid of purpose or stuffed to the gills with SEO keywords”.

Do you think this would be applicable for many other fields in addition to real estate? I do

Roberto Mazzoni

P.S. Share you experience on this topic by commenting on this post, or simply say hi

The death of the real estate blog is a post from: Using the Web and social media to sell real estate

Picking the best for you.

Here they are in the order of preference expressed by the readers themselves:

Selling a Home in 21 Days

Which provides practical suggestions for a very needed ability, today.

The top six mistakes in social media

A nice summary of the most common errors people face while dealing with this fascinating new world.

Being captured by the third tribe

An introduction to a completely new way of doing marketing, which is much closer to the spirit of a blogger like I am.

Learning from a magazine publisher

The best advices I have gathered in a long time.

The top ten sites for real estate investing

This is very recent and comes from detailed research I did on the subject, which gives a very complete description of the various different approaches.

Roberto Mazzoni

The best of my blog is a post from: Using the Web and social media to sell real estate