As you know, part of internet marketing is testing, and testing some more. So we did a test using a relative new property listings address using a few different sites. These include Tackk, Word Press blog post, Twitter, Tumblr, Craigslist, Postlets, Youtube, Pinterest, and Friendfeed.
We left out Facebook because individual Facebook postings do not rank well, or at all in Google because you have to be logged in to physically see it.
Our focus had nothing to do with any branding, but ranking the property addresses only because more, and more people type in, and search for specific addresses looking to find additional information.
First, unless you have a simple share button somewhere, Tumblr has lost its mojo. It has become a spammers haven, and lost a lot of love in the eyes of Google. But, it is quick, you can get a link back, and you can post pictures so if you have an account, and a system, it falls under the "might as well" catagory.
Twitter used to rank fast ... not any more. It did get indexed with in 24 hours, but stalled on page 4 or 5 with its property address rank. Twitter is one of those I would use an account for branding, and an account to post properties on if you do not want your listings on your personal Twitter account. Almost everything has a syndication button, or check box to forward information to Twitter so it is easy to use and send additional information to.
Postlets also does not seem to rank as well as it used to. It is nice to have an account here, has multiple places you can syndicate your property information to, along with a Craigslist embed code. You can repost expired listings with a click, which is a nice feature, along with many others. But as far as ranking fast, it is now falling short.
Pinterest showed up fast, but peaked on the middle of page #2, and slide to page #3, or #4 with our listings. It is super fast to post a picture of your property, add a description, and edit the picture to be a clickable link back to your direct listings. We have had 5 click throughs from here so far, and is growing, so I would say worth it.
Craigslist is an odd creature when it comes to ranking. It seems highly geo-targeted, meaning listings near where I live may show top three, but it may not rank at all for someone doing the same search in a different part of the country. Also there were times it popped up in the top three, and sometimes nothing at all. Still, we posted 7 properties to Craigslist (Since Monday, today is Wednesday morning), and have had 22 click throughs from CL to our site. You can also repost your properties, so when you get them all in, you can repost them all every three days with a simple click. Considering the traffic you get, this is a no brainer to do.
Tackk ranks excellent, and fast. You can add buttons at the top to entice click, add pictures, videos, maps, contact forms, and more very, very quickly. It also has a share section to send to many additional social media sites. An example of how well it ranks
Active Rain is not allowing me to upload a picture, so here is a link :http://pinterest.com/pin/314407617705697479/
With in a day, it ranked #1 and is still there above Zillow, Trulia, and all the others. We posted 10 properties and have had over 100 visits to our Tackk boards. We have not perfected the page to optimize click throughs to our main site ... but that is another test.
Simple Word Press blog posts still do great. You will see in the picture link that right below Zillow is the Word Press individual post. The blog is new, it is a subdomain, it has no optimization plugins (SEO, sitemaps, or etc), no links were done, yet it still ranks in the top #3 as did all our posts. Now I could write a novel on using Word Press alone, but buttom line ... you need to have a Word Press blog somewhere whether it is paid on a new domain, or a subdomain on another site.
And lastly, what ranks the best everytime is a Youtube video. Example here :
Google owns Youtube, so they love it. You can pretty much be top three in a couple days with no effort. There are tons of video software out there to make videos fast, we just used sparkol.com for ours.
In summary, with just testing, we got close to 200 people either viewing our social media properties, Craigslist, or our main site itself.
If you were to take a small block of time everyday to post your properties to just the places we mentioned above you would increase your client base.
As always, let me know if you have any questions.
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