Post your REALTOR.com listings on your Facebook page

Now you can post the listings that your MLS sends to REALTOR.com on your Facebook profile.  If you are a Real Estate Agent and a member of NAR you can now easily put your listings on your Facebook profile.

With the SeeMyListings.com Widget you can place your listings on your Facebook profile page.

NAR has created a listing widget to place your listings on your Facebook profile.  The process is very simple.

1:  Go to www.SeeMyListings.com.

2:  Click on “Add My Listings”.

3: If you are not logged into Facebook, you will be asked to login.

4: You will not get the “Allow Access” screen.

5: Click “Allow” to allow seemylistings.com to install the widget to your Facebook profile.

6: Enter your MLS provider and MLS Agent ID#.

7: Click the “Continue” button.

8: If you entered the correct information you will see;

X homes for sale by YOUR NAME

MLS:	MLS Name
MLS ID:	Your ID

9:  Click on “Add to Profile” and your listings will be added to your profile.

10: That’s it, you are done!

In under 10 minutes you can easily display your REALTOR.com listings to your Facebook profile. The best part of it is that your listings are automatically updated.  If someone clicks on a listings they are taken to the listing detail page on REALTOR.com.

For those Agents who are looking for a more branded solution and one that does not click out to REALTOR.com, thus exposing your buyer to other agents, RE/Advantage is working on a widget to allow any Agent Central Max client to have a custom branded widget on their Facebook page which clicks out to your own website.  If you would like more information please contact us and we will keep you posted.

Good luck if you give this a try and let me know how you did.  Send me your Facebook page and maybe I will share your page on my follow-up post.

Twitter and StalkDaily.com Worm Virus

By now most of the Twitter users probably heard Twitter was hit with a potentially harmful virus.

For those who did not see the posts around the net here is what basically happened.

Twitter profile pages are being infected with cross site scripting (XSS) attack. What this really means is that Twitter profile pages are being compromised by hidden javascript. When you visit an infected profile page, this script runs and infects your Twitter account. The script then send Tweets out to your followers to visit StalkDaily.com. The virus also inserts itself into your bio pages, allowing your bio page to become a host to infect others.

StalkDaily had said they are not the orginator of the attack.

If you are infected do the following:

1. Go to your Twitter account settings and switch your bio back to the normal setting.

2. Clear out your cache and cookies from your browser.

3. As a precaution, change your Twitter account password.

Twitter was pretty fast on knocking this down and posted this their status page:

Earlier today we were informed of a malicious site that was spreading links to StalkDaily.com on Twitter without user consent via a cross-site scripting vulnerability. We’ve taken steps to remove the offending updates, and to close the holes that allowed this “worm” to spread.

No passwords, phone numbers, or other sensitive information were compromised as part of this attack.

Blog Commenting

I wrote a post a few weeks ago on why we should comment on blogs. The blog I maintain is very relevant to the Real Estate industry so the moral of the story was to take sometime and begin to comment. I even offered a reciprocal comment.

So now when we do comment, how should we go about doing it?

Here is my short “NOT” list..

• Don’t leave short comments like “Great post” or “I agree”, include a link and think you accomplished your job.
• Make sure your comments are of value.  Take some time to write a clear post that is grammatically correct.  Don’t leave unprofessional posts.  Remember this is a reflection of you.
• Don’t stuff keywords in your post.
• Don’t mass comment all at once across a single blog.
• Don’t use the same comment across multiple blogs to try to spam your way to success.
• Don’t advertise on your comments like “I have this great site where you can purchase…”.

Use commenting for what is was meant for, engaging the conversation.  Spend a bit of time and make a quality post, show the world you are a professional, gain some credibility and commenting will be a successful use of your time.

Setting up Google Alerts

 

 

As promised here is the follow-up to my post on “Can Google Alerts Help The Agent?“

Now that we explored how you might be able to use Google Alerts let begin to talk about setting up your alerts.

In order to use Google Alerts you must have a gmail account.  If you do not have one please go to www.gmail.com and get one.

No that you have your gmail account you need to login to your alerts.  You can go here to directly login or if you have used any of the google tools you can login to your account directly as well.

To login directly to Google Alerts go to this page http://www.google.com/alerts.

(Note: If you have an existing Google account go to google.com and click on the “My Account” link at the top of the page.  Login to your account.  If you never used Google Alerts go to the section “Try Something New” and select it.

Once you login you’ll be at the manage your accounts page.  Click on the “New Alert” button to create a new alert.

1: Deceide on your Search Terms

The first thing you need to do is choose your search terms.  This is the word or words Google will search on.  For this example I will use; “Giants Football”

2: Choose the Type of Alert

Now you need to choose the type of alert.  Your choice are; News, Blogs, Web, Comprehensive, Video, and Groups.

Depending on what you are looking for here is an explanation of each type:

•  A ‘News’ alert is an email aggregate of the latest news articles that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google News search.
• A ‘Web’ alert is an email aggregate of the latest web pages that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top twenty results of your Google Web search.
• A ‘Blogs’ alert is an email aggregate of the latest blog posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Blog search.
• A ‘Comprehensive’ alert is an aggregate of the latest results from multiple sources (News, Web and Blogs) into a single email to provide maximum coverage on the topic of your choice.
• A ‘Video’ alert is an email aggregate of the latest videos that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Video search.
• A ‘Groups’ alert is an email aggregate of new posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top fifty results of your Google Groups search.

For now let’s choose “Comprehensive” which will yield results from Web, News, and Blogs.

3:  Select a Delivery Method

Now choose how you waned it delivered.  You can receive an email or it can be outputed to an RSS feed.

Next you need to choose how often you want results.  The frequency you select when you set up your alert determines how often Google checks for new results, not necessarily how often you’ll receive alerts. If you select “once a day,” Google will check for new results once a day, which means you’ll get a maximum of one email per day. If you choose the “as it happens,” Google will check for new results continuously and send you an alert whenever they find a new result.

4: Create Alert

Then simply click “Create Alert” and you are done.

Summing it up

So setting up alerts is fairly simple, the trick is using the correct search terms and type to yield results that are useful.  When thinking of what term you want to search on be specific.  For example Arizona would probably give you everything from Arizona news headlines to Arizona Iced Tea.  A better term would be Arizona Scottsdale travel or New Jersey wine tasting.

Also if you are looking for current events you might want to choose only the news alerts  instead of adding the web and blogs.  Also add a separate one for video if you want to see what is being posted for video.

The real trick is to play with the type of alerts and the search terms.  After a bit of practice you can really gain some insightful information out of these free alerts.

Get a web strategy, not a website

I have clients ask me all the time; “I have a website and IDX but I do not get many leads”.  That sound might resonate to many of you out there but their is a real good reason why this happens.  Websites today are more than just a bunch of pages, they are a strategic marketing platform.  Today’s websites are more than just pretty pictures and when attention to detail is not paid, most people have poor results.  Take a look at this list.  How many items do you consider in your web marketing strategy.

1. You need to engage your prospect.  Failure to do so will simply result in a lost opportunity.
2. Today people demand complete listing inventory.  Yes they want lots of pictures, video and good content on listings. I wrote about IDX in a previous post and how poor quality content destroys the integrity of your inventory.
3. Responding to leads.  Yes it does make a difference if you call/email within an hour vs. 2 days.  Generation X & Y will not tolerate it.  With the advent of cell phones, Instant Messaging, and email, people today want to be connected and connected fast.
4. KISS – Yes the adage Keep It Simple Stupid applies to your website.  Complex pages and searches will turn your audience away.  For the same reason Gen X & Y want to hear from you within 60 seconds, they also don’t want to be bogged down in your website.
5. Social Networking – Now here is a interesting topic for the Agent.  More and more agents are embracing Social Networking but a lot of them are not leveraging it as part of their marketing strategy.  In the 2008 NAR Profile of Home Buyers & Sellers, 44% of home buyers use Social Networking every day.  That is a lot of connecting.
6. My quest would not be complete if I did not mention, Content, Content, Content.  No website can be successful without quality content that is original in nature and is from your market’s perspective.

So what does this all mean?  Well for starters, a website needs some of your time.  Whether you hire a professional or put the time in yourself your website must evolve.  Also you need to have a good marketing plan and budget just as your do for any other marketing project.  Lastly, start connecting, most people are happy with just a website but that is not enough today.  Get involved with Social Networking as part of your web strategy.

So start planning and leverage the Internet to become your next lead machine.

Trackbacks

I get asked all the time what a Trackback is. Here is a post that explains it perfectly. Trackbacks Explained.

The author Teli Adlam provides a really good explaination of how trackbacks and pingbacks are used.