One of the first questions I get asked by an Agent who wants a Custom Facebook Business Page created is “Can you pull in my listings – here’s my IDX Feed”
The answer is No!
"Pretty Please?"
Still No.
Not because I don't want to. You see... Facebook does not like dynamic content in custom tabs and guess what your IDX feed is? Yup! “Dynamic”.
But wait there’s a workaround and a very pretty one at that. The folks over at RealBirdhave a slick application.
If you have a Facebook Business Page and want something like this for yours – just contact me.
This post brought to you courtesy of Mike Mueller. Feel free to ReBlog or ReTweet as you like as long as you credit the source (him). Did you know? He's for hire! He builds Blogs, Graphic Images and Widgets and Facebook Pages and besides… He knows lots of really cool stuff.
The great thing about blogging on ActiveRain is that the community many times helps us with real-world examples - case studies that we could hardly produce ourselves. The collective creativity of the RealBird members - on and off ActiveRain - is way bigger than what we could produce on our own. This was the case with Mike Conner's example of online marketing results with RealBird and this is the case with the next example.
The credit goes to John Slocum of RE/MAX Vancouver. John had a great idea and he actually implemented it with his listing flyer. With his permission I share it here in a form of a tutorial and as an introduction to the power of web analytics segmentation.
Enhance your printed flyer: track views with bit.ly and RealBird
Here is the concept:
Printed listing flyers are passive by nature. You design them, you print them and you distribute them at your property's location. Once you leave the scene, you have no idea where they go. Kids, neighbors or random people take them and eventually many of them discard the flyers. A lot of waste. Hopefully, many interested homebuyers get them too, but there is no way to tell. As opposed to online marketing - where you can track visitors and conversions (the money spent vs. a meaningful action taken) - with offline marketing it is hard if not impossible to measure your marketing activity. Unless of course you utilize the simple technique suggested by John Slocum
What if you could add a special link to your printed flyer with your call-for-action, one that is short and easy to type in, even on a mobile devices? A special link with web analytics capability that can be accessed from any web capable device. If this link is only shared on the printed flyer, you end up having a web analytics segmentation, a technique that can track consumer actions via your printed flyer.
John created a listing website on RealBird and then set up a bit.ly Url for it. I won't link his bit.ly Url here because we do not want mix up web traffic with the traffic through the printed flyer. When designing the flyer, John added a special call-for-action message with the link at the bottom of the flyer as you can see below (the arrow annotation is by us).
The bottom of the flyer links to http://bit.ly/MyCondo2770 Via bit.ly's analytics capability, John will be able to track traffic through this dedicated link by visiting http://bit.ly/MyCondo2770+ (Note the plus sign at the end of the link). It's a simple, but very powerful solution.
You can do this for your own print flyers by following the simple steps below:
Copy your RealBird property website Url to your clipboard
Shorten it with bit.ly - paste the RealBird Url into bit.ly and click "Shorten"
Optionally, using the "Custom Name" field on bit.ly, you can enter your property address to have a vanity short Url. I suggest to add only the number and the street name to keep the Url short. You can of course leave the default bit.ly code as is, but having the street address in the short Url may help with additional branding. E.g. http://bit.ly/streetaddress - Careful here, the Url will be case sensitive. I suggest to use all lower case letters as they will be less likely to mistyped by your clients.
Finally, make sure that you only use this special bit.ly link on your printed flyer, not on the web. Do not share it on any other places, in order to be able to track the traffic from the flyer.
Give it a try, it does not take much extra effort and you will get some special insight using these technologies, a benefit that is not available otherwise.
An excellent case study by Mike Conner about how different Internet and social media marketing techniques can amplify your reach and take your listing beyond the MLS. His RealBird property website for the single family home for sale at 11 SE Rosewood Ct. Shelton, WA 98584 had over 200 hits in the first few days.
A few months ago I was fortunate enough to stumble onto a company called RealBird. As a real estate agent trying to embrace the vast new world of online marketing I was admittedly lost, not knowing where to begin. What RealBird did for me was provide a one-stop place for me to get my listings seen all over the web. I used the tools they provided, added a few ideas of my own, and took off running. The results were fairly immediate with new leads coming in from places I had never even imagined posting listing information. Since that time I have used those same tools to easily obtain new listings I was competing for as well as build an almost overnight huge web presence. I won't go into all the details and features of their system here (but please go check out their website and AR blog!!!) because what I really want to share with you is a real life example of the power their product provides....
This past week I went out on a listing appointment. I didn't know going in if I would be competing for the listing or if it was a slam dunk, so I came prepared. After about 30 minutes of touring the home and conversation I knew the listing was mine. I had barely explained the online marketing I was doing and how their home would have its own personalized website and next thing I knew we were signing listing paperwork.
What happened next is where the magic kicked in....
We weren't going to be officially listing it in the MLS for a few days so I asked their permission to go ahead with some online marketing to create some excitement about the home in hopes of producing a quick sale. I submitted the listing info and created a listing page on RealBird for the home. I followed my usual routine of posting the listing to craigslist, Facebook, my blog, etc. as well as all the sites RealBird automatically syndicates to.
The results were astounding! I had over 200 hits to the listing website within the first few days. Phone calls and emails began rolling in within hours. What topped it all off though, was when I got a phone call from a fellow local agent. This agent explained to me that her clients had found my listing online and were very excited but the agent couldn't seem to find it in the MLS. The implications of this hit me hard....in terms of reaching consumers online, the MLS is no longer the only game in town! Obviously the value of the MLS is still great, due to the data shared amongst brokers. However, the old model for real estate agents of simply having a website with an MLS search function may not be enough in the near future.
The need to spread your online presence to multiple outlets and link it all together is growing rapidly, and RealBird provides that service in a very user-friendly interface. Do yourself a favor and check them out if you haven't already. You can sign up for free on a trial basis and market up to 3 of your listings. Experience the results for yourself!
We started a sweepstakes a few month ago using our RealBird Facebook Page as the platform, and an iPod Touch as the prize. The rules are simple: to participate, just fan our Facebook Page and we'll randomly select one of our Fans as the winner, once we reach 500 total fans. No purchase of any kind is required. You can also help by inviting your real estate friends to fan the RealBird FB Page too. Your chance of winning will not change. Due to rules of the sweepstakes, it always stays 1 in 500, but with your invites, we may get there faster.
We are now in the final stage, with the current fan count at 411. There are only 89 more fans needed. You can participate by fanning our Page on the right sidebar of this blog or visit the RealBird Facebook Page and participate there. There is also a handy invitation tool built into the Facebook platform. Once you are a Fan, you can use the "Suggest to Friends" link on the left side, as shown below. Again, your chance of winning remain the same:
One of the issues we have been working on regarding RealBird's lead capturing functionality was making sure that prospective clients' inquiries actually reach you. Email inquiries and showing requests were sometimes lost in space. Either because of spam filter settings or simply because sometimes emails go unnoticed due to information overload.
In May, 2009 we introduced the Message Archive for RealBird members and started to store all of your prospects' and clients' inquires and even consumer-to-consumer forwards for the RealBird Listing Publisher and the RealBird Property Search services. However, that facility still required RealBird members to log in every now and then in order to see if there are new messages that need attention. While this feature was a big step, in practice, it was still not the perfect solution. One forgets to check the Message Archive or due to the log in requirements just delays it. And we all know that a week old lead is as almost as good as no lead at all.
We needed to do better than that. All the powerful features of RealBird is useless if the leads are missed or go cold for the reasons described above. With this new release, we believe we sold the problem. The RealBird Message Archive now has a handy RSS feed that you can subscribe to with your favorite feed reader. You can add it to your browser toolbar, to your iGoogle browser homepage, Google Reader and even access it from your mobile devices, you name it. Most phones - Blackberry, iPhone etc. - has some sort of RSS reader application so that you can be notified when a new inquiry is submitted through RealBird. There are even services that you can use to receive text messages when this RSS feed is updated.
You can get your own RSS feed in the RealBird Member area under the Message Archive section. See the screenshot below:
Compiled by Larry Cheng, a VC partner of the Boston and London based Fidelity Ventures, the "Global VC Blog Directory" is a quarterly updated list of top 100+ venture capitalists blogs based on their Google Reader subscriber count. To add some value to this post rather than just reposting the top 10 of his list, I included the Twitter account of these VCs. The first link below is a direct link to their blog, the one at the end of each line is their Twitter account.
John Slocum was kind to let us know a few weeks ago that he could successfully post his RealBird property ads on Backpage using the new, high-impact RealBird embed code. Not only BackPage takes the RealBird slideshow code with all its glory, but it also produces very nice search engine ranking for your listings.
Most of you know the value of posting your RealBird single property websites to Craigslist, but I thought it is good to emphasize the importance of posting to Backpage.com as well. With our new RealBird Quick Share tool, it now takes only a minute or so per listings to do so. One of the great features of BackPage is that they then distribute your ads to local newspapers.
The combination of the new high-impact RealBird embed code, Backpage search engine ranking, their distribution to local online newspapers and the new RealBird Quick Share tool looks like a winning combo. It's quick and powerful way of sharing your listing info to even more places.
I am researching the exact list of newspapers that BackPage distributes advertisements to, but the post on Galttech.com says, that BackPage supported newspapers are huge in Dallas, Pittsburgh, LA, Kansas City, Houston, St Louis, and Miami. I'll contact them for a full list and let you know what I found out.
See a few ReaBird ads on Backpage below - active ads at the time of posting this article:
To get started, just enter your listings in RealBird as usual and from the listing management page or via the Quick Share page, post it to Backpage.com with a few clicks. Simple, fast, great-looking and powerful distribution.
Another week, another linkroll. This time it is a list of 5 blogs I am reading on a regular basis for design ideas, trends and insipration. These blogs focus mostly on graphic design, web design and usability/user experience.
As promised, we continue to roll out productivity upgrades to the RealBird Listing Publisher. Here is the second feature which should reduce the time it requires to perform important repetitive tasks such as reposting your RealBird property websites to Craigslist and to social media. The more clicks we save for, the more likely you will actually use the features. So our theory goes ...
Last week, we made a downloadable PDF file available that should help you keep track of repetitive tasks with a simple checklist. The #2 productivity feature we have just released is a Quick Share page that shows your top 100 most recently added or editied RealBird listings on one page with one-click access to the most important sharing codes. Until now, when you wanted to re-post your listings to classified sites that do not allow automatic syndication, you had to log into RealBird, navigate to your listing management page and share the listings from there. The new Quick Share page does NOT require login (there is no private information on the page) hence you can bookmark it with your browser and jump back directly to the sharing page with only one click.
There is a new link called "Quick Share" above your listings - highlighted above on the screen shot.
When you arrive to the Quick Share page, bookmark it with your browser
On subsequent visits, go directly to your bookmarked Quck Share page, no need to go through the first 3 steps again. You will be able to re-post your listings to Craigslist and other destinations with only a few clicks. The page is also optimized to load fast (showing only minimum information) and does not require paging through sets of listings.
Disclaimer: ActiveRain Corp. does not necessarily endorse the real estate agents, loan officers and brokers listed on this site. These real estate profiles, blogs and blog entries are provided here as a courtesy to our visitors to help them make an informed decision when buying or selling a house. ActiveRain Corp. takes no responsibility for the content in these profiles, that are written by the members of this community.
Here is the concept:
-- Zoltan 
-- Zoltan 
;)
;)
