Foursquare: Have you checked in?

Foursquare hit the social media scene in 2009 and has gained popularity ever since. With over 25 million users world wide and over 2.5 billion check ins, Foursquare allows users to check in at businesses and public places. Foursquare is a fun social media app but it isn't all fun and games when you consider its business applications

Become the Mayor of your favorite spots
When you check in to a place more times than anyone else you are deemed the mayor of that place. Being the Mayor can give you special things and general notoriety.

Register your office
Setting up your office as a place on Foursquare not only allows you and others to check in at your office giving it online exposure, but allows you to write about your activities like preparing a new listing. It also gives you the opportunity to write tips like preparing your home to sell.

Open House Buzz
Foursquare is a good way to post information about open houses. Sellers and other office agents can comment about open houses and the neighborhood.With Foursquare's ability to forward to Facebook and Twitter, more of your social community can view open house activities.

Connect with your Sphere
Checking in at local stores gives you the ability to see which of your friends are there. Imagine "bumping into" an old friend while shopping! Knowing that they're there gives the savvy real estate agent time to prepare for the casual conversation.

Take a few minutes to sign up for Foursquare if you aren't already using it. The online social community is blending into our face to face contacts making prospecting much easier.

Blogs: Quick and Easy Tips to Increase Readership

Writing and publishing a blog is a lot of fun. It allows the author,using articles photos, and videos, to creatively  develop their online personality. Many bloggers develop an intricate and detailed online personality only to be disappointed at the lack of interaction with their online community.

Here are a few words of encouragement. Whatever you do, don't give up! Try these easy steps to develop a long term group of faithful followers who interact with you through your blog.

• Post - Quit waiting for the perfect article. Take the idea you have and express it. You can always go back later and expand your idea by posting more detailed information. Just Post it!
• Distribute - Make sure your blog posts are shared throughout your online media sources. Remember to use your blog as the hub and sources like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and others as the spokes. These  other social media communities will help you draw in more readers to your blog.
• Engage - Ask questions in your posts. When your readers comment, it is important that you respond. Listen so you can interact. Do this by setting up notifications to your phone or email (or both) so that you are immediately notified when someone comments on your post. By  responding to their comment quickly, you can create a real time conversation.
• Adjust - Analyze and tweak as you go. Watch your statistics and and analytics so you understand what interests your readers most. Post on subjects that have high interest and comments. Stop posting on subjects that have little to now interest.

Enjoy developing your blog and your online community. Keep your blog fresh by updating it frequently. You'll be glad you did!

Mashable Reviews Comscore's Study on Social Network

In a whitepaper title It's a Social World: Top 10 Need-to-Knows About Social Networking and Where It's Headed, dated December 21, 2011, comScore released amazing statistics. Adam Falk of Mashable highlights a few in this video.

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How do we interact in 2011?

To reach consumers it is necessary to understand how people interact today. More than likely, people meet online with 1 in 5 marriages originating from an online introduction. With the likelihood of personal interaction initiating online, a strong, widespread, dynamic, and planned online presence is a must for a real estate professional to grow a successful and productive business.
An online prospecting campaign must include a substantial amount of Facebook. Successful campaigns that create a measureable return on time and dollar investment usually include use of both the personal profile and a business page along with facebook ads.

Recently Facebook incorporated Facebook generated lists to help organize friends into manageable groups. Lists allow individuals to post status updates to specific groups of people allowing a great opportunity to target market. It would be beneficial to post an open house for friends in a specific geographic area. But it may be considered spam to others who live far away from the open house. Lists also allow facebookers to review or watch posts from specific groups of people. Many people today have more Facebook friends than they can interact with. Lists allow people to streamline friends into smaller lists. The smaller groups let posts move slower down the wall so it is easier to pay attention and interact with friends.

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Seven things you need to do to engage your Facebook followers

This is a no-brainer, but were you aware that people buy more when they are engaged? Though I can't source this, some statistics show that consumers spend 20-40% more when they are actively engaged with the salesperson or company.

Do you know why? ...Because buying and selling is emotional

We must move away from one-sided tightly scripted messages to a free form of dialogue with consumers. Creating dialogue and engaging your consumers means you have to know who you’re attracting.

• Ask Questions - Brainstorm a list of questions your followers will find engaging
• Keep it simple and fun - Use videos and photos to attract followers
• Keep an editorial calendar - Plan your posts around themes.
• Create a content grid – Organize your posts into categories: Real Estate, Local Interests,
• Personal Interest, Your website
• Reply to every Like or Comment - Simply, “Thanks for the likes” will suffice.
• Reply to every Share - People want to know that you’ve seen them.
• Measure your success with analytics - Use the basic Facebook analytics or more detailed Hootsuite or Google Analytics to measure your traffic.
  

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Use Video to Innovate Your Marketing

Using video to prospect has several benefits for marketing and prospecting for new business. Consider these:

• First page Google: Video helps move you up the search engines. Video helps create a dynamic website that encourages comments vrom viewers.
• It's Fun!: Creative outgoing people can quickly crank out a video to involve viewers in their website.
• Viewer Friendly: More and more people are willing to spend a few minutes watching a short video than reading a market summary. Do yourself a favor and capture a larger audience by posting a few short videos.

Here are a few ideas to get you started.

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Want to gain followers for your blog or facebook?

Some people come up with the greatest ideas. They're great not necessarily because they're unique but because they're simple and they work.

I ran across a tweet about a blog called My Life, Such as it is.... In a specific blogpost the author, Elizabeth, is running a contest to give away a Thomas the Tank Engine. In order to enter the contest Elizabeth gives several options:

1 Post a comment on her blog
2 Tweet a link to her blog
3 Blog about her contest
4 Follow her blog

For those of us trying not only to post great content but to gain followers, Elizabeth has a remarkably simple idea. I hope she is successful in gaining readers this way. Think about the opportunities available to us to gain authentic followers within our community. Great job, Elizabeth!

Facebook Hits 500 Million Users

Facebook is the third largest country in the world.
Fastest growing demographic group on Facebook - 55 to 65 year old females.
Facebook has more weekly traffic than Google!

As expected, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook surpassed 500 million users today. (Wouldn't it be cool to know that you were the 500 millionth?) Zuckerberg in in his blog, says it isn't about the numbers but about the mission, "to help make the world more open and connected."

To better understand Facebook's mission and to commemorate this milestone, Facebook also announced it's new Facebook Stories, asite to share how Facebook has impaced you and your friends' lives.

In an effort to keep updated on the impact social media has had and presently is having on our lives Erik Qualman has updated his video Social Media Revolution.

Trying to add cool Facebok buttons

Learning new things isn't always easy. If you are watching others and then trying to figure out how they did what they did and then searching and trying to replicate it, it can be difficult. It would be much easier if I actually knew someone who would say something like, "Whoa dude, check this out. It's sooo cool."
Google serching a problem is getting easier and easier.
Today I tried to add a Facebook Like button. My first attempt landed me a I like Milk facebook link. Nice move, Byron! It looked good on my blog though. I learned by searching how to on google and then on facebook that I had to actually create my own application and then copy and paste my coe to my widget on my blog. Sounds hard but it really wasn't. The big deal is actually having the time to figure these things out. Back to "Whoa dude, check this out." I could use a friend like that!

True Social Media Network part 2

Blogging is different. It's somewhat of a neighborhood farm but it's online. It has to be worked and cultivated. Careful planning and continual upkeep will insure long-term results. Like a neighborhood farm, it will take some time to grow.

Amy Chorew writes that the blog should be the hub of online marketing. Daren Rouse says the same thing. He uses Chris Brogans model showing the blog at the center and other social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Flick’r, etc. as sites to send people to your blog for information.

Dan Iampieri is a great youtuber. Take a look at his series, "Andrew buys a House from Dan" He uses youtube to direct customers back to his blog which gives them more information about buying and selling real estate. Dan gives away a lot of information. He's building a base of people who know and trust him.

All these exmples point towards the creation of a social media network with a blog in the middle.

Putting Social Media All Together

Scott Stratten @unmarketing absolutely gets social media marketing; create an online relationship that leads to meeting a person irl (in real life). He uses authentic topics to reach out and engage his audience. He's real, not airing a personality or persona of fictitious matter. Scott is showing who he is and what he has to offer. Watch this video of Scott explaining his #followfive on his blog. In Scott's words, "Stop Martketing and start engaging." Click on the title to watch Scott's video.

Building a Brand and Creating Authenticity

Creating an online personality is an important part of establishing a social network. People need to know, like and trust you before they'll buy from you. In this article Stefan Swanepoel has takes a comprehensive look at setting up an online personality that is credible and authentic. Swanepoel's list is more philosophial than true steps to building the brand but it is definitely worth reading. Take a few minutes to read his article which is linked above.

Why Teens Don't Tweet

Geoff Cook, cofounder and CEO of social networking site myYearbook, wrote this enlightening article regarding Teen activity on several social media sites. Worth the read. Follow the link to his article in TechCrunch.

5 Easy Steps to Prospect with Twitter

Now that your new Twitter account is up and ready to be used, I am sure your are wondering what to post. This important video gives you five quick and easy ways to ensure Twitter will create business for you. Success starts with Activity!

Social Media Marketing Doesn't Work?

I recently saw a presentaton by Poetic Systems sponsored by Friendswood Development. Matthew Hagar read some pretty amazing stats:

Social Media surpassed personal email in online use
4th largest use of a PC
10% of al time spent on the computer is spent on Social Media
13 HOURS of video is uploaded on youtube EVERY MINUTE
Twitter has a 1382% growth rate per MONTH
5 BILLION facebook posts a day
2/3 college grads are social media users
35+ year old is the fastest growing group

What do you do?

Organizing Your Electronic Communications

When computers were as big as rooms and we were all excited about things like Tang, computer aided instruction, Apollo rockets, and Space Mountain we were told that this new computer age would not only improve our lives but also reduce the 40 hour work week. Last week I worked over 60 hours with no days off and worked literally from the time I got up until the time I went to bed. I’d like to find those people who proliferated that lie about computers and kick them right in the shin. They are all probably dead anyway from over being worked…and drinking too much Tang
Technology has moved so quickly to make us all so electronically connected. So much so that we are expected, not only as real estate agents, to be in continual contact with our network or sphere of friends. The constant bombardment of emails, text messages, tweets, and other electronic communication devices has left us without a moment to ourselves.
It is difficult at times to determine how to take control of this constant level of communication that we are expected to keep. There are some things that we can do to reduce some of the clutter and demand of our time. First, when posting electronically to our social network sites make sure the various sites you have link to each other so one post goes to each site within your network. Second, use a posting scheduler like www.tweetlater.com to post your information. Using an automatic posting device like this will enable you to plan your postings for at least a day at a time and even longer. You could for example, research only once or twice a week, prepare a series of posts on a specific topic, schedule the posts, and then have them upload to your twitter site at specifically scheduled times so that it appears that throughout the day or week that you are consistently and constantly updating your sites. You can even review your calendar to post, at appropriate times, about events you haven’t even attended!
Technology and instant communication can at times seem overwhelming and burdensome. Since the computer age seems to be ever advancing and growing in speed, creating greater demands on our time, use these advances and tools to help reduce your stress.