Using the Web and social media to sell real estate

I have reviewed the traffic statistics of my blog and there are 5 articles that have gathered the most attention of my readers in the last few weeks.

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

Marketing on the Web today is about providing content and making sure that people find it relevant and easy to reach. It can be about products or about how to do something or achieve some result. Basically it need to solve some problem, or cater to some necessity or desire, but still it must be available and easy to consume.

Eight rules to avoid social media disaster

My field is international real estate and the experts say that in real estate you make money when you solve problems. The same is with any other type of business, but what matters in the first place is finding the people who have these problems so that you can solve them and this bring us to the channels and the format of information that you will have to use to find them. Social media is based on digital media: text, audio, pictures, video in all their various formats. And here are the rules that I have gathered on how to use it:

1. Your customers have very different schedules so you need to allow them to get your information when it is more convenient for them. Direct interaction is valuable and interesting, like in webinars, Q&A calls and social media chatting, but cannot be used on a wide scale. So record your key content and make it available for future reference (click here to read more on this point).

2. You cannot predict where your customer will use the information. She will not necessarily use a computer, therefore prepare to make your content available on portable devices (like the iPod) if possible (click here to read more on this).

3. Create content that can be viewed on as many different devices as possible. Less people have time to spend in front of their computer just for getting information. Production schedules get more and more tight, so produce your content so that it can be consumed in a number of ways.

4. Be concise as much as you can and to the point. This doesn’t mean that you should write little, but avoid padding your content with useless material. Value the time of your people and they will value you. Always give them a short cut to the action items they can perform immediately.

5. Never create an article or video or podcast/MP3 that depends on previous material to be fully understood. Build every single item so that it can be used by itself. You can still create series, but each item in the series should be independent.

6. Keep it simple: it you expect your public to understand what you write because they have read something else before, you will lose. Always define your key terms when you use them and where you use them.

7. If you don’t provide real value in your content then it is pointless. The value is established by what other people think of it. Also the value of a piece of content needs to be evident by its title and presentation. People need to know immediately what’s in it for them.

8. Use as many channels as possible to reach your audience as they will shift in the use of their channels and you will lose them is you use just a few.

By following these simple rules that I have collected from my personal experience and from the writings or presentations of Internet Marketing experts you will be able to grow your public and keep in touch with it in the way it is most convenient to them.

Roberto Mazzoni

P.S. I am sure you have your own opinions about this subject so please leave a comment and invite others to do so. Your viewpoints are important to allow me to improve  my content.

Business and private individuals alike need social media to build their brand today, but how much should they do and how can they measure the relative success of their endeavors? First of all, any social media activity is not free: it takes people to implement it, which means individuals who have the knowledge to know what to do and when to do it.

You can’t avoid having an understanding of what it takes because, even if you outsource it, most of the content and the strategical decisions will have to come from you. You simply can’t have somebody else tell your story or the story of your company and at the same time you will need help along the way because you can’t possibly do everything it takes to have a prominent position on the Web and still manage your business.

How well are your spending your resources on social media?

I have found that the selection of the right assistant, as in any other business activity, is the most critical part. You will have to spend a fair amount of time defining and explaining what you want ant checking her understanding, before you can safely outsource some of your social media activity. And again the content will have to come from you or you will have to select it from some other source, ahead of time.

It also takes technology, in terms of computing power, plus specialized software and services that you can either get for free or through a paid subscription. This is an area where you can get help from the outside: I have discovered the majority of the tools I am using today either through the direct advice of an expert I had been networking with, or through the suggestion of a blog post by some other expert.

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Being out of the game of today Web 2.0 can be quite deadly but you can also die in the effort of doing it the wrong way and wasting a lot of time and energy in the process. Like every other activity, also your social media presence must have a plan and must be aimed at obtaining a specific result that will benefit you an your business.

Using social media to sell directly is a bad idea and it will eventually recoil back, you can instead use it for creating the connections and setting the stage that will then allow you to continue the conversation elsewhere and the do business.

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