Austin Texas Real Estate Blog

I’ve been somewhat heavily involved in social media marketing for several years, and involved in internet marketing for our company since 1997. I began my own online consulting business in 2009.  As such, I’ve seen a lot of changes take place over time.

Here are a few potential surprises, depending on how long you’ve been active online:

When I first started optimizing our website for the search engines, Yahoo was absolutely dominant, with something on the order of 65% market share.  If you weren’t being found on Yahoo, you weren’t getting a whole lot of traffic. 

Was Google in second place?  Nope – it didn’t even exist.  Other search engines that were important back then included Excite, Lycos, and Altavista.  Have you heard much about those lately?  Me, neither.

When I began blogging for business in 2007, MySpace was the dominant social network platform. Facebook existed, but it was sort of a non-factor for marketing.  Twitter also existed, but it hadn’t gained much traction.  Now, MySpace seems like a giant abandoned playground.

Statistically, people are spending less and less time watching television, or reading traditional (meaning not online) newspapers.  Those who do watch TV shows watch a good-sized percentage on sites like Hulu.com and Fancast.

I haven’t looked anything up in an actual Yellow Pages in many years, and I would wager that you haven’t either.

Despite Facebook’s recent privacy concerns, they have edged out Google as the most-visited site online for the past couple of months.  Let that really sink in for a second.

Can you guess what the second-place search tool online for raw traffic is today after Google?  It’s YouTube.

So, what does all of this mean for the future of your own marketing efforts?

• First, don’t focus on the tools and platforms themselves.  Instead, focus on having a strategy for engaging people on your own turf and terms somehow.   (i.e. Don’t depend on Facebook to always be there for you.  It may be a distant memory in 10 years.)
• If you don't have a social media strategy, the time is absolutely NOW (or more accurately, yesterday) to figure this out.

In the next several years, if your business doesn’t have a social component that allows your clients to share their experiences about you along with some type of strategy on your part to “listen” to their needs/concerns/praise, two things will happen:

1. They will be talking about you anyway.

2. You won’t hear them.

The bottom line here is that I wouldn’t waste any time or effort on “snail mail”, TV, radio, or print advertising UNLESS you are planning to tie it into your website/blog/online presence somehow.  After all, as marketing becomes one big conversation, you don’t want to be the shy wallflower in the corner.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/webtreatsetc/4305344218/in/set-72157623226308089/

It seems that just about every decent restaurant these days has a “receipt survey” in place. You know the kind I’m talking about, right? When I’m trying to pay for my meal, I get a long receipt with a code highlighted near the bottom.

It’s always a little awkward when the server says, “Visit our site and use this code and you will be entered into a drawing to win something useless to you.”

Okay. I know they don’t really say that, but that’s what I hear.

What are the exceptions for me, if any? What would cause me to actually visit the site and use the super-long encrypted code?

That’s easy. There are exactly two occasions when I would bother to follow through:

1. The service was phenomenally good.
2. The service was horrendous.

Everything else falls into the lukewarm spectrum in between.  Is this really candid or valuable in any way?

With that in mind, how can restaurants (and other businesses, for that matter) get a handle on how they’re actually doing? Unlike the title of this post, I wouldn’t advocate actual, in-person eavesdropping.

I have another idea for them (and for you, too, if you're in the real estate industry), and it can be done free of charge. You can easily use some simple online tools to get a feel for what people are saying about you. Believe me, if you do much business at all, someone is having a conversation about you and your company.

If nothing else, you probably have a handful of terms that you're interested in tracking when they are mentioned, correct?  If not, we need to talk.  :-)

Here are a couple of places to get you started:

1. Set up Google Alerts (http://google.com/alerts) for your company name or the names of your competitors. If people are writing blog posts that mention how terrible your service is, you might be interested in knowing this.  Conversely, if someone is a raving fan, figure out a way to reward them somehow, both publicly (thank them on your blog) and privately (take them to lunch!).  QUICK TIP: Make sure you put your name or company name in quotes (e.g. "Jason Crouch" rather than Jason Crouch) or you will get every result for each individual word.

2. Use Facebook’s “deep search” function. Many people don’t even know this exists. Use the “SEARCH” box on Facebook and put in your company name (or your personal name).  A dropdown menu may appear there automatically.  If so, make sure you click on the “See More Results for ______ Here”, which will be the bottom result on that list.  The results could surprise you.  Try out your town and "moving" as an initial search.

3. Utilize http://search.twitter.com - the “advanced search” gives you a lot of options. Again, you could be surprised by what you see, and how easy it is to join the conversation with a prospect.

Of course, there are plenty of others, some of which are professional (read: paid) in nature.

If you need help understanding how to leverage social media tools to help you improve your company’s online presence and make more sales, let me know how I can help.  I love this stuff!

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/neilt/2517652/