Guest Blogger: Alva Cranford,  Breeze Marketing Media

How American Businesses are Using Social Media Marketing

A 2009 CMO survey conducted by Duke University and the American Marketing Association provides insights into how firms are presently using social media in their marketing strategy.

1. 65.4% firms use social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn
2. 52.3% use video and photo sharing sites like Youtube and Flickr
3. 50.9% blog
4. Social Media marketing spending expected to grow by 300% in 5 years
5. 81.1% firms use social media for brand awareness and building
6. 55.8% use social media to acquire new customers
7. 51.9% introduce new products and services
8. 47.6% use social media to retain current customers
9. Traditional advertising is projected to decrease by 7.9% while internet marketing is slated for a 9.5% increase.

To see more results from the Duke University/AMA study, click here.

If you’re not currently using sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, you should consider. They are one of the simplest ways to ease into social media and they are free. Blogging is also a way to increase your brand visibility and engage your customers you can also do this yourself, or outsource. Social media is ever changing with great frequency, and continually introducing new tools and online avenues for reaching new customers. Are you currently using social media in your strategic marketing? If so, what have you found to be the most effective?

Take a virtual tour of a few recent new listings without leaving your office:

New Home Listing & Virtual Tour: Downtown Dallas, Texas

4913 Alcott Street, Dallas Texas – Click here to view this downtown Dallas loft virtual tour.

Virtual Tour & New Home Listing: Flower Mound, Texas

5204 Saddle Drive, Flower Mound, Texas – Click here to view this Flower Mound home virtual tour.

Virtual Tour & New Home Listing: Keller, Texas

1017 Western Trail, Keller, Texas – Click here to view this Keller, Texas home virtual tour.

Guest Blogger: Alva Cranford,  Breeze Marketing Media

Social media networking has totally revolutionized how we do business. Real estate professionals have always been experts at building their brand through networking relationships; today, social media provides the opportunity to expand that reach even more. Each day, millions of consumers turn to the internet to check email, catch up with friends and family, entertainment, and research their next purchase! Google remains top dog as the number one search engine, but did you know that Facebook is ranked as the 2nd most popular website in the country? Not far behind is Twitter (10th) and LinkedIn (15th). These are also amazing tools that can be utilized for online marketing with essentially no cost to you!

According to the National Association of Realtors only 30% of Realtors are taking advantage of social networking. Wow! Considering a referral today is as easy – and efficient – as forwarding an email, sending a text message, or sharing a virtual tour link, it’s kind of surprising that more realtors have not taken advantage of this incredible viral marketing opportunity. And it also give a tremendous competitive edge to the realtor who utilizes social media as part of their integrated marketing strategy.

Getting Started with Social Media: Facebook

Creating an account at Facebook.com is simple enough. There is also a Help Center, click here to access, that provides information about how to use the site, adding photos, videos, setting up a Fanpage, and the important privacy settings. You can snap a photo of a new property you’ve just signed to list, and post to your Facebook page using Facebook Mobile, before you even drive away!

A few things to consider when setting up your Facebook page is how you plan to use it. If you have your privacy settings set to “Everyone,” anything you post can be found in an online search of your name, so you have to consider if a funny inside joke could be considered offensive to a prospective client who googled your name and stumbles across that. At the same time, every post shared using the “Everyone” setting gives your brand more visibility across the web. Some use LinkedIn for business contacts and Facebook for social – another option for Facebook is a great tool they offer called Facebook Pages – and it’s free. With a Fanpage, you can invite other realtors and clients to “become a fan” – this allows you to publish content, such as photos and links to new listing virtual tours. You may think, I already have a website that does that, but keep in mind social media takes your message to “where” people are and many are spending a good deal of time on Facebook! One of the best things you can do is first post content on your website, then post the link to your site on Facebook and Twitter to push the message out.

You can use the Facebook Events application to promote events such as your next Open House! These are the free tools available, but Facebook also has Ads which allow you to target clients based on targeted region, keywords, and budget.

The continuing advances in social media make it easier and easier everyday to grow your business with virtually no out-of-pocket expenses if you do the marketing yourself. There are also integrated marketing companies that can do these things for you if you choose to outsource your online marketing. Today, there are applications linking Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn together making it even more effective and efficient to utilize social media in taking your message to the largest number of people.

Check out the Facebook groups and pages as they offer additional opportunities for networking! Simply search for a topic to see the many available ones to join.

One last tip for making the most of your Facebook account, some of your friends may really love to play online games such as “Farmville,” “Mafia Wars” and more. You can open your page to find it filled with these silly status updates – if you find them distracting or annoying, you can simply slide your cursor over to the right of the post and a “Hide” will appear – click on that and you have the option to hide “the person” OR “the application” … click that and they will stop appearing on your page!

The Importance of Social Media in Marketing

Social media marketing is not only competitive and real-time effective, it’s also eco-friendly. When you print and distribute flyers and brochures, you never really know how many of those will go straight to the trash can for both a waste of investment and natural resources. But social media allows you to both continue to build brand awareness, but also be found when people do real-time searches for realtors and/or homes online.

An additional important benefit of using social media in marketing is link juice. This is a term used to describe the fuel that helps you be found by consumers who use search engines to find what they are looking for online. Similar to the Facebook image above showing the networking of people connecting, search engines look for sites that have many links coming in to them from other websites; continually building links to your website is among the most important marketing work you can do to push your site up in page rankings in organic searches.

We’ll look at other social media tools and websites in future blog posts. If you find this information helpful and wish to share with other realtors, please feel free and we’ve made it easy to do so. Simply move your cursor over the images below to post on your Facebook or LinkedIn page, tweet out on Twitter, Buzz up on Yahoo, or bookmark on Google (additional options available below).

To learn more about Alva and her integrated marketing services, check out her website Breeze Marketing Media.

Save time and money in showcasing new home listings with a Home Virtual Tour! Here are just a few we produced recently. Never has it been easier or more cost-effective to showcase new homes – Virtual Tours take you there!

New Home Listing & Virtual Tour: Allen, Texas

1706 Clarke Springs Drive, Allen TX 75002 – Virtual Tour: Click here to enjoy this Allen Home Virtual Tour.

New Home Listing & Virtual Tour: Frisco, Texas

11403 Bent Creek Trail, Frisco TX 75034 – Virtual Tour: Click here to enjoy this Frisco Home Virtual Tour.

New Home Listing & Virtual Tour: McKinney, Texas

8104 Boulder River Trail, McKinney TX 75070 – Virtual Tour: Click here to enjoy this McKinney Home Virtual Tour.

Feel free to share these home virtual tours with others by using the social links conveniently located below! And if you have questions about virtual tours, please contact us today!

Savvy agents know how to use virtual tours to full advantage, making them into a tool that distinguishes their marketing from their competitors.

They understand that a real estate website is a lot like a blank page. It has to be filled with content that is interesting and relevant to homebuyers and sellers. They know the website has to be marketed, too. People won’t necessarily go to the Internet and automatically find a website or its virtual tours without some advertising effort on the agent’s part. However, the smart agent understands the internet is a powerful selling agent, at work 24/7, so they include their website address on their business cards, virtual tour sign riders on their yard signs, and a link to the virtual tour on the home’s flyer.

That’s simple integrated marketing!

Think about the importance of a business card. It wouldn’t do any good to keep them boxed. Business cards only bring a return on their investment when they are distributed by the agent to as many people as possible.

Yet agents spend hundreds, if not thousands, on websites that few consumers ever see. They don’t market the website, so they conclude that websites don’t work. Therefore, virtual tours won’t work either.

Virtual tours are powerful visual home-selling agents, but can fail as business generators if they are not marketed properly. If left “in the box” they won’t be seen by many consumers. But when agents make a concentrated effort to include them in their marketing strategy, the virtual home tour becomes the powerful selling agent it is designed to be.

Simply put, a virtual tour is a tool that needs to be utilized in order to receive maximum return on investment!

Location, Location, Location!

Just as physical location plays a key role in the marketability of a home, online presence and visibility play an equally-important part considering 60% of internet users take virtual tours and reduce wasted viewings by 40%! The internet and email offer two of the most inexpensive, eco-friendly, and efficient ways to promote your listing. Considering listings with virtual tours are clicked open, on average 10 times more than those without, virtual tours are a powerful marketing tool.

10 Effective Ways to Integrate Virtual Tours in Your Listing Marketing:

• email alerts – to inform prospects and other Realtors of new listings
• email signature lines where correspondents can sign off with “See my new listing!” with a hyperlink to your newest tour(s)
• content for the agent’s website(s) – “See my listings”
• content for the agent’s newsletter, or market conditions reports
• content for listing presentations that illustrate what the agent can do to market the home online and to show where the home will be marketed online: Realtor.com, franchise websites, personal websites, newspaper and other media websites, and more
• content to help convince sellers of the importance of staging, decluttering, remodeling, lighting, and more
• a competitive edge – that all the agent’s listings get a virtual tour regardless of the home’s price
• sign riders to invite drive-by consumers to the agent’s website to learn more
• an accounting tool for the agent to see if a certain advertising site is pulling in prospects or not
• a reporting tool to inform the seller to help determine if the listing is priced properly in the current market

Gone are the days when the average consumer dug through the yellow pages to find information. Now, each day, millions turn to the internet to search for information and they expect it to arrive efficiently; search engine sites like Google return pages of info in about a second. It’s very powerful. Employ these cost-effective, yet simple integrated marketing tactics for the maximum return on your virtual tour investment.

If you are interested in additional virtual home tour statistics, click this link, if you’d like to see some of our work, please enjoy our virtual home tour gallery, and if you have additional questions, or would like to schedule a virtual tour, please contact us today!

You may also share this blog post with others, be it your website, Facebook, LinkedIn page, or other,  by using one of the links below.

DFW 360Foto has a new website in progress! We’ll be fully-operational in just a couple more days! All current hosted tours are fully operational and will not be impacted by our new site.

If you need to schedule a virtual tour, please do not hesitate to call us today. We appreciate your business.