Real Estate Advocate

If you still aren't convinced that social media is here to stay consider the following figures from a recent Nielsen study: "Americans have nearly tripled the amount of time they spend at social networking and blog sites such as Facebook and MySpace from a year ago, according to a new report from...

Here are the results from a survey of 200 Realtors about using social media in your real estate business: Feedback and Comments Thanks to everyone who provided the comments and insights into social media marketing and it's impact on the real estate profession.  As promised, here's the feedback fr...

I recently conducted a survey of over 200 Active Rain members where I asked for their comments about social media and social marketing. In particular I asked about their fears, frustrations and success stories. My favorite comment was "Social networking was more addictive than crack cocaine". I p...

Social media marketing now accounts for about 90% of my real estate marketing. But what I discovered is that my marketing is completely different to everyone elses. The big difference is that I don't try to sell real estate online. I found that it's just too difficult. Instead I use a different s...

To be a successful social networker, you need to get potential clients to accept your friend request. Here's three tips for getting your friend requests approved and quickly building your friend list:  i.        If the site has a feature that tells you who is currently online this is a great tool...

Your blog is the foundation of your social media strategy and it's the place where you host your online friends and let them know that you're a local real estate expert.  Don't make the mistake of using your blog as a sales platform. It simply doesn't work like that. Think of your blog as your ba...

Spam and Scam are on the rise on Twitter. The latest technique used by spammers is called TweetJacking. TweetJackers take advantage of the popular practices of replying or retweeeting other people's tweets.  Here's how it works: The spammer takes advantage of the practice of @replies. An @reply i...

It's and old cliché but you need to approach social networking with the end in mind. Before you start social networking you need to ask yourself one simple and straightforward question - Why? Why social networking?  You need to be absolutely clear about what it is you want to achieve by growing y...

Twitter is designed to be viral.  Every time you send out a message it appears on what's called the public timeline. This means that every time you send out a message Twitter publishes it and makes it searchable to every Twitter member.  You can add keywords to your message and make them searchab...

This is a must watch video about social media and how it impacts our lives. I have absolutely no doubt that social media is the new frontier for real estate marketing and although it's a pain in the behind to learn new technology it's well worth the effort. If you haven't seen it yet, take a few ...