YouTube is the second largest search engine on the web, yet most REALTORS still haven’t figured out how tap into its traffic. Maybe that’s because their MLS listing sheets can’t play a video? Let’s change that.
If the first thing you do when you meet an old friend for lunch is whip out a copy of your newspaper advertising, you’re probably doomed to failure when it comes to Facebook.
Matthew Ferrara explores how properly staging a home’s unique value proposition can make your listings more competitive in a tough market.
The iPad’s destiny isn’t how it will revive newspapers and magazines, but how it will finally kill off the real estate property listing sheet. Hopefully.
Matthew Ferrara explains how real estate salespeople can grow their business every day by following the low-cost and sustainable Formula of Fives.
Matthew Ferrara offers a radical idea on leads management: Only assign new leads to agents who have a track record of turning prospects into closings. Imagine that!
Prospecting in social media is different than advertising. Here are five ideas about what to say to engage with consumers online.
Facebook’s face lift confusion provides businesses a good lesson in how not to confuse your customers while building your brand.
Are social network games just for fun – or powerful sales tools. Matthew Ferrara explores the Gen X / Gen Y sales potential of Farmville and other social media fun.
Riddle me this: How is it that the industries that charge the least for their products and services seem to have more more advanced technology than those that charge the most? Some time ago, we wrote that REALTORS might want to take a look at how gas stations were using technology to market ancillary products to their customers. Now a year later, my local real estate brokerages still don’t offer any interactive technology to their visitors in the waiting area, but my local veterinarian and shoe store does.
Peter Drucker said that the purpose of marketing is to make sales superfluous. That should come as welcome wisdom to the real estate industry that is comprised of so many reluctant salespeople who won’t telemarket, interact at open houses or even join Facebook (latest numbers show less than 35% of REALTORS with a social networking presence). So what can be done to improve the pathetic listing sheets, the photo-less listings or sea-sick virtual tours that are undermining so many sales? Perhaps a quick art lesson could help.
For many real estate brokers and agents, the hot technology today is social networking. Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter are the “new new thing” for making friends and influencing business. There’s probably no better tools for directly prospecting your marketplace – and maintaining your referral and repeat business base. But let’s not lose sight of the other pieces of the social networking-sphere, notably those technologies that we all take for granted, but may not be maximizing to drive web traffic and sell more homes. Long before there was social networking, there was social bookmarking, a system for recommending cool web content to your friends – and millions of others. The real estate industry should revisit these networks as free systems to drive web traffic without increasing their marketing budgets.
Readers of our column know that we called the beginning of the end of search engines some time ago, when we noted that Facebook and MySpace had already started to generate more ad views and targeted traffic than Yahoo and Google. Unfortunately, Microsoft didn’t seem to have read our post, and went ahead with Bing. Microsoft calls it a “decision engine” and it certainly works differently than the traditional search sites. Yet technology improvements aside, none of the search engine players have considered the basic question: Do people really “search” for things on the internet any more?
Ten Questions with Real Estate Expert Matthew Ferrara By Dianna Kawell Reposted with permission from WCR’s site.Real estate is becoming an increasingly technology-driven industry. Every day, a typical REALTOR® depends heavily on her laptop, GPS and digital camera to get the job done. For what was long believed to be a face-to-face business, 88 percent of REALTORS® now report using e-mail as the preferred method of communicating with their clients.However, REALTOR® Web sites may be the one neglected piece of the technology puzzle. Perhaps, it is because agents see little tangible results from their personal Web sites. In the latest Member Profile from the National Association of REALTORS®, members reported on average just four inquiries generated by their Web sites over 12 months—accounting for just 3 percent of their overall business for that year.In the past year, with members reporting a 14-percent drop in gross income from real estate, these already neglected Web sites have seemingly moved completely to the back burner. NAR is reporting a 20-percent drop in the dollar investment that REALTORS® are making in their Web sites from 2007 to 2008, with the number of REALTORS® who invested zero dollars in their Web sites increasing from 18 [...]
The social networking abuse by REALTORS reached a tipping point yesterday: It seems some virtual tour vendor has made it “quick and easy” to mass-post your tours across multiple networks at once. Oh, goody: REALTORS are about to have no more friends.
