Accelerate Your Real Estate Prospects on Facebook

Many real estate agents claim they are not getting a return from their Facebook profile or fan page. One of the primary reasons is that many agents use Facebook and other social networking sites as a free-for-all promotional platform, using it only to market themselves and their listings.The mere meaning of the word “social” means “not-business.” Your listings, sales, and announcements should be the secondary focus of your social media on your Facebook fan page. Instead, build a local community that your fans will value and recommend to their friends. Here are some ideas to accelerate your prospects and build awareness among your community:

Create a Facebook Fan Page for your
neighborhood or town. Whether you set up a second fan page from your business or decide to start with one fan page, make it all about the community. This will create an affinity among the locals that a business typically can’t.

Post rich content and post often!
On your Facebook Page landing page, highlight articles, photos, videos and links that your fans will value and pass along to their friends. Here are a few ideas:

• Discounts for nearby restaurants, dry cleaners, car wash. etc.
• Home improvement tips
• Local events
• Links to coupon sites such as savings.com.
• Neighborhood garage sales
• Tips on finds at local thrift stores

Promote your listings subtly.
Consumers will feel alienated if you constantly promote your listings. Instead, set up a separate facebook tab on your community fan page for your listings and sales OR link your community fan page to your business fan page.

Monitor comments
Take the time to read and comment on other people’s posts. Give your fans the full freedom to comment and interact, and don’t try to control the conversation. By allowing people to express their opinions freely, you assure that they will come back.

Keeping it Relevant on Twitter

Well, I finally did it. I purged my Twitter account. That's right, I "unfollowed," with a mission in mind.

I have always been a proponent of relevancy, and Twitter is a key component of our PR strategy - giving us that connection and engagement with our followers.

But, quantity over quality was not working for me. I decided to go the opposite route. @floridahalfback was my first account on Twitter - a tourism and relocation specialist in the Southeast U.S. I have created other Twitter accounts for various divisions and clients of Leisure Linx, but I got my feet wet in early 2009 with @floridahalfback. I quickly built my follow list, focusing on the region that this account serves the most. Then I started following my follower's follows (a mouthful in itself). I was quick to follow everyone who followed me, and my follow/follower numbers stayed consistently close in quantity.

But as time went on and I passed the 500 follow mark, I found myself overwhelmed with replies, retweets, clicking links, and going deeper and deeper into these links until I was so far off the mark I had to slap myself awake! Have you ever been driving your car and suddenly realize you don't remember the last ten minutes of driving? Did I stop at the stoplights? Did I really make that turn off that busy exit? I remember none of it, but I know I must have done it well. It's the same feeling with irrelevant social media connections.

I don't know about you, but my time with social media is limited. AND it is very important. But my goal is to  balance my "A" priorities (revenue-producers) with "B" priorities (engagement and maintenance).

So on January 9, 2010, I started unfollowing the irrelevant. It was a bit scary. I was careful at first to only unfollow those that hadn't tweeted in a few months. But as I dug deeper, I reminded myself of the goal to follow those individuals and businesses who are relevant to this Twitter account. I dropped my following count from 710 to 475, a 49% drop - all within about a one hour period. It made me nervous but I was a woman on a mission to get organized so I crossed my fingers and watched the results. Within minutes, my follower count dropped by a few - probably auto-bots. The next day I checked my Twitter Counter results. Still just a handful of drops. All in all, for the first 24 hours I lost 38 followers, and a few days later that total grew to 52. So within the first week I had lost 6% of my followers and yet I was following nearly 50% fewer Tweeters.

Now ten days later, this Twitter account is noticeably efficient and meaningful. I am interacting with related businesses and visitors, retweeting relevant information, and I have more time for my "A" priorities.

I must note that not all of my deleted follows were irrelevant to my overall business, just irrelevant to this account. I subsequently followed these folks from another Twitter account such as @Strategy140.

If you have time on your hands and love to read and research, I don't recommend purging your Twitter account, but in my case it has handed me back a nice chunk of time to know those I follow better, and to engage more efficiently.

Facebook Guide Book by Mashable

Facebook is the world's leading social network, with over 300 million users and more than 900 employees. But how do you get the most out of it? To answer this question and more, Mashable has created The Facebook Guide Book, a complete collection of resources to help you master Facebook.

- Pete Cashmore, Mashable

Thriving in the Post-Media Age

Are You Using Linked In Effectively?

Communicator and LinkedIn expert Chuck Hester discusses how to build your network, contact journalists and look for a job on this popular professional networking site.

Goal Setting that Works!

Have you ever worked all day and have nothing to show for it? Get yourself back on track with some simple goal setting and time management techniques that work:

1. Long Term Goals: Take a look at the big picture. What do you want to accomplish in the next three months? The next year? Be specific and write it down - better yet, use Evernote to keep all your notes in one place.
   
2. Write down three things you must do today in order to advance your long term goals. Keep these tasks in front of you all day. Don't deviate from these tasks.
3. Add two more tasks related to current events but not related to your long term goals. Label these as "if I have time."
4. Eliminate ALL distractions. These time-hogs KILL productivity and creativity:

• Close your email client, and only open it 2-3 times per day
• Shut off Twitter,
  
• Disconnect from the internet entirely (yes, we said disconnect from the internet) at a few points throughout the day.

Review your progress every day. Look at your long term goals and set your short term tasks for the next few days.

Try this method for a day. See what happens, and let us know! We think you will be surprised at how much you can accomplish with simple goal writing and distraction busters.

Americans Want Brands That Inform

The top characteristic US consumers want from brands they like is to improve their knowledge—and the least desirable one is for a brand to “only be visible in store”—according to the “Global Web Index” from Lightspeed Research.

Helping consumers keep up to date on topics that were important to them was also key, followed by being entertaining, becoming part of a daily routine, and informing consumers about the product and the company. Consumers were relatively uninterested in brands that tried to act like their friends. Read more from emarketer...