Real Estate Internet Marketing » Social Media

Facebook Real Time Search – How Real Estate Pros & Business Owners Can Exploit Facebook New Features To make more money for their business

Peter- REBB Founder — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 17:59:29 +0000

Facebook is at it again with their new Facebook real time search. Now, they added some powerful features that will help your real estate business to make more money. What features you ask? Those new features include:

Facebook Real Time Search

Liked articles will start appearing in search results
Facebook Open Graph improvements
Facebook Credits
Facebook Pages Browser

So, check out the video I made for you. Pay close attention to the part where I talk about how your content can be found in the search results. Personally, I think that’s huge! After you finish watching the video, I would love for you to hit the like button and let your friends know about these new features. Let me know what you think about this as well.

So, what did you think? Are your creativity wheels turning in your head? Do you see the possibilities that Facebook Real Time Search will do? They are in mine. Let me know your thoughts below especially about Facebook Credits and Facebook Real Time Search.

To Your Success,

Peter Kolat

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Yet Another Reason Why Facebook is taking Over the Web

Founder — Sat, 15 May 2010 21:43:04 +0000

Here’s something interesting…

A little birdie told me ,actually it was adage.com, that Facebook is coming out with another MEGA feature. I think they are challenging Google and Twitter here which is fun to watch. However, for us entrepreneurs, this type of a feature has a different meaning. Why? Because it will allow us to market to our audience on a local level and compete with businesses we never thought we could compete with in today’s economy.

So what is that feature I’m talking about?

Well, as of right now, it sort of seems as a rumor because Facebook won’t confirm it but here’s the deal. it seems that by the end of May or beginning June, Facebook will releases a location based feature into their status updates. What does that mean?

That means that whenever you create a status update, you will be able to share your location with the world. For instance, if you just had a tasty frap at a local Starbucks and want to see if anyone wants to get together with you, you will be able to post and update with your location and your friends will be able to get together with you. Now, let me ask you a question…

Is that cool or scary?

What do you think?

I want to hear your thoughts on that in the comments below. As far as real estate goes, I think that this feature will allow real estate professionals to do some crazy, localized and targeted marketing using one of the most popular websites on the internet. Did you know that Facebook is signing up about 1 million people per day! Yeah, I said per day, not month, not a year, per day.

Doesn’t that just blow your mind?

So, let me know what you think? Personally, I can’t wait until they release this feature.

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How to get more Twitter Followers & Gain More Market Exposure for Yourself & Your Business Using Twitter New Embed Feature

Founder — Wed, 05 May 2010 18:16:19 +0000

Hi everyone,

It’s Peter Kolat. In today’s post, I want to share with you a new feature that twitter is testing, or at least one of their employees to help them gain even more viral market share for their website. What is that new feature you ask? Well, it’s the ability to embed tweets into websites.

What? Embedding tweets? What does that mean?

Let me explain…

You know how when you watch a video on Youtube, you can take the video, hit the embed button under the video, and Youtube is going to give you a piece of code you can copy and paste into your own website? Well, that’s what twitter is working on doing for their own website. Can you see the possibilities?

I hope so. If not, then check out the video below.

Ohh, and here’s a sample tweet I inserted into my own website to see if it work. Ok, twitter… Let’s see what you got. Here I go:

I see twitter is taking it to a new viral level. U will be able to embed tweets into your website or a blog? Hmm, Youtube embeds videos. less than a minute ago via webPeter Kolat
peterkolat

What do you think? Personally, I think that when they clean up this code and make the feature more streamlined, actually add it to the twitter stream in a form of a button where someone can click on it to grab the embed code, the sheer number of retweets is going to explode. Also, once individuals start incorporating that feature into thier own marketing strategy, THE RIGHT WAY, they’ll see an increase in the number of followers and ranking for their twitter accounts.

Not to mention, it’ll be easier for one’s campaign to go viral. Good luck and tell me your feedback in the comments below. Most importantly, I will be following this development and post you here on my blog. I suggest you sign up to my list so you don’t miss anything in the near future.

To Your Success,

Peter Kolat

Random Posts

Why Social Media SEO is Becoming More Powerful than SEO & How Facebook is Changing the Face of Business

Founder — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 20:16:37 +0000

In today’s post, I am going to talk about social media seo and will probably make some people mad. Here’s the deal. This past week ending on March 13th, 2010, Facebook has dethroned Google as the #1 visited website on the internet in the United States. You can see the new release by going to Facebook_reaches_top_ranking

WHAT!!!???

Facebook got more traffic than Google?

Yes it did. But I wouldn’t discount Google yet because they are starting to do some crazy stuff when it comes to social media marketing. I find it very interesting though that Facebook got more traffic than Google. They are not a search engine but a social media website. People go there to socialize, not search for stuff they need to find on the internet.

Social interaction still kicks butt and will for a long time. In fact, I strongly believe that is will get better, bigger and faster. Why do you think Google is integrating social media aspects into their SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages). See my post on How To Get On 1st Page of Google For Highly Competitive Real Estate Terms Using Social Media Marketing.

So how does social media seo affect you?

Well, if you haven’t joined the social media seo marketing world, I think it’s time for you to do so. I mean think about it, what is business all about? Is it about selling services and products or building relationships? What do you think real estate industry is all about? It’s about building win-win and lasting relationships with other people. That’s a big ingredient in success, especially when you align yourself with other more successful people.

Social media seo allows you to do that. Think about it? Before social media sites such as Facebook, would you be able to contact people like some of the real estate gurus or CEOs of different companies? Would you be able to connect with people such as Matt Cutts of Google? Probably not. But that has changed. Matt for instance, uses Youtube and other social media sites to connect with Google users.

He answers questions about Google’s search engine index, rankings, sp@.m and many other related subjects. Do you think that Google uses those questions to help them build a better search engine? I bet they do. They listen to their customers and so does Facebook.

If you own any kind of business, including real estate investing business, you need incorporate social media seo into your business and communicate with your customers both past and present. Believe me, they’ll change your business forever with a much better outcome. Not only will you earn more money but have a better relationship with your clients who will rave about your business to everyone they see.

For instance, look how many popular companies are using GetSatisfaction.com including Microsoft and Nike. In fact, Facebook just announced they will integrate GetSatisfaction into the Fan pages. Now, that’s awesome. You can learn about that at Facebook integrates GetSatisfaction.

How can you apply social media seo into your business?

First of all, get a fan page for your cause, service or business. Then talk to your fans and listen. Obviously, when you are creating your fan page, you need to incorporate social media seo into it so your page can be found both of Facebook and Google. But that’s for another discussion. I could write an entire course on social media seo and how you should use it within Facebook. But for now, make sure that you at least have your main keyword in the title of your fan page.

Now, you tell me, what is the most important thing you got out of this post? How can I help you to grow bigger and better in your business? Is there something I should do to help you in your marketing efforts?

Post your comments below and let me know. Remember, social media seo is getting bigger and bigger every day and we can achieve greater results by working together.

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How To Avoid The Biggest Mistakes Most Real Estate Investors & Agents Make When Using Social Media Websites

Founder — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 15:58:49 +0000

Real Estate Social Media Marketing can be extremely powerful. In fact, I use it in my business all the time. If you look around this blog or on any of the social media website such as Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, BiggerPockets and few other social media websites, you’ll see me on there. Recently, someone asked me about using Twitter for real estate. I answered him and then decided to post the answer here because I see this problem happen ALL THE TIME.

Here’s a scenario: You hear all those great things about social media marketing. How powerful it is, how you can make money using it, how it can explode your real estate business, how you should be on Twitter, Facebook and bunch of other social media websites, right?

So you go on there, build a profile and spend TONS of hours on there and what is your result? Nothing! All you hear is those virtual crickets when you’re logged in. So what’s the problem? Why isn’t social media working for you?

Well, here are several problems that might be killing your social media marketing campaigns.

This answer leans towards Twitter but it can apply to other social media websites as well.

Twitter can be extremely profitable and well worth it for your real estate business. In fact, I am using Twitter for one of my websites and it sends me a lot of traffic.

Here’s the deal: Twitter is a great list building media. There are a lot of investors and real estate agents on there. The trick you need to remember when using Twitter for your real estate business is that you need to:

1. Separate yourself from spending hours and hours on there. Many social media users end up spending hours and hours of their time on social media website. most of the time, it includes reading updates, chatting with others, reading walls and watching videos. You need to have a system in place that will allow you to use social media but not suck up most of your time.

For instance, you can use a service called ping.fm to send out updates to all of your social media websites. With this service, you are able to update all of your social media websites with one click. You don’t have to login to each website individually and end up saving a lot of your time. How cool is that?

2. Build relationships with people. I’m talking about people who respond to you, follow you, retweet your stuff. These are the people who are your lifeblood on social media websites, especially Twitter. Think about it, there is a reason why people follow you and retweet your updates. They like it, find it interesting and want to share it with others. You need to talk to these people and build relationship with them. One piece of advice, don’t sell them of your products and services which leads me to #3.

3. Don’t sell on social media website. At least not at first. You need to minimize your tweets to about 80/20 ratio (at most). What I mean by that is 80% of your tweets need to be personal/friendly/non-commercial/educational. 20% (at most) can be of commercial nature. Most people use social media to get away from all of the commercial, advertising and junk emails. If you start doing that to them on there, they’ll ignore you and in some cases, unfriend you. best type of selling is when you are not selling at all

One of the Biggest Social Media Mistakes

One of the biggest mistakes I see a lot of investors and agents make on twitter and other social media site is that the minute they get on there, they start marketing themselves.

STOP IT!

Remember, social media websites are like a birthday party or if you went to college, a frat party:) People know each other there and when you first show up, you are an outsider. You would never go in there and start selling yourself, right? You need to make some friends before you tell them what you are all about. Otherwise, they’ll ignore you and if you act like a door to door salesman, they’ll kick you out. Same thing happens on social media websites. If you start selling right away, people will ignore your tweets, updates and you’ll never make any friends.

That’s it for now.

I hope this was helpful. Let me know what you think and if you have any questions, let me know in the comments below.

To Your Success,

Peter Kolat

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Brand New Facebook Feature Will Help You Gain More Credibility, Exposure, Business & Friends – All With Just One Symbol

Founder — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 02:48:33 +0000

This post is for all of you my real estate social media maniacs.

If you are on twitter that you probably know of a strategy called tagging. Basically, you add the @ sign right at the beginning of someone’s profile name and your tweet will link back to their profile. For instance, if you would want to tag me, you would write something like this: “@peterkolat” (minus the quotes).

This little feature works great for many reasons including driving traffic, getting more exposure, growing your followers, gaining credibility, trust and loyal following who will respond to your tweets. I have several of my customers that keep retweeting my posts and tagging my name (I don’t tell them to do it). You know who you are and I am very grateful for what you are doing. Thank you!

Believe me, this strategy works great both for me and the people who tag my name. I end up interacting with them more often than usual. I respond to them, to talk to them and help them out with any kinds of questions they might have. All in all, the tagging feature can become extremely viral and help get yourself exposed around your market on the internet.

So use it to your advantage.

HERE’S THE BIG NEWS… (the real reason for my this blog post)

The almighty Facebook has just implemented the same feature in their updates. They’ve been doing it for a while within Facebook notes, but now you can do it within your Facebook updates. How does it work?

Basically, you start typing out your update and when you want to tag someone, you just type in the @ sign. Looks familiar, doesn’t it? So, if you would want to tag, let’s say me, you would type in @peterkolat (peterkolat is my profile name).

The good thing about Facebook’s @ tag feature is that when you start typing out someone’s name, Facebook will automatically suggest your friends to you if the letters you typed in are in their name. Now, when your update goes live, each of your @someone’sname is a live link. Then, when you click on their name, you are taken directly to their profile.

Talk about growing your Facebook friends, huh?

Now, start tagging each other boys and girls!

By the way, I’ll post an advanced real estate social media strategy that incorporates this tip. So, if you are a SWAT Inner Circle member, then you should see a video of this powerful strategy very soon. This one strategy can grow the number of your friends very fast.

As always, I would love to hear your comments below. Let me know if you have any questions.

To Your Success,

Peter Kolat

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URGENT NEWS -Brand Yourself using Facebook

Founder — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 04:45:18 +0000

Quick and Urgent update for everyone using Facebook.

It’s Peter. Quick update for you. If you have a facebook profile, you need to head over there right now and change your username to whatever you want before someone else claims it.

Today at midnight EST, Facebook released a new feature where you can claim a name for your facebook profile. What does that mean? That means that people will no longer need to go to:

http://profile.to/peterkolat

After you change your profile, they can go directly to

http://facebook.com/peterkolat (that is if you had a plugin for custom page inside your profile). Otherwise, your profile address was something like this:

http://facebook.com/profile.php?id=123456789

This is great news for you. (Obviously, you’ll need to claim your own name to whatever you want.) Just be careful because you can only do this once. Once you claim a name, it’s there for life.

So head over to the following page:

http://www.facebook.com/username/

and change your name there. From now on, people will be able to just go to facebook.com/yourname without trying to figure out the location of your profile.

I changed my profile to my real name because I am looking at the future and want to brand myself out there.

You should think very carefully at how you want people to find you.

Answers to some common questions:

I had several people email me with questions about facebook’s new username change. Here’s Why this is important for you.

This is really good news because your profile (and your name) will get indexed in Search engines and it will be easier for people to find you. Your followers will just type in facebook.com (everyone knows that address) and then your name. I would recommend making it your own personal name or your main keyword, for branding reasons, plus everyone knows you by your name.

Second, I know that some of you have fan pages. I have received questions about that. Here’s my take on it. Right now, Facebook does not allow you to brand your pages unless you had 1000 fans before the end of May 2009. If you had 1000 fans, you can change your fan page to whatever you want. Now, if you have already changed your profile to your real name, I would change your fan page to a “keyword” that is related to your niche. For instance, if your fan page is for “saving from foreclosure in Atlanta”, you can change your facebook page to

http://facebook.com/savemefromforeclosureatlanta
That means that your fan page, with that keyword phrase will be indexed in Google and since Facebook is an authority site, your fan page will show up high in search engines for that keyword. See how powerful that is?

Now, if you changed your fan page to your real name, I don’t think that’s a big deal either. Here’s why. As of right now, Facebook still limits the # of people you can have as your friends on your profile. Once you reach the 5000 friends limit, you’ll need to direct people to your fan page.

In conclusion, if you can do both, then do both and use your real name for one and a keyword (SEO friendly) for the other. It’s extremely powerful. But hurry up because some of you have very common names and some guy who’s name is Will Smith (not the famous actor) can take that name.

To Your Success,

Peter Kolat

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Facebook Real Time Search – How Real Estate Pros & Business Owners Can Exploit Facebook New Features To make more money for their business

How to Get Your Friend Requests Accepted on Real Estate Social Media Sites

Peter- REBB Founder — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 04:53:29 +0000

One of the big mistakes I see many real estate professionals make when doing social media marketing is the way they do friend requests. This problem is most evident on Facebook but I see it made everywhere including Twitter, RealEstateInvestor and BiggerPockets.

Therefore, I decided to create a short audio giving you some good tips and strategies that will help you get your friend requests accepted and your social media marketing growing to a much bigger network. Enjoy.

Don’t forget to comment on what you just heard in the comment area below. I would love to hear what you think.

To Your Success,

Peter Kolat

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Why Real Estate & Social Media Are A Perfect Match For Each Other

Peter- REBB Founder — Fri, 29 May 2009 03:57:44 +0000

I do a lot of internet marketing through social media for my business. I’m on twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Biggerpockets, Realestateinvestor and many more social media websites. I love helping people out and for the most part, people understand the huge benefit social media can have on your real estate business.

But once in a while, there are people who say that real estate social media does not work. Real Estate and social media marketing does not go together. Well, in today’s short audio, episode 2 of this new venture, I am going to tell you why I think social media is a perfect partner for your real estate business. Just listen and you’ll hear why. It’s that important.

Then, please comment on the blog below and let me know what you think. I would love to hear your point of view.

To Your Success,

Peter Kolat

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10 Ways Real Estate Investors Can Use Social Media

Peter- REBB Founder — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 14:18:37 +0000

Over the past week, I wrote 2 blog posts that discussed real estate social media and outlined strategies showing how real estate professionals can use it for their real estate internet marketing purposes.

In the first post, I spoke about Top 7 Real Estate Social Media Sites that real estate investors and agents can use to gain advantage over their competition.

Next, after receiving some great feedback from my readers, I wrote a post titled “Real Estate Social Media- When Time is of The Essence“. That post focused on sites you could integrate into your real estate social media marketing funnel when you are strapped for time.

Since those 2 blog posts were so successful, I decided to continue on with real estate social media marketing. Today, I will talk to you about 10 different ways you can use social media to improve your real estate marketing on the internet.

Feel free to share this with others, post it on your own blog, bookmark it, or whatever else you want to do with. All I ask is that you don’t change anything and link back to RealEstateBlackBook.com as a source.

10 Ways Real Estate Investors Can Use Social Media

1.

Start a group on social media sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace or Google Groups. You can start a group called “Save my house” to help homeowners in trouble. Since people feel that they’re anonymous on the internet, you’ll be surprised how many people will come and ask for help.

Once you start the group, provide quality information for your readers. They will value, respect you and see you as an expert in your area of expertise. There are dozens of groups on all those social media sites. Here’s an example of a Facebook group Real Estate Internet Marketing Domination that focuses on real estate professionals.

2.

Create a blog using a free platform such as WordPress.com, Blogger.com, or TypePad.com. This blog can be your own value-driven lead generation vehicle. WordPress is my favorite platform as it has many valuable themes, plugins, and optimization tools that you can use to help you rank high in search engines.

3.

Add social bookmarking tools to your blog posts, articles, and web pages to help your readers share your valuable content. One such tool you can use is addthis.com. The tool is extremely useful and easy to implement.

4.

Check your incoming links to your blog and/or website. Start forming relationships with sites that link to your site by commenting on their blogs and bookmarking their web pages. And don’t spam their blogs with poor comments.

5.

Create informative videos to help homeowners in trouble and post them to video hosting sites such as Youtube.com, Google Video, Revver, and many more. Once people see the quality content you provide them for free, they’ll come to you for help.

6.

Build relationships with other professionals on your LinkedIn profile. Offer your services to them without asking anything in return. Ask them if they need anyone with certain expertise. Then, if you know of someone within your network that fits that criteria, recommend that person to them.

7.

Write a press release about your company and any new developments that your target audience will want to know about but don’t know about it yet. Use services such as prweb.com (for best results), webwire.com and prleap.com. For the ultimate Web 2.0 press release, follow the social media press release template format.

8.

Use early social media sites such as Yahoo Groups and Google Groups to join communities already engaged in conversation. Become a contributor, help others and don’t pitch yourself in there. Do an advanced search in Google Groups and filter out groups by date to weed out the most recent conversations.

9.

Form relationships with people interested in real estate and/or your target audience on sites such a digg.com, del.icio.us, technorati.com, puurple.com and/or other social bookmarking sites. Then, while browsing the internet, bookmark pages that are of interest to you and your friends.

10.

Finally, and this last point refers back to all previous 9 ways. Remember that the main core of social media sites is the fact that they are build by and around people, just like you and me.

These people have likely been there for a while, have already build relationships, and might know each other. They will know that you are new. Earn their friendship and respect. Don’t go in with selfish reasons because the community will see right through you.

So there you have it. 10 ways real estate investors can use social media to improve their marketing and gain competitive advantage over their competition.

Now, its your turn. Pick 2-3 strategies I outlined above and use them in your own marketing. Then come back here and share your success stories with us.

One more thing, post your comments below and tell me:

Are you using any of those techniques in your marketing?

Do you want me to elaborate more on any of the above techniques? Just write it in your comments, point out which technique you want me to elaborate on and I’ll create a post that will give you a more in depth picture on that technique.

To Your Success,

Peter K.
Founder of RealEstateBlackBook