Posts Tagged ‘Facebook’

« Older Entries

Cool Apps: Spice up your farming practice with List.ly

By John Thompson | April 29th, 2011 1 Comment

Bring your neighborhood farming techniques online and add a little twist with a new app called List.ly.

Farming is one of the oldest marketing mechanisms in real estate. And for good reason: It works. Real estate is local, and who better to do business with than the agent who knows the community. But everyone does the old postcard or personal letters with their picture on it song and dance. Why not do something different?

This is how I see List.ly being applied to real estate. Those of you who are blogging about local events, happenings, places of interest and distinction can use List.ly to add a little zest to your posts and spark some interaction with your readers – people who most likely share your passion for the neighborhood.

How does it work? It’s stone cold simple. Go to List.ly’s website and click on “Start a List Now,” then either sign in using Facebook or Twitter. The whole point of these lists is to get your networks involved so you definitely want to use one of your social networks to connect.

Then you begin your list. Some ideas here: “Top 10 Things to Do in My Neighborhood in Spring,” “Top Neighborhood or City Landmarks,” “Best Ways to Find Your Dream Home in (Your City Here),” “Best Sources for Local Real Estate News,” etc.

You can create a full list or just start one and invite your network to comment, thumbs up or down and add their own items. When done, don’t forget to share it with your Facebook and/or Twitter networks.

The idea is to have fun and try something you think will incite passion and opinion from your social networks. Remember: Participating in social media for your business isn’t about just slapping your picture and business card on Facebook or Twitter and self-promoting. You have a real opportunity to engage people and make them remember you.

List.ly is a cool free app that can help you mix it up with your Facebook and Twitter marketing.

  • Get new posts via email
  • Subscribe
Tags: , , , ,      Categories: Intero Cool Apps

Cool Apps: Cast a Wider Net with Facebook Questions

By John Thompson | April 1st, 2011 0 Comments

Got a Facebook Page for your real estate business but struggling with how to engage your community? It seems the folks at Facebook had a sneaking suspicion about your troubles and also realized you’re not alone.

Facebook Questions is now on the scene with some expanded features. The latest news to come out of Facebook last week enables Page administrators to poll or survey their communities – but in addition to asking Facebook friends questions, your friends’ friends can also respond.

Your social circle = instantly wider.

This presents an interesting method for getting inside the minds of consumers. Chances are high that the folks in your network are not always looking to buy or sell a house – after all, that only happens once every seven years or so for most people. But the odds of people in your friends’ networks being in the market to buy or sell are much higher.

This is a free app on Facebook that you already have access to if you’re using Facebook Pages for your business. I say go for it – give it a try and see how it works. My best advice, though, is to keep it interesting and topical.

The updated Questions feature enables users to agree to an answer with a single click or to add a different response. You’ll get a view of the most popular responses, which gives you “polling” insight.

In addition to gaining customer insights, Facebook Questions offers a way to crowdsource business decisions like a new design on your blog, new logo or any other new thing you’ve been testing out with your marketing.

Another interesting way this feature could be used is to incite discussion and get a sense of which real estate topics get people’s attention. Think: blog strategy. You pose a question that gets passed through friends’ friends and the responses start to ignite passion and disagreement. Sounds like great fodder for a blog post, right? Watch, listen, learn. Then pull it together into a post and send it back out to Facebook friends thanking them for opinions and thoughts and inviting them to comment on your post.

It seems like Facebook is realizing how many small businesses are using the platform to create community around their products and services. The enhanced Facebook Questions is the latest to cater to our needs. Go give it a try!

  • Get new posts via email
  • Subscribe
Tags: , , , ,      Categories: Intero Cool Apps

Cool Apps: Pagemodo Helps You Build Your Facebook Page in Minutes

By John Thompson | February 4th, 2011 0 Comments

With 500 million registered users, it’s difficult to dismiss the power of Facebook for reaching new customers and building business online. But not everyone has the know-how or the budget to build a compelling business page on Facebook.
 
Enter Pagemodo (formerly Fanbuilders), a marketing tool that enables small business owners to design their own custom Facebook pages using the company’s Pagebuilder product, free of charge. To date, the service has published more than 100,000 custom Facebook pages to more than 60,000 small businesses, according to a recent TechCrunch article.
 
How does it work? Pagebuilder walks you through the process every step of the way. You can choose from a variety of templates, change backgrounds, place images, videos and copy all without having a single design skill under your belt. But you also won’t end up with a product that looks like a DIY web page.
 
The company offers a free version for personal branding (perfect for real estate agents!), and a tiered pricing menu that adds features along the way ranging from $9 per month to $59 per month.
 
If there’s one app you check out this year, this is it. Pagemodo makes it so dead simple to get your professional page up and running on Facebook – enabling you to save your energy for the hard part, which is figuring out the best way to build and cultivate your network for your real estate business.
 
Having a professional-looking Facebook page will help you keep your personal brand intact and focus your Facebook activity from this page around your real estate clients, neighborhoods and providing all-around stellar service. Just be sure to tell everyone about it once it’s up and running and encourage them to “like” the page so that they’ll receive updates you send out on a regular basis.
 
Visit pagemodo.com to give it a whirl.

  • Get new posts via email
  • Subscribe
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,      Categories: Intero Cool Apps

Cool Apps: Instagram – Easy, Fun Way to Share Neighborhoods

By John Thompson | November 5th, 2010 0 Comments

Looking for an app that allows you to be social and useful at the same time? One that’s easy and fun to use? That doesn’t require a ton of strategy or technical prowess to get right?

Check out Instagram – the latest iPhone addiction for folks who like to take photos and share.

As real estate agents, you’re selling neighborhoods just as much as you’re selling homes (if not more, in many cases). My first thought with Instagram was that it offers a fun way to show off the quirky things about a neighborhood that you really can’t stage.

Imagine this: you’re out touring houses in a neighborhood where you have a lot of listings. You didn’t intend to have a photo shoot today, but you do of course have your iPhone with you. You notice some fun things happening: a guy on the corner playing the trumpet; a bakery that’s gone wild with a new mural on the side of its building; two squirrels who seem to be posing in front of a home for-sale sign.

Using Instagram, you simply launch the app, snap a picture, add a cool filter for effect, add a title so people know where it was taken, and upload it to all your social media networks – Facebook, Twitter and Flickr, for instance. Do this often and your followers will start to see the world you live in – the neighborhoods you sell.

A picture is worth a thousand words, so do the math and you might find yourself subconsciously selling great places to live to folks who are looking for just that.

To test out Instagram yourself, you’ll need to download it from the iTunes app store. It is currently a free app and only available to iPhone users.

Snap it. Share it. See what happens!

  • Get new posts via email
  • Subscribe
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,      Categories: Intero Cool Apps

Cool Apps: More Help for Twitter

By John Thompson | October 29th, 2010 0 Comments

We have a theme running through these weekly Cool Apps posts: making the most of your social media efforts without killing yourself. We all have limited hours in a day, which is why it’s so important to maximize our social media marketing and make what we’re doing count.

The bottom line: If you’re spending more time tweeting or facebooking than selling homes, then you’re not doing social media right. This can be tricky since a lot of social media in the beginning is a try-test-adjust cycle.

The good news is that there are many tools out there to help you. In fact, there are almost too many. We’ve already covered a few like: Social Oomph, ManageFlitter and Seesmic Desktop. But let me spotlight an old favorite in case you haven’t come across it yet: TweetDeck.

If you thought Twitter was a noisy mess the first time you used it, and also the tenth time you used it, then do yourself a favor and try TweetDeck. It’s a downloadable application that sits on your desktop (and of course there’s also an app for iPhones and Androids).

With TweetDeck, you can manage your Twitter conversations, set up columns for searches, follow specific conversations via hashtags, and even pull in your Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn and other social streams. It’s meant to be your social dashboard – an easy one stop for sending out tweets, a quick glimpse at conversations you’re interested in, and checking any replies or retweets you may have missed.

By far, my two favorite business uses for TweetDeck are:

Multiple accounts: If you find yourself managing more than one Twitter handle (an account under your own name, for instance, plus maybe one that is more vertical or branded to your neighborhood), TweetDeck makes it easy to send tweets from each account without having to log out and log in under a new name each time.

Ear to the ground: As a real estate agent, you need to know what’s happening in the neighborhoods you serve. TweetDeck makes it easy to set up a search that pulls in related conversations. For example, you can set up a column for the key phrase “San Jose housing” or “San Jose real estate” or even a hashtag like #realestatetech. Then every time you launch TweetDeck you’ll see a stream of the latest tweets containing these terms. It’s a cool way to find people on Twitter who are talking about things you’re interested in.

Give it a try!

  • Get new posts via email
  • Subscribe
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,      Categories: Intero Cool Apps

Cool Apps: Plan for the Future

By John Thompson | October 15th, 2010 0 Comments

Has this ever happened to you? You’ve run into a colleague who is energized, refreshed and inspired because he just got back from a killer conference in Southern California or an informal barcamp gathering in San Francisco. He stands there telling you how great this event was, how he came back with no less than 10 follow-up action points for building his business. All the while, you’re thinking: How could I have not known about this event? Sign me up for next time, please!

In real estate, like other businesses, we tend to get super busy and bury ourselves head first in work. Meanwhile, the world continues moving along and we end up missing stuff we didn’t realize was happening until it’s too late. Well, here’s an app that can help with this:

Plancast – it’s an app for sharing where you will be, where you plan to go. It may sound silly at first (Who on earth cares where I’ll be next week? Or why do I care where Bob Jones will be the first weekend in November?) But there are actually some great business uses for this.

Where the smart kids are

First, using Plancast, you can follow others and see where they are going or what events they are planning to attend. This is probably the best use I can think of for this app. Why? Because instead of hearing about groundbreaking events after the fact, you’ll now be able to see that Bob Jones Real Estate Exec is planning to attend this super cool 50 Ways to Rock Your Real Estate Blog barcamp next weekend. And you can sign up to attend too!

The key is following the plans of those who share your interests.

Where the real estate guru is

Second, I can imagine recruiting clients into Plancast to have them follow you. You can then simply lay out open houses, broker tours, or even just the houses you’re showing privately to clients. Show them what’s out there, what you are seeing, then let them ask questions.

Or, a more informal use would be simply to let folks in your Facebook or Twitter networks know that you and a few colleagues will be having drinks at the local watering hole on Friday and can answer any real estate questions they may have if they want to join.

What’s the catch?

Plancast is one of those apps that only really works well if others adopt it too. The good news is that it is catching on, and now they have an iPhone app to use on the go.

You can sign up for Plancast from scratch at their website. Or you can sign up using your Facebook or Twitter accounts, which would make it easier to get an instant network going.

  • Get new posts via email
  • Subscribe
Tags: , , , , , ,      Categories: Intero Cool Apps

Cool Apps: A Cure for Social Media Schizophrenia

By John Thompson | September 17th, 2010 0 Comments

If you’re out there on the social web communicating, connecting, branding, selling, you’re no doubt on at least a few – if not several – social networks like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Foursquare. Manage these networks for a day and you suddenly see the need for an application that can help you pull them altogether like HootSuite or Tweetdeck.

The market for these third-party apps just keeps getting bigger – which is great for agents who may be looking for a good solution to keep it all organized. After all, the goal still is to sell real estate, not to spend all of your time figuring out your online social circles, who’s saying what and who’s responding to your messages and links.

The latest to come out is from Seesmic, which last week released a new version of its Seesmic Desktop application. The new desktop app allows users to log in to more accounts from one dashboard and customize activity through plugins for various other applications.

At launch, the available plugins will enable you to connect with Google Reader, Ning, TwitPic, Salesforce and even Zappos, to name a few. Seesmic also has set up a plugin marketplace where presumably more will be created.

The Seesmic Desktop app is all about customization, which offers users like us a lot of flexibility in terms of what we want to see and do. This enables you to pull in everything you want and get rid of everything you don’t want – making it a sort of “Swiss Army Knife” for social applications. This is really what makes it different from say TweetDeck, which is a great app for pulling in multiple Twitter and Facebook accounts, but wouldn’t presently support something like Google Reader for your news feeds.

The key with social media is to try new things, test them and adjust accordingly. But as I mentioned, as real estate agents we really can’t spend the whole day logging into several different sites. The new Seesmic Desktop has a lot of promise to be the one social app you’d need to log into. Let everything else come to you there.

  • Get new posts via email
  • Subscribe
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,      Categories: Intero Cool Apps

Cool Apps: Kick Some Oomph into Your Social Media

By John Thompson | August 13th, 2010 0 Comments

You’ve sat through a few workshops about using social media in real estate. You may already be tweeting, Facebooking, Friendfeeding. You’re digging in, trying new things, seeing what sticks.

By now, you may be realizing that your tweets and updates can get lost online as quickly as a single raindrop disappears into the ocean. You’re thinking: OK, now I’m doing it, but how do I break through all this noise?

This may not be what you want to hear, but how about trying another app? One that allows you to schedule your tweets in advance, track keywords, automatically follow those who follow you. One that helps you make the most of social media while not sacrificing all of your time. See, the thing about social media is that you try, try, try again, but that you also test, see what works, test, see what works, test, see what works.

SocialOomph is an app that can help you organize your social stream. It might be that you’re tweeting the right things, but at the wrong time. Or it might be that your tweets are not connecting to the right conversations – i.e., that the right people aren’t noticing them because they lack hashtags or keywords.

SocialOomph offers a way to get some insight into your twitter activities. It can also help you build your following by auto-following those who follow you, and direct messaging new followers.

The free version allows you to schedule tweets, track keywords and click-throughs, and create an extended profile, among other things. (See the full list of SocialOomph’s free features at the company’s website.)

The professional membership offers, in addition to the free features, the ability to find friends using keywords. You can also find influential followers – which are important as most people agree that it’s better to have fewer followers who are influential than more followers who are not influential. You get automatic spam controls and the ability to bulk upload and schedule a large number of tweets.

So you see – it may seem laborious to use yet another app for your social media outreach, but SocialOomph can really help you get the most of your activities in less amount of time.

Then you can spend more time doing what you love – selling real estate! And hopefully have more clients to work with in the process.

  • Get new posts via email
  • Subscribe
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,      Categories: Intero Cool Apps

Cool Apps: Get A Handle On The Soc-Med Game with Postling

By John Thompson | May 21st, 2010 0 Comments

There are lots of opinions on Social Media and how it can be employed to promote business and engage with our customers. One thing upon which we can all agree, however, is that it can be enormously time-consuming. A time-suck, if you will.

Twitter. Facebook. LinkedIn. Yelp. FourSquare. YouTube. Tumblr. Flickr. How are we supposed to stay on top of it all and still, you know, do our jobs?

Postling is here to help.

Postling saves you time and frustration. Period. Postling endeavors to help you make social media engagement more efficient. It monitors your presence, and provides you one hub through which you can update your WordPress blog, Facebook fan (or profile) pages, Twitter…you name it. No longer do you need to log into different social media sites every day. Postling does all the work for you. In two simple steps, publish your blog post to your blog(s), then update your Twitter and Facebook status with a link and custom message.

Postling offers unrivaled information curation.

Now partnered with Collecta, Postling will give small businesses a way to track search terms and see its mentions on blogs, in mainstream media, and on social media sites. In addition, they’ve created a custom RSS feed reader, so that you can monitor competitors or blogs that are of interest to you and your business. From Postling, you’ll be able to tweet, comment or post to your blog.

And all of this will happen in real time. Pretty cool, right?

Some of the best features of Postling are the ability to monitor as many different accounts as you like, as well as a great community support feature, to which you can turn for advice when you really need it.

You want to know what people are saying about your business. You want to know what they’re saying right away. Postling will help you listen.

Postling is the tool for small businesses to get a handle on their social media usage. It’s not built for the big boys, it’s built for you and me. Check it out today!

  • Get new posts via email
  • Subscribe
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,      Categories: Intero Cool Apps

Cool Apps: What Do You Like?

By John Thompson | April 30th, 2010 0 Comments

It’s official. Facebook is taking over the world.

A couple of weeks ago, they made a subtle change. You may have noticed that where you once became a “fan” of a particular page, you suddenly “liked” it. At first, this didn’t seem like a big deal. But it was. And it is. BIG.

Last week at its F8 developers’ conference, Facebook announced some changes that will dramatically change the way that people interact online. The biggest part of the changes is something that Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO, calls “Open Graph”. Open Graph is a new platform that will allow websites to blend their users’ social experiences. They’ll take the information that they have about your likes and dislikes, and make a customized online experience for you.

For example, if you have a Facebook profile and you visit Pandora.com, a popular music service, you’ll find that they are able to recommend playlists for you, based on artists that you’ve “liked” on Facebook. Similarly, if you visit CNN.com, you’ll see if any of your friends have visited the site and recommended news stories that they’ve found helpful. When you click the “like” button on these pages, that activity will be posted to your Facebook profile. It’s pretty nifty.

Now, what this means for each of us, personally, is a big question. Whether to opt in or out of the instant personalization functionality — deciding what you do and do not want to share — is a personal choice, and an important one.

What it means for businesses, however, is, as I said earlier, big.

The “like” button, which you’ll see popping up on sites all over the place (if you haven’t already), is exceedingly simple to add to your own website (if you have someone manage your website, they can make the addition in about 5 minutes’ time). It’s a simple addition that has the power to expose your site or business to vast numbers of people who mightn’t have been aware of it before.

When one of your Facebook friends “likes” any of your blog posts (or any other items to which you’ve added the “like” button), that activity will be posted on their personal profiles and in the news feeds of their friends.

This new functionality is controversial, make no mistake, but the possibilities that it opens for businesses are myriad and fascinating.

  • Get new posts via email
  • Subscribe
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,      Categories: Intero Cool Apps

« Older Entries