Posts Tagged ‘social media’

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Intero Cool Apps: Why You Should Resist the Urge to Ignore Google Plus

By John Thompson | July 8th, 2011 0 Comments

By now, you’ve likely heard some buzz around Google’s latest big release called Google Plus. Maybe you’ve already gotten an invite and tested it out. If not, you should. I’m going to talk about why and how this new social network can be useful in your real estate business and go over a few basics of the road.

Why oh why do we need yet another social network?

This of course is the first question that comes to mind anytime someone invites you to a new “Facebook” of sorts. The short answer for why Google Plus is worth your time is this: It’s easy to use, takes seconds to set up and gives you the flexibility you’ve been longing for to segment your professional and personal social networking in a meaningful way.

OK, so how to get an invite if you don’t already have one?

The best way is to simply put the word out on Facebook and Twitter. Let your existing network know that you haven’t gotten an invite yet and are looking for one. Chances are high that someone in your circle has gotten in and can send you an invite.

What’s it all about?

The fundamental difference between Google Plus and the others before it is privacy. Google Plus is based on the Google Circles feature, which enables you to share and view content to and from specifically defined groups of people – and no one else. So if you want to share new listings or local housing news with your group of interested local buyers, then your cousins in Minnesota don’t have to be burdened with your irrelevant posts. Likewise, your professional contacts won’t have to see the pics from your summer family reunion.

How is this any different from Facebook’s list feature? Very very different. First, there’s ease of use. Google Circles is simple drag and drop. As soon as you get set up, you start creating your circles and simply sort your contacts into their respective groups. Second, there’s the segmentation of viewing content from these groups. So you’re not getting professional news and marketing tips alongside updates from your family members.

It’s easy to get fatigued by social media and resist the urge to jump on the next big thing that ends up being nothing at all (remember Google Wave?). But Google Plus really shows promise to be the best social web tool of all – especially for those of us who’ve found our personal and professional lives blending, finding it hard to keep up with all the content we want to keep up with due to this very blending.

Reach out and get your invite and start test-driving Google Plus today!

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Intero Cool Apps: Get the Inside Scoop on Your Clients with Flowtown

By John Thompson | June 24th, 2011 0 Comments

You know those names and addresses that line the pages of your real estate email contact list? Do you know who these people really are? Have any clues about them, what they enjoy in life, where they envision themselves living? Or, when is the last time you did a quick reality check on who you think they are?

Without any information (or the right information) about the folks who receive your marketing messages, your efforts are wasted dollars.

Enter Flowtown. It’s a social media marketing platform that enables you to mine your current email lists and figure out where your contacts are active and engaged online. (Could this be the end of aimless Twitter and Facebook campaigns?)

The web app can help you reach your existing contacts in new ways. You’ll know a bit more about them as you gain information about where they’re engaged in public online networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and Flickr. You can get more detailed data about what they’re into.

The only thing Flowtown needs to work is an existing contact list, which hopefully you’ve been cultivating since the day you set foot into the real estate field.

OK, how does this thing work?

1.     Go to Flowtown’s website to get started.

2.     Once you’re in, hook up your contact email list.

3.     Watch as the app prepares an information sheet with data about your clients (based on their public social network activities).

4.     Mine that data for all sorts of useful information like which social networks they use most, which clients have large followings online, their occupations, interests, etc.

5.     Start thinking of how you can better target your marketing to fit your real customers.

Real estate choices are about lifestyle. It’s amazing the kinds of clues you can get about a person’s approach to lifestyle just by analyzing what they’re doing publicly online. (I stress the word “publicly” because this activity could have a Big Brother feel to it, but no one’s privacy is being compromised here because the app is using information gleaned from public sites.)

Once you know more about your clients – past, present and future – you’ll be able to craft stellar marketing messages that really speak to them, not just out-of-the-box real estate marketing that every agent in town is using.

This sounds wonderful, right? But alas … there is a catch. Flowtown is still in early stages and accepting new users only by invite. So to use the service, you have to sign up to be on the invite list and invite a few friends and colleagues along with you.

Bummer, I know. There’s a tad bit of waiting involved.

But cruise on over to the website and get your name in there to test drive this thing. You may be surprised by the results!

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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!

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Cool Apps: Get Custom Social Media Reports with HootSuite Social Analytics

By John Thompson | March 25th, 2011 0 Comments

You don’t know what you can’t measure. If you’re dabbling in social media marketing for your real estate business and not measuring your efforts to draw some conclusions, then you might as well be shouting from a mountain top. You have no idea who’s heard you or who you are influencing with your shouts.

Now there’s a great “all in one” kind of tool to help with measuring your social campaigns. HootSuite recently launched HootSuite Social Analytics to give you real-time views into your social efforts.

HootSuite itself is a social media dashboard that enables you to organize your social media efforts. You can monitor your brand, schedule tweets for specific days and times, assign tasks to team members, update multiple networks at once, and more.

With HootSuite Social Analytics you get deep analytics, enabling you to:

·         Track follower growth for each social profile.
·         Monitor the use of brand keywords.
·         Measure social reach.
·         Get a Twitter account summary.

Choose from more than 30 individual report modules to get your own custom social media report. Then share it with your team if you’re working on a team campaign.

HootSuite offers a free 30-day trial of HootSuite Pro, which gives you access to all the new analytics features. After that, it costs $5.99 per month, which gives you the ability to create one custom report of your choice.

Aside from access to the analytics, HootSuite Pro also offers a number of other features you wouldn’t get from the free account. These include Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, Unlimited Ow.ly stats, custom URL parameters, Klout influence scores, Social Insights access, and batch message scheduling. You can read more about what the Pro plan offers on the HootSuite site.

Add some zing to your social media efforts with HootSuite and HootSuite’s Social Analytics. The ease and insight will provide great value to your social campaigns, sending you on your way to social rock star status.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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Cool Apps: Share My Map!

By John Thompson | June 25th, 2010 0 Comments

In real estate, the most important three words are LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION! This is true for your clients and where they find their homes and it’s true in the way that you do your business — how many times have you heard the word “hyperlocal” in the past couple of years?

In the realm of social/mobile media, location is the name of the game, as well. FourSquare. GoWalla. Yelp! Google Latitude … each of these applications is taking advantage of the hottest trend on the social media block.

Well, now there’s a new player, and this one could have some pretty nifty uses for REALTORS, not to mention lots of other folks.

People, I invite you to Share My Map.

ShareMyMap is a social network paired with a geo-location service. It allows you to create communities based on whatever geographic information is of interest to you. Do you want to make a map of the best restaurants in San Diego? Places where you’ve been on your World Cup trip to South Africa? Or even new home communities in your local market area? See where I’m going with this?

You can make a map of anything you like. Be as broad in scope or pinpointed as you want.

More than just that, though, the service is interactive, so members who are looking for the information you’ve posted can rate or review places they’ve been, and add other feedback, as well.

Whatever sort of local expertise you’d like to promote, you can enhance with an interactive map on ShareMyMap. If you use your creative noodle just a little bit, you’ll see that there are some strong possibilities here.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to seek out the best running trails in my town. What will you look for?

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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!

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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.

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