8 basic steps for Jamaican Realtors to Get Started on Twitter and Increase their Visibility
3:50 AM Posted by Stephanie Treasure
Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author's profile page and delivered to the author's subscribers who are known as followers. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications. While the service itself costs nothing to use, accessing it through SMS may incur phone service provider fees.
As a marketer, my advice is to be visible and active in social media and use it to leverage your visibility, leverage your offline marketing efforts, to connect with your audience or target market wherever they are (and they are indeed on one social media platform or another). So get involved, get interactive and get more business.
Here are some basic steps to get started:
1) Go to Twitter.com and click on sign up Go ahead and sign up and be sure to use your real name, a Twitter username that is either close to your real name, represents your brand/product/service in a simple and clear way. So ‘TheActionMaven’ or ‘John Doe’ is good, but ‘Act1234’ is not descriptive enough. This is important because once you start building your Twitter followers, you want to be recognizable and consistent across all your social media platforms.
2) Once you sign up, the next thing to do is to adjust your settings First, go to notifications and uncheck, ‘send an email when someone starts to follow me’ and ‘send an email when I get a Direct message’. Twitter is a fast-growing social media platform. It’s easier to find random people, celebrities or people doing business in your niche than it is to do the same thing on Facebook. And there are people on this platform that directly monetize Twitter with Affiliate marketing programs and the like. These people make it a part of their day to mass follow Twitter users. There are programs and software that are structured to do help them do just that. So once you are on Twitter, you will find people following you that you don’t know. These emails can be annoying because you can receive 20 and more unsolicited followers per day. That is alot of email to go through.
3) Profile Next is to customize your profile. As you know, Twitter is a micro-blogging platform. So Twitter updates and even your profile has to be kept under 140 characters. Write something descriptive about your business or your brand, maybe a mission statement. Try to make it sound results-oriented or solution-oriented so that as soon as someone in your niche sees it, they will say, ‘That’s just what I need!’ For instance, ‘Successful Jamaica Real Estate Sales Consultant committed to finding the best deals for my clients. I focus on a win/win solution for all.’
4) Website Include your website URL in your profile in the space allotted for Website or URL. This is important for branding and promotional purposes along with your profile. It is also helpful for your website page ranking, the factor that helps your website to get found on the search engines. To optimize your profile and help users to see your website easier, enter your website in the format, http://yourwebsite.com instead of http://www.yourwebsite.com Test the former to make sure it actually goes to your website when clicked.
5) Follow people in your niche There are many Twitter Directories out there. Do a Google search for Twitter Directories and then use one or two of them to find followers using your most popular keywords for your niche. You can also do a twitter search for #hashtags related to your niche and follow the people that are using them. Hashtags are keywords preceded by the '#'to categorize tweets, i.e. #jamaicarealestate Hashtags are most commonly placed at the end of a tweet but it is not a rule.
6) Set up automatic sharing on Twitter If you do article marketing, video marketing and if you have a blog, you can customize your settings to update your twitter status every time you update those networks. You can also set up automatic Tweets through Hootsuite.com or SocialOomph I use the latter to send motivational quotes at specific intervals throughout the day.
7) Start getting interactive ReTweet, comment or share links with the people in your niche. Motivational quotes are very common and tend to get ReTweeted quite a bit. ReTweets and @ mentions are great for exposure to other people’s networks which helps to increase your followers.
8) Promote your Twitter Profile Include a link or note on your website, blog or other social networks inviting people to follow you on Twitter.
Twitter is a powerful micro-blogging social media tool that provides an avenue to build your brand and increase your virtual visibility. It’s fun, interactive, but can be time-consuming. Decide on a schedule for you or your company’s participation and then be consistent with it for optimum benefit.
Build it and they will come?
12:50 AM Posted by Stephanie Treasure
1) Pay per click advertising Have you noticed those sponsored links on websites or in your Gmail account if you have one. It is usually related to the website you are browsing or the topic of the email you are reading. You can have your company featured in those sponsored listings too. The most popular Pay-per-click program is Google Adwords. These programs are fully customizable for cost and for geographic area, keywords, etc. For instance, you can stipulate how much you want to spend per day or per month or per click. You can also specify which geographic area to display your ads. And you can drill down further to specify they keywords relevant to your Ad and for which you want your Ad to be displayed.
2) Website Optimization You can use keywords in your website content that are most popular for your market. In this case, some of those keywords are: “Jamaica Real Estate”, “Real Estate Jamaica”, “Jamaican Properties” and more. But don’t take my word for it. You can do a quick research for this using a free tool called, Google Adwords Keyword Research Tool. This tool tells you what people are searching for and what keywords or keyword combinations they use most.
3) Submit articles to Article Directories An underutilized tool by the Jamaican Real Estate Industry players. I heard someone in an online Teleseminar say recently that ‘underutilized’ translated means ‘opportunity’ You can take a look at my submissions to EzineArticles.com, the most popular article directory here, Jamaica Real Estate Guide Articles This gives you an opportunity to link back to your website, which helps your site to get found quicker by the search engines, this more web traffic.
4) Submit press releases Send out press releases when you have added a new Real Estate Sales Consultant to your staff, new person on the Board of Directors, changed locations, redesigned your website, received an award, made a significant donation to charity and more. One of the most popular online press release services is PRWeb. But there are also Jamaican and Caribbean specific online press release services. Two of them are Jamaica Press Release and Caribbean Press Releases
5) Exchange website links One of the best ways to increase your website’s popularity is to exchange links with similar websites in your industry. Exchanging website links means to place a web link for another company on your website in exchange for a placement of your company’s web link on their website. Hope I did not lose you. For instance, www.JaRealEstateGuide.com has a Broker Directory page with links to Jamaica Real Estate brokers. Some of those brokers have kindly and smartly reciprocated with a link to the Jamaica Real Estate Guide. Some of those brokers are La Maison Property Services, Declan Real Estate and Howard Johnson Realty. This does two things for companies that actively engage in link exchange: 1) It adds value to the web visitor who sees your links page with helpful resource links to other companies in the industry; 2) It increases the ‘credibility’ of both websites, as Google and other search engines, rank websites high based on the number of links pointing to it. For instructions on linking to our website, click here
6) Offer a Newsletter When you offer a newsletter to your website visitors, it encourages them to come back to your website and refer others as well if your content is good.
3 Simple Tips to Engage Your Website Visitors
12:08 AM Posted by Stephanie Treasure
2) Build Rapport First you need to have a lead-generating system on your website. It can be a sign-up form for a newsletter [recommended] or a simple contact form for property inquiries or general real estate related question. Then you need to keep in touch via a newsletter which can be sent out weekly, bi-weekly or monthly.
Alternatively, blogs are a very effective way to build a rapport without or in addition to having an email list and subsequent newsletter. How do you know what to blog about? In addition to the obvious topics to blog about like industry news or updates, you can make a list of the most frequently asked questions by prospects for one week. Write a blog post about each one.
3) Make your website easy to use Design your website with your prospective web visitors in mind. Simple navigation system so that web visitors can find their way around easily. People browse websites differently than how they read print. They scan very quickly and don’t have time to figure things out. Try to put yourself in your prospect’s shoes and browse your website to make sure you can find things easily and quickly. Are you attracting returning residents? Do you have information on your website that may help a returning resident? Ensure you have information on your website that will help each user type. That means general information for first-time homebuyers, investors, returning residents, sellers, etc.
These are just general tips that are relatively easy to implement. Give them a try and see for yourself. At the very least, take a look at your website’s effectiveness or lack thereof and see how you can improve it. The time you invest on this now can mean increased leads and listings down the road.
Top 5 reasons for Jamaican Realtors to Blog
11:58 PM Posted by Stephanie Treasure
1) Build credibility If you have a blog outside of your corporate website, it helps to build trust and credibility among prospects or leads. Typically, the corporate website contains static information about your company, team, listings, etc. However, a blog allows you to be more conversational and provide valuable information.
2) Makes you seem more real In other words, more approachable. It puts a voice on your business. Blogs have the distinct functionality of inviting visitors to make comments on your blog posts and everybody likes to be heard. This adds tremendous value and creates a community type of environment. It’s also the easiest way for people to start a dialog with you or your business. So when you do speak ‘in real life’, it’s as if you already know each other and the formalities are already out of the way. Then you can get right down to business. [Quick side note: Let me know that you are real too, leave a comment on this or any other blog post that moves you. I would love to hear from you!]
3) Lead generation Getting website traffic to a blog can be easier than a website because the search engines rank blog posts with valid content higher. Once you have a blog set up and post on a consistent basis you will see a surge in traffic to your corporate website as long as they are linked. Of course, the smart thing to do is to capture these leads via a sign-up form for a newsletter because the fortune is in the list. You can send property alerts, updates and a newsletter to an email list and keep them in ‘your space’ as a ready market.
4) Position yourself as an expert Blogs are a platform to express your views, demonstrate your knowledge and provide expertise on Jamaica real estate industry issues. If you are very vocal on the issues and post regularly about them, prospects will view you as an expert in the industry, which means more business.
5) Sets you apart from competitors How is your firm different from the hundreds of others in the industry? Why should prospective clients do business with you? A blog can help to bridge the gap towards differentiating your firm from your competitors. A blog gives your readers insight to who YOU are and what YOUR firm is all about.
So how do you get started? Well you could get started tomorrow if you’d like using a free platform like Blogger or Wordpress If you want a unique domain name, you can get that inexpensively at GoDaddy.com In terms of design, you can go very basic, minimal branding and get decent blog themes for free or you can incorporate branding and premium themes quite inexpensively as well.
I use Wordpress for a personal blog on a unique domain with a free theme (still under construction but I will provide you with the link at a later date). I use Blogger for the Butterfly Publications blog using a free theme called Revolution.
With regards to updating, you will have to decide on a schedule and stick to it. This can be once a week, bi-weekly or Monthly. However, some email newsletter programs like Aweber actually allows you to do what is called, Blog Broadcasts at scheduled intervals with some minor programming. The idea is to write a series of blog posts and input in Aweber to be delivered on the dates and times you set.
If you are interested in consulting services to start your blog and get it up and running, please contact me directly here.
Happy Blogging!
Jumping on the Online Video Bandwagon
4:52 AM Posted by Stephanie Treasure
Going back to online and social media marketing methods, video marketing comes to mind. Search engines tend to index video content higher in the search results. Also, there is no denying that people are watching online videos more than ever. An August 2008 study by eMarketer estimated that 129 million people watched online videos at least once a month.
Here are 7 points to help you develop your own Online Video Marketing Campaign:
1) Ensure the video covers the key points your target audience is looking for. Include the key selling points about your company, vivid images, contact info or website and a call to action. The good thing about online video is that people usually don’t care about whether your video has high production quality like a television show. They will choose content over quality.
2) Post your video on your website and across other video sharing sites. If you have several videos, show one on your website and include a link to your YouTube Channel. Also, in order to help optimize your website for the search engines, it’s good to have the videos on other websites with a link pointing back to your company’s website. Some other video sharing sites include Metacafe, Vidilife, Revver, Yahoo Videos and more.
3) Ensure that people can find your videos by using keywords / tags effectively, plus keyword rich titles. So if you have made a video about a listing in Barbican, your keywords could be “Barbican home in Jamaica for sale, Barbican Jamaica House for Sale, Jamaica Real Estate in Barbican”. You should include your company name in the keywords as well.
4) KISSS Keep it Short, Simple and Sweet. This is key for online videos due to slow connections which make it difficult to watch a long video and short attention spans when it comes to online videos. Two to three minutes is adequate.
5) Refresh your videos Keep updating your YouTube channel with newer videos. Even if you don’t have any new properties to showcase, you can tape customer testimonials from time to time.
6) Network within the online video community. Subscribe to other related YouTube Channels, befriend other users, etc. You can view and subscribe to the Jamaica Real Estate Guide channel here.
7) Tie in your online video marketing campaign with other online or social media efforts. If you have a Facebook Fan Page or Group, corporate blog, MySpace page or Twitter account, then you should promote your videos there too.
Top 10 Tips for Real Estate Agents Using Twitter
2:10 AM Posted by Stephanie Treasure
Social media is here to stay and everyone’s using Twitter. But if you’re worried about how to best use it, here are propertyadguru.com’s Top 10 Tips for Real Estate Agents Using Twitter:
1. Understand what Twitter is and plan before you tweet. Twitter is about posting short updates of less than 140 characters, which have been described by some as a little like a mobile phone text messages for the web. It’s all about telling your followers about what you’re doing at that moment. Look closely at examples of how others use it.
2. Every word matters. You only have 140 characters, think carefully about how you choose to spend them… Consider using
3. Personalise your Twitter account, but keep it professional. Make sure to think business and include all your relevant contact details in your profile, choose a relevant name, add a photo, include a short bio and make new friends or follow other relevant businesses using the “find people” function.
4. Tweet. You can’t just sit there – you need to be active. Twitter is social – so participate, and find your Twitter voice. Read propertyadguru.com’s article on Twitter: to tweet or not to tweet.
5. You need to be followed, and follow. But remember: it’s about quality, not quantity. There’s no point having the most followers if they’re not remotely interested in what you’re doing.
6. Think big and be creative with your Tweets. No one will care much for hearing about what you ate for lunch, but they might be keen to know you sealed a big deal, or have a great new property for sale. Whatever you tweet should be newsworthy.
7. Don’t overdo it. Think about the frequency of your posts. Nobody likes a spammer and the aim is to keep your social network alive and expand it through Twitter, rather than annoying people.
8. Learn the Twitter commands. Using the @ symbol before someone’s username is a reply and the user will receive notification. Using the # means it is tweet about a certain topic or event (#icny is Inman Connect New York). You also have the facility to send and receive direct messages that don’t show as a public tweet.
9. Think about how you can best use extra Twitter related applications. There are many such as: tinyurl.com, budurl.com, tweetdeck.com, twitterfeed, Twitter for mobile, twitpic.com, ffwd.com’s Twitter Connect for Video, or Facebook’s Twitter function.
10. Keep up-to-date with some of the fantastic twitter advice sites. twitip.com is jam-packed with useful information. UK comedian Stephen Fry has even been advising on Twitter best practice (and he should know, he has 100,000 followers).
But overall, just enjoy it.
You can follow us here at http://www.twitter.com/jarealestate
Originally published by Property Ad Guru
