Bradly,

Great article, but I have few questions regarding your information. 

1. 'Social Networking', yes, is a way in which people interact but what is the effectiveness you have found regarding your sales/listing conversions?  Have they increased?  Through tracking are you finding a significant increase in lead generation coming through that source?  Is your website traffic being "funnelled" through there by measuring the trafiic patterns?
2. NAR's study does show the increasing number of buyers using the internet to gather information, and yes about 86% of buyers say they used the internet first.  In relation this over 75% of buyers say they visited Realtor.com first, so shouldn't there also be a serious focus on the use of Realtor.com with all of its features (i.e. enhanced listings, featured listings, etc.)
3. How do you think social networking plays into the statistic that almost 99% of consumers will work with the first Real Estate professional they come into contact with?

Hi BW,

1) I am not a real estate agent so I can not give you any personal information regarding sales and listing conversions, yet there are a lot of agents even around Active Rain that can attest to the power of social networking. Check out the Active Rain Success Stories.

I personally have recieved great response through social networking with real estate proffessionals promoting my services, I am a web site developer specializing in real estate sites, which I have only been promoting this way for the past couple of months. That is actually how I landed writing that article, the owner of MyAgentBook saw some of my posts on AR and asked me to write the article. I am sure you can guess at what kind of exposure that gets me from not only being featured on the front page of MyAgentBook but also by being featured on Realtor.org.

2) I do think that realtor.com deserves a lot of focus but is not in the same ball park as social networking. You have a number of great sites that I think people will start to use. I think that sites like Active Rain and Localism, Trulia and others are important. Social networking on the other hand is a whole different story as you can see from some of the examples in my article about people recieving clients and refferals from sites like Facebook and myspace. Social networking and sites like realtor.com are quite different.

3) Very good question. That is the first time that I have actually heard that statistic. I think that consumers that read agents blogs and are connected to agents via social networking are more informed consumers and the new age market that is more tech saavy. These are the people you are targeting through social networking.

Hi Bradly;

Congratulations and I must say very good article. Keep Posting.

Anthony