Oh the drama!

With social media being the rage today, and a full gaggle of people preaching about how they can help you, you have to ask yourself what do I do?

Well what a great question, and I’m not going to answer it for you.  I will give you some thoughts on twitter which you may find interesting.

So the story starts with:

An interesting thing happened to me on my way to the net today! I was doing some reading on the ole Twitter, and ran across a message about Fauxlowers? What is a Fauxlower? Well let me tell you.

It’s a fake follower, someone who follows you just to have you follow back, they have no interest in what you say. Doesn’t that just get your goose! Yeah ok, anyway.

So a number was tossed around something like 62.5% of all twitter followers are Fauxlowers. Which lead into a huge discussion about engagement. Now when I mean huge discussion, it was really me talking to myself, because I work at home with my cat, who really does not care about engagement.

Anyway, if a large percentage of your followers are only following you so you follow them and no one really cares about what you are saying, then have you accomplished anything or are you actually speaking to yourself and your cat. The answer is, sort of and not really.

Take a look at this really technical graph.

What you are seeing here  is a representation of engagement.  The only thing that matters in any marketing effort, especially from social media.

As the number of followers increase the percentage of people who respond decreases.  So if you have 10 followers maybe 1 person responds, 10%, but if you have 1000 followers then maybe 10 respond, only 1%.

So are you better to have a smaller group with a higher level of engagement, Fauxlowers.com says probably, but I say NO.  You still want as many followers as you can get.  I’m going to clarify that, you want as many targeted followers as you can get.  If you’re a Realtor in Miami, you want as many people looking for and living in Miami, as an example.

For two reasons:

1. More followers means more Social Proof that you are worth following and have something interesting to say.

2. More followers still means more engagment. 1% of 1000 is more than 10% of 10.

However, you still need to make an effort to interact, and as your followers grow it becomes a lot more difficult to be personal.  Which is where Twitter Lists comes into play.

What’s the moral here, probably don’t talk to your cat as much.  But if you want more great info about this subject go to Fauxlowers.com and subscribe to the newsletter, they have some great back issues and some good info on what happening in social media.

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I deal with a fair number of companies being in the business that I am in.(which is web marketing, shameless plug)

Most are small businesses that deal within a specific local area. So even though there are opportunities with SEO, we often also look at the other forms of marketing they use to reach and communicate to both current and prospective clients.

I call it mining. Because, not every person is looking for your service, you need to dig for your client and treat them like gold.

Most small local companies, use the newspaper, radio, maybe television. Some do Direct mail, some do newsletters, some of have a website.

But when I ask them do you have a database of your clients email addresses. I often get blank stares. They’ll spend thousands on all sorts of media, but forget to send and extremely cost effective email newsletter out to their current customers and prospects who have given their permission to receive information.

I understand the problem, there’s a technical barrier here. How to send them out? Am I spamming? What do I write about?

All really good questions, but lets review how any business grows.

1. Sell more products to more people.

2. Increase the amount you sell to the people you already do business with.

3. Increases the transaction value of each sale.

That’s pretty much it.

When you create an email newsletter, or postage newsletter, you’re looking at improving step two. Which is one of the most cost efficient methods to increasing your business. These people already do business with you, they already like you, they already trust you. They are loyal to you and the last thing you want to do is ignore them.

So here’s what you do, start asking for email addresses, in person, on your website, on the phone. Ask Everywhere and build your list.

Use something like Constant Contact or Aweber, both are easy to use, keep you CanSpam compliant and won’t cost an arm or a leg to use.

Then here’s the format I want you to use when mailing.

1. Short message from you.

2. Relevant Article.

3. Item of value, something like a coupon for a restaurant. Make a deal with a local company to include them in your newsletter.

4. Create Offer with a Call to action. Something complimentary to one of your key products or a new product release with a request to call you or go to your website for more info.

That’s it. BOOM, newsletter done. Don’t worry about fancy, worry about implementation, you can make it fancy as you go.

Now get out there and grow!

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As you know I spend my days checking types of real estate lead generation techniques used for Realtors.  We’ll here’s new method, it’s simple, I suspect currently it is effective, but over time will become less effective.

Certainly the conversion of visitors to leads will be higher, but I can’t say if deals from leads is all that good.   It really would depend on the email follow-up.

If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, then two things:

First: Watch the video below.

Second:  Talk to me so I can fill you in. 
Leave a comment below or email me your questions. tlyons@lyonsinternational.com

High Quality Video Version

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Looking for strategy this year to make 2009 your best year yet.

Well for your website it’s starts with a game plan and we thought you could use this little diagram to get you started.

Is there something we missed? Add your comment below we loved to hear from you! Click the thumbnail for the full size image.

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Ok, well here we are.  You’ve read the first post in this series right?  If not head there first and check it out, you need to know why you’re going to do this before you actualy start the process.

So now that you know the why, let’s start looking at the how.

Today we only want to do one thing.  Set up our profile in Facebook.  I’m a beleiver that if you can do one small thing each day to move you the direction you want to go, you’ll be amazed how far you get over time.  It’s a tortoise/hare thing.

So that’s what were going to do, start slow, and over time if you stick with me, you’ll go far.

Step 1:  Go to Facebook.com

Step 2: Sign Up for Facebook

Step 3: Confirm your email address.

Step 4: Facebook is about making and keeping connections. The part of the picture we are creating right now is personal side of your Facebook presence.  It’s called your profile, and it’s about the more social friendly side of Facebook.  Which means we need to find some of your friends.

The first stage is checking which of your current friends are on Facebook.  Facebook makes this a little easier by allowing you to scan your current email contacts.  If you’re worried about Facebook having access to your email, you can always skip this step.  There are other ways to find friends.

6. Continue with the steps facebook walks you thorugh to set up your new profile.  Remember to be complete in the information you give, but be yourself as well.  Social media is about authenticity.  If you would be uncomfortable telling something offline, you don’t need to share it online either.

7. Ok let’s head into the profile once it’s set up.

See the photo below.  You’ll notice the arrows point to my status update, it’s one of the key tools of communication in Facebook.  It tells people what you are doing, what’s happening and is your tether to all your friends.  See how Tara’s status has been added to my page.  She’s giving away some concert tickets cool, maybe I’ll comment back or give her a quick call, or email, or txt.  She’s actively found a away to engage me, her friends and customers.  In fact, she gave away her 10 ten tickets in minutes with that post.  Do you think that built customer loyalty?

Ok, we’re going to stop here for now.  We don’t want to get all fancy quite yet.  What I hope you’ll do why you wait for the next post is go out and make some friends, start some conversations and play with it for bit.  A word of caution.  Even though this is your personal face in face book, keep it professional, clients are still interacting with you through this medium.  Don’t go crazy with Apps, use your judgement and take things slow so you can get comfortable.

Don’t hestitate to find me, I’ll be your friend!  And feel free to ask me some questions.

Here’s my Facebook Page. http://www.youhavetom.com You’ll notice it’s a facebook page not a profile, we’ll get to those soon.  Become a fan, and I’ll friend you back.  And of course if you really want to ramp this stuff up, get in touch with me about our “Making You Findable Program”, nothing wrong with a little self promotion.

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Ok, here’s where we start understanding Facebook and why it’s going to lead us all down the golden road of riches and deals.

I mentioned in the past post that Facebook had more than 120 millions users online. I also mentioned that the demographics of Facebook puts the users at a prime home buying age.   So we need to really look carefully at how to use Facebook to improve our business.

First let’s look at current marketing methods and compare them against Social media and the internet in general. I think you’ll start to see why most of us just don’t get it, and why it so hard to pull in business.

Traditionally, as Realtors, our advertising efforts focused on interruption marketing. Send a flyer, run a newspaper ad, start a radio ad campaign. Our goal was to insert our message into the life of a possible client. We threw a really big net hoping some fish would get caught.

Online the rules are different to a degree. We still run ads, such as Google Adwords. But for the most part, our goal on the internet is to have our message appear when a possible client is specifically looking for our services. Such as a Google Search. Our goal became less interruptive (assuming that’s a word). Here we throw a smaller net, but we know where the fish are, so we catch more.

With social media like Facebook, we are part of a community(we are one of the fish), you are like the shy new kid at school, no friends, and with no friends it’s harder to meet someone to make friends. One might ask, what’s the point in going out for recess, I don’t know anyone, I have no one to play with.  We may be swimming with the fish, but we no longer have the net, so we don’t catch any.

But here’s thing, if you don’t go out to play, you will NEVER have a friend. On Facebook, you need play. I don’t mean that literally, I mean you need to join, create a profile, create a page, add some content and then start networking.

I was at a Gala the other night, I know me at Gala, who knew. Anyway, I was at the Gala, my intent was not to do business BUT, as luck would have it, someone asked me what I do, I told them, they said call me this week we need you. Boom, new client, of course it was a little more involved, I gave him a ton of free advice, I asked him about his business and what he currently did on the internet, etc.   I was swimming with the fish, and he came to me.  I didn’t need the net to catch him.  If I have enough fish swimming with me, I’ll NEVER need a net.  Starting to get it!  It’s about surrounding yourself with enough people and providing value to them that when they need your service they are already your customer.

What’s my point, well, I went to an event, not to network, not to get business, but because of the nature of the event I did network and did get business. One of his questions to me was, I don’t get this Facebook thing, what’s the point of social networking if you’re not doing it for business. Hmmm, I don’t know, but I paid $125 bucks to attend a non business social event, what was the point of that?  Fun, networking, good food, charity, all of the above.  Oh and despite the fact I was actively not trying to do business I did anyway.

So my first piece of advice in this article is this:

Get on Facebook, start a profile, and start networking. The same way you would in the real world. Start a conversation, ask some questions. It’s a big Gala event with 120 million people attending, the stats say 1 in 12 people are looking to buy or sell a home. That means 10 million people on Facebook are actively searching for a Realtor. Too bad you didn’t introduce yourself already.

In the next post, I’ll talk more about specifics. The Actions you need to take, but for now, get your profile started.

And go to http://www.hubspot.com/archive/facebook-for-business/

Hubspot posted their webinar on Facebook for Business and the slide show is available for download in PDF.  It will give you a headstart in the coming posts.

Also, become a Fan of my Facebook business page.  I’d love to get to know you.

Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter!

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You ever have one of those days, where your mind is just go in really slow circles. Well that’s me today, I’m spinning my wheels, and just can’t get my mind to get engaged into one coherent task.

On days like this I find myself reading tons of posts, viewing new websites related to marketing, reviewing my friendfeed and twitter accounts. I’m looking to find a loose concept that combined with massive amounts of scanned information starts to form a trend.

It’s sort of like looking at one of those cool pictures you can’t see until you defocus your eyes, then the picture is clear. My minds already defocused, so I use that to find trends in the global conscience we call the web.

Of course, one of our biggest trends is social networking, whether it be in MySpace, Facebook, Linked In, Active Rain, Twitter, Digg, Reddit, Friendfeed, etc, etc, etc…..

We’re looking at a new paradigm shift. The concept of how we do business is changing, and like the frog in slowly heating water, we don’t even know we’re about to be cooked.

Facebook has 120 million users! Consider that, one hundred twenty million users. That’s bigger than many countries, and even Facebook can’t figure out a good way to make money from it.

And here you are, the Realtor, looking at this massive collection of sellers and buyers. In fact, over 75% of Facebook users are over the age of 25, 70% have household income over $50K and 65% have college or higher education.(stats provided by Quantcast.com and Google Insights). So what do you, that’s only one social network.

Well let’s start looking at what you could do.

1. Get you profile address on your business card. Sure you have your website, email, phone number, maybe even your cell number. You be da contact master! Whatever. Get your profile address on there for all your main social networks. That’s the point of a network, and they won’t find you if you don’t tell them where you are.

Besides what a great conversation started, “Here’s my card, you can reach me on facebook, twitter, my website, email, by phone, are you on facebook?” Boom, another contact, networked and ready for a relationship with you.  I’m not telling you to assault people, it has to be natural, but the business card can help to lead into a further discussion.

There’s a great article about this over at the The Future of Real Estate Marketing

2. Start networking online.

If you use Twitter, start following people. Make friends on Facebook in your area.

3. Blend the two worlds.

Daniel(at The Real Estate Zebra) is starting to introduce clients to social networks with client seminars. By being their guide he’s the top of their network, building trust and friendships long before they are looking for a Realtor and also being a central hub for all their networks too. He has a great post here at: Realestatezebra.com.

4. Learn to engage your customer without offending.

The below video was held by Dustin Luther, Jeff Turner and Rudy Bachraty at the 2008 National Association of Realtors. I need to give credit the RealEstateZebra.com for the original find on this one.

5. Use the right network for the right purpose.

Place photos on Flickr, communicate with Twitter, build relationships and networks with Facebook.

This is just a start, and we’re getting pretty long here. So we’re going to call this post a wrap. But there will be more to come.

What are you comments for best practices in the Social Network world.

By the way you can follow me on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/tlyons

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Techcrunch posted an article today (you can see it here) talking about the new changes to the Google Adwords quality score.

In the past, your postion using Google Adwords was based on the price you paid and how many people clicked on your ad.

Over time the score started to include the context of the title to the page it linked to, context of the words within the ad itself, etc.

The latest change includes how the clickthrough rate affect the position of the ad.  The issue was based on the fact that a higher placed ad naturally gets a higher clickthrough rates, giving it a higher quality score.  A self feeding cycle, higher clickthrough, higher ranking, higher clickthrough.

Google is going to take the higher clickthrough from position out of the equation, I’m sure with some very techinical and complicated math the Google PhD’s can come up with.

Gogole will also be putting more ads at the top of each page, this really is nothing new, we’ve seen this increase over the years anyway.  However, the blend of natural to paid searches in the average consumers eye will be less distinct with the ads at the top.  Possibly making adwords a better option for adversting than it was before.

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We’ve all heard it, Web 2.0 this, Web 2.0 that, Web 2.0 just saved that baby from a fire! But seriously what has it really done for you lately.

Well let me give you a few tips that will get it working for you!

There’s a new thing out there called Social Bookmarking. The concept comes from the idea that if you took all the favourites people save in their browser and then put them in one place where everyone can share them, you would get a collection of relevant and important sites. Then if you let people tag them with descriptive words they would become searchable.

The more times a site is bookmarked and tagged the more relevant it must be, or at least the more popular.

Great you say, I always wanted to know that piece of information Tom! Thanks but we’re just getting started so don’t leave yet. I promise to try and get more interesting.

Anyway, sites like Del.icio.us and furl.com were born. Here is how they can help you.

Search engines, go through these list and index them, noting the tags to track relevance. So if you had a Blog, or a website that was not getting regular visits from the search engine you could create an account at these sites and bookmark your articles. All of a sudden you would get visits from the search engines. Not all at once but your chances of getting indexed and receiving more backlinks will improve.

Have you ever written an absolutely amazing article, one that touches the very soul of those who read it. Then post it on sites like Reddit.com or Digg.com. These sites have close to 1 million members and they vote on the best stories and articles. I caution that you should only post relevant and timely information which is helpful to a large group of people. Bad stories get bad votes, good stories get good votes.

Don’t forget to ping your blog at Pingoat.com, this will alert several blog tracking search engines to your new post.

What about you, any great tips you want to share!

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I was talking to an agent the other day and they were grumbling about the fact that they think they should be getting more referrals.  They send post cards, emails, etc.  They have a website and run a radio ad, but they feel that they should be getting more business from current and past clients.

Does this sound like anyone out there?

Well here was my reply?  Off the top of your head how many clients can you name back to me.  This agent has a database of over 400 people, all past clients.  They could not name more than 20 back.  I sat down at their database and starting calling off names for them, asking about each one, who they were, where they moved, do they have kids.  The agent did not know most of the answers.

Would you know the answers?

You CAN NOT expect people to refer business to you just cause you sold them a house.  They refer because they know you and you KNOW them.   You are their Realtor, the professional who guides them and advices them on what will most likely be their biggest asset, investment and purchase of their life.

Want more referrals, start by getting to know your clients more, get to know them as people only then will they refer friends and family to you.

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