Posts Tagged ‘Facebook’
7 Signs You Need a Break!
Wednesday, November 23rd, 2011
With the holidays just around the corner, many of you are probably looking forward to a much needed break! Whether you’re gathering with family or friends, or are just craving a few days of personal R&R, having a little time to switch gears and turn off the noise of work can be just the thing you need to get refreshed and ready to go for the new year.
Now you may be one of those real estate agents that thinks, “Take a break? I wish!” As Real Estate Virtual Assistants, we know that there’s a lot of hard work and endless hours that you as real estate agents put into your company. If you own your real estate company or are with a very small firm, you probably feel the extra weight of keeping the momentum going, and a break seems out of the question.
However, not taking time off can hurt you more in the long run! If you get to the point of being burnt out, you’ll have to take a much longer time off in order to recover and your business, co-workers and even family and friends will suffer. So, how can you tell it’s time for a break? Here are seven key signs:
1. Loss of Joy- If the job you once loved and were passionate about is now becoming a dreaded part of your day… you need time away from it. Being passionate about your job, especially in this line of work, is imperative! Your clients will notice and your work will clearly reflect your passion, or lack thereof!
2. Lack of Focus or Creativity- It’s impossible for anyone to run at full speed all the time. When you notice you’re not able to focus and solutions to problems seem to allude you; you need a break! Give your mind a rest and you’ll find a much more productive you when you return!
3. Constantly Feeling Overwhelmed- As a real estate agent, there seem to be a million things demanding your attention at the same time. High maintenance sellers, first time home buyers, showings, marketing, social media, networking events, etc… the list appears endless! If you’re feeling buried under the weight of all these things and are having a tough time prioritizing… take a step back! Take the time to look at your business from a distance and you’ll feel more in control.
4. Irritability- We all have off days where we feel on edge, but if you’re feeling this way on a regular basis it’s a good sign you need a day off. Whether it’s related to stress, depression or worry; your irritability can have an effect on your co-workers and clients. Be sure to take a break before you burn bridges!
5. Insomnia- Sleep is essential to keeping a fast paced and high demand lifestyle. If you’re finding it’s hard to fall asleep at night, getting fresh air during the day, sunlight and even exercise can help get your inner clock back to normal sleep rhythms. Take a personal break to do these things on a daily basis!
6. Health Issues- A good sign that you need a break is when you begin developing health issues. Hopefully you’ll see warning signs and take a break before this occurs, but many people will ignore the red flags until it’s too late. Stomach issues, regular migraines and not feeling well on a regular basis may mean it’s time to visit your doctor. Chances are, they’ll prescribe a much needed break!
7. Warnings from Family and Friends- If those that know you best and are around you the most are concerned you’re overworking yourself; take note! They may see the warning signs before you do and can be that voice of wisdom that you need to heed! They’re looking out for your good and it’s important to not ignore their sound advice.
I hope that you take the time needed this holiday season to relax and enjoy being with loved ones! This is a great time of year to unwind and take in a few personal days so that you can hit the ground running in 2012!
If you’re worried about the amount of work that seems to be piling up and feel that you can’t take a break with all there is to do; let your Real Estate Virtual Assistants know! They can cover your listing marketing, social media,website maintenance, print marketing, real estate blogging, and much more! Take that much needed break this holiday season and rest assured your work is in good hands!
Contact Carrie
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6 Tips for Effective Video Marketing for 2012!
Friday, November 11th, 2011
With the holidays right around the corner, many of you may already be thinking about what the next year will bring. Taking the time during the slower holiday season to really map out your business strategy for 2012 is essential for starting the new year out on the right foot!
You may even be considering some new avenues of marketing that will help boost your business’s appeal and draw in more clients. A great medium that is quickly gaining momentum is video marketing, and if you haven’t yet jumped into the video scene, this coming year would be a great kick-off point!
Many real estate agents have shied away from doing video for a variety of reasons. It may be a fear of being in front of the camera, not knowing what to create a video about, or just not having the right equipment. However, when done correctly, using video as a marketing medium can be just the thing to boost business for 2012!
Whether you choose to use an inexpensive handheld video camera like the new Sony Bloggie camera or prefer to hire a local video professional, here are six video marketing tips to help you get started!
1. Keep It Short- Don’t feel as though you have to have a five minute video to make it worth your while or to convey the information you want to share. Your video can be anywhere from a thirty second “quick tip” segment to a two minute video describing what you love about your community. Most potential clients will want a shorter video that allows them to get to know you a little better.
2. Pick a Focus- Make sure each video you create has a distinct focus or point that you want to make. If it helps, take the time to write out a script so that you know exactly what you want to say. Read over it and revise it until it’s concise and compelling! Any video you post that seems distracted or doesn’t have a clear message can give the wrong impression about who you are.
3. Offer Value- As a real estate agent, you are very familiar with the top questions you get from buyers and sellers. Using a video to address these questions will ensure your video is providing the valuable information viewers want to know! You can also use questions that your clients should be asking to help them prepare for the home buying or selling process.
4. Include a Call to Action- Many real estate agents fail to include a call to action in their video, which can defeat the purpose of creating the video. Even if it’s just a simple invitation to call you if they have further questions about your communities’ real estate market, they are at least left with a next step that they can take. This is imperative to encouraging them to take action!
5. Tag Your Video- Including key words in the title of your video such as your city, and what your video is about. This will help search engines index your video more quickly. You can also include key words in your video description if you’re uploading the video to YouTube. Help potential clients find your video more easily and you’ll get more views!
6. Post Your Video- Once you’ve created your video, you’ll want to post it in as many places as possible for ultimate exposure. Have a video page on your website, create a custom YouTube channel for your videos, post them to your real estate blog, and be sure to promote them Facebook and Twitter.
I hope these tips help get you started as you embark on this new marketing territory! Getting a video or two recorded before the end of the year will help you launch your new marketing and give your business fresh appeal with the beginning of 2012!
Contact Carrie
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5 Compelling Reasons You Can’t Forget Your Website
Friday, November 4th, 2011
While we enjoy bringing you all of the latest and greatest tips and tools for social media, we also are firm believers in the tried and true basics of online marketing! Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, a custom blog and other social media sites are all extremely valuable for marketing as they allow you to connect and interact directly with your clients and leads. However, they should never take the place of a customized, content rich website!
With the lean towards social media, it could be that your website has fallen to the wayside and has gotten a little outdated. Hey, it happens. The key, however, is to not let it stay that way!
Think of your website as foundational to your online marketing. Sure, people will flock to your social media sites, but they’ll eventually look for the link to view your website. They want to see that you’re on top of all of your online presence mediums and will be searching for further information on your real estate company, reviews, homes you currently have on the market, homes you’ve sold, more about you personally and other pertinent real estate information.
So here’s the test. Go to your website and look at it from a visitor’s perspective. Is it visually appealing? Are you providing enough information about your services and your community? How’s your bio? Is it outdated? Does your personality shine through? Are you social media sites even listed on your website? If your website is lacking in any of these areas; it’s time for an update!
Still not convinced that your website still plays a vital role of your online presence? Take a look at these five reasons why websites still matter as pointed out by social media and online marketing consultant, Mikal Belicove.
1. Branding: Since it’s your site, you set the design, which affords you the flexibility to optimize the user experience in ways that directly support your business model and brand-related goals. There’s no competition on your website, just a branded experience that you direct yourself.
2. IT and Engineering Jurisdiction: When you control your own site, you have complete jurisdiction over its code, hosting environment, page count, content, plug-ins and more. With regard to branding, here too you have the elasticity required to make small or sweeping adjustments at will, an advantage you don’t get with third-party websites. With sites like Facebook, you can change minor graphics and some content but not code, navigation scheme, server speed or the graphic user interface.
3. Content: Create compelling and useful content that speaks to why someone is visiting your site, and you stand a higher chance of that visitor taking action with respect to your services. And since web pages are virtually unlimited on a site under your control, you have ample opportunity to add additional content and calls to action in any way you choose.
4. SEO: If garnering multiple, relevant and highly positioned placements in the SERPs (search engine result pages) is part of your marketing strategy, a website is a must. When properly coded and managed, your site delivers natural and sustaining search results that drive qualified traffic to the exact pages on your site where you want visitors to be.
5. Analytics: While many social mediums provide access to data related to demographics associated with who accesses your profile and how often they do so, website analytic tools go much deeper. They can provide you with the type of business intelligence you need to determine in real-time how your online marketing performs and stacks up against the competition.
It’s apparent that your website can’t be ignored! Your website is the foundation of all your other marketing and should reflect the excellence and effort that you put into every area of your marketing and service.
If your website does need a little renovation or if you aren’t quite sure where to begin, let your Real Estate Virtual Assistant know! They can help make those few minor tweaks or the overhaul that’s needed to your website to ensure your continued online success!
Contact Carrie
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5 Tips for Reaching the Millennial Generation
Friday, October 28th, 2011
Have you stopped to think how technology driven our society is today? It seems worlds away from where we were twenty, fifteen, even ten years ago! In fact, there’s a whole generation of people who don’t even know what life was like before the internet. They’ve grown up with immediate access to an abundance of information at their fingertips, a fast paced social life and are novices as quickly sorting through the best and most convenient path to take in any given situation. They’re call “Millennials.”
So, how do you reach this 17-34 year old, on-the-go generation? Since they are the next wave of home buyers and sellers, being able to capture their attention and speak their language is vital!
Two of the key aspects are to be mobile and be social.
Millennials aren’t tied to a desk top, but reliant on their smartphones, tablets and laptops. Being as mobile as they are will help you keep their speed. Being social reaches them where they spend the majority of their time and will help keep you at the forefront of their mind when they do decide to enter the real estate market.
Here are five main ways you can reach the Millennial generation with your marketing as pointed out by Matt Britton, founder and CEO of Millennial generation marketing agency Mr Youth.
Utility: Millennials are multitaskers. They have 15 tabs open in their Chrome browser while their iPhones push Twitter alerts and their Facebook feeds are blowing up. They don’t want their time to be wasted, so you’re best suited by offering tools to help streamline their day, as opposed to adding one more thing to check.
Keeping on top of your Twitter and Facebook accounts can help streamline their online time as you feed your blog and other social media sites through these hubs.
Entertainment: The average YouTube user spends 15 to 25 minutes per day on the site; we like being entertained. And since traditional media consumption is being turned on its head by streaming services, companies need to find a new way to get in front of their audiences and entertain them.
Having a custom YouTube channel for your listings and community videos will spark their interest and give them that visual entertainment they’re searching for.
Information: We are bombarded daily by information online, and one huge reason we use the web is to find more of it. The information you provide on your blog and other social media sites needs to be current and relevant in order for the Millenials to take the time to read it. They’re smart and will quickly dismiss any information they feel like they’ve heard a thousand times. They simply don’t have time for it. Fresh and pertinent information is key!
Rewards: Rewarding is most effective as a retention tool, and not an acquisition tool, Britton says. Offering a prize to your 200th follower might get you a few more fans, but they’re only there for the free stuff and not because they’re huge fans of your business. On the other hand, rewarding your existing fans is a great way to bolster their connection to your company.
Whether you’re offering an exclusive coupon or a prize, be sure to reward the existing fans who got you are past clients or current leads. These are your loyal fans who are most likely to stick with you and use you again in the future, unlike a fair-weather follower who only showed up for the latest contest.
Recognition: Be appreciative of your fans’ interest and support of your company (it doesn’t have to be monetary, even a “thank you” will go a long way). Branding isn’t just important for companies as millennials are all building their own personal brands, too.
If you have a current client who is showing in a local gallery; recognize their accomplishment on your sites! Having your recognition and interest in their lives will show them you care and show others that you’re a real estate agent who will go above and beyond. This will give them even more reason to tell their friends about you and your services, which could result in even more leads for you in the future.
Now, it may sound like it will take a lot of extra time and effort to reach out to this next generation of home buyers, but taking it a day at a time will go a long way. If you find you don’t have the time needed to reach out to this demographic in the way they need to be reached, your Real Estate Virtual Assistant will be a great resource in helping you achieve your goals!
Contact Carrie
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6 Ways to Customize Your Facebook Business Page
Friday, October 7th, 2011
As a real estate agent, you know that it takes much more than just a website to establish a worthwhile presence for your business. Maintaining a web presence on social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others is extremely valuable in terms of connecting with prospects and clients, sharing content and generating leads.
But unlike your own website, it is not always easy to customize your social networking pages to your liking. You are forced to work within the set parameters and design limitations given to you, which can make it difficult to achieve a unique presence that sets you a part from your competitors.
But nothing is impossible, right? Here are several things you can do to uniquely brand and customize your Facebook Business Page.
1. Claim Your URL – Make sure your Facebook page is as shareable and easy to find as possible. You can achieve this by creating a more recognizable vanity URL. For example: http://www.facebook.com/username (insert company name here). Straight and to the point is all it takes for effective results. This will also make your page more professional, more identifiable and will make it easier to share with others. Keep in mind: you need at least 25 fans on your Facebook page before you can create a custom URL. Think of it as an incentive to really invest in growing your social media presence!
2. Generate a Custom Welcome Page – A welcome page can be used to welcome new visitors to your page and will encourage them to ‘Like’ you. By having a welcome page, visitors will not be able to view your page without liking it first. (Remember, your posts will not show up in newsfeeds unless you are ‘liked’) Set this page as your ‘Default Landing Tab’ so it’s the first page people will land on when visiting your page. There are several free services that you can use to create a landing page. You can also have website providers such as RealPro create a landing tab for your page that will match the branding of your website. Another option is to have your real estate virtual assistant create a custom landing tab for you.
3. Make Your Picture Stand Out – Your Facebook Profile Picture doesn’t always need to be your company logo. Be creative! Do you have an amazing new property that you would like to make known? Did one of your team members win an award? Honor them by making them your picture for a day or two. If you’re feeling spontaneous, you may want to experiment with different colors, themes and designs to get heads turning.
4. Create Custom Tabs – You can create custom tabs on your Facebook page to feature whatever or whoever you want. A few ideas of what to use could be: client testimonials, featured listings, product information, and publicizing your social media presence on other networks.
5. Generate Tabs Showcasing Other Content – In addition to your custom tabs, you can add a tab to your Facebook page to showcase work you’ve published to other websites or social networking channels. Maybe you have a slideshow presentation that you would like to make public. To get this content on you Facebook Page, all you need to do is create a SlideShare account and add the SlideShare app to your page. You can also do this with your other accounts such as Flickr and YouTube.
6 .Run a Contest or Promotion – Running a contest or a promotion is a great way to generate conversation and feedback to your page. It will also help to attract new fans and make your presence more unique. If you are having a hard time thinking up contests, look at it in terms of month by month. For example, for the month of October you could host a Halloween Costume Contest by encouraging fans to post pictures of their costumes. The contests/promotions could have prizes, or simply be for fun and engagement.
Establishing an online presence for any business is tough. It takes time, dedication and motivation, which are all things driven real estate agents know a lot about.
Have a great day!
Contact Carrie
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Beat the Clock: 3 Tips for Managing Your Time
Friday, September 16th, 2011
As a real estate agent, you’re fully aware that time is of the essence! In fact, the saying, time is money, certainly rings true as you deal on a daily basis with this ever-changing market. Oftentimes, your schedule is filled with back-to-back appointments with buyers and sellers and, if you’re constantly having to move appointments around or aren’t giving the time needed to your clients; a deal could fall through.
So how can you free yourself up to focus on the areas in your day that are most important to you? How can you avoid being overwhelmed by endless tasks that you don’t have time to get done? How can you better manage your time?
Here are three key tips that will help you approach each day with a sense of being in complete control of your time. Which can, in turn, result in a more organized approach to your business and further growth!
1. Plan your schedule the night before and hit the ground running- When you’re not in control of your schedule, you invite stress to fill the void. Set and prioritize meaningful tasks to be accomplished. Whether it’s an appointment calendar or a software program, the critical first step to properly managing your time is to organize and schedule your day.
Be careful not to confuse activity with productivity. For example, don’t just block off a couple of hours to make calls. Instead, set measurable activity goals to be accomplished, such as those 15 necessary phone calls you need to make that day.
2. Identify your time bandits- Once you’ve scheduled your day, the next step in managing your time is to recognize and modify old behavioral patterns regarding the improper use of time. Avoid procrastination in all of its attractive forms.
Having a planned schedule helps you say no to time wasters such as online surfing, personal phone calls, long lunches and chatty coworkers. An open door invites continuous distractions. Effective real estate professionals focus on task achievement rather than tension relieving diversions.
3. Delegate- Don’t feel that you have to take on every aspect of your business! Focus on doing the things only you can do and delegate things like your social media maintenance, listing marketing and real estate blogging to your Real Estate Virtual Assistant. This will give you more time to focus on your clients.
Although these steps seem basic, it’s sometimes hard to put them into practice. Yet taking control of your time will be refreshing for you and your business!
Contact Carrie
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The 5 Parts of a Facebook Post
Friday, September 2nd, 2011
Creating content to post on social media outlets is one of the biggest challenges for any professional. Not only do you want your posts to be thoughtful and informative, but you also want them to generate feedback. But let’s be honest. We could spend countless minutes, maybe even hours trying to find that perfect thing to post, but even the best articles or bits of information aren’t guaranteed a response.
As real estate virtual assistants, we want to make sure we’re giving you the tools you need to be successful within your careers and through your social media efforts. Here are two simple questions to ask yourself to create a well thought out post:
1. If you ran into one of your clients or colleagues at a party what happenin’ thing would you talk about?
2. You could also look at it the other way around. If you ran into a client or colleague at a party what story would they tell that you would want to share with others?
With that said, let’s break down Facebook posting into 5 parts.
1. Re-share What Others are Saying: By re-sharing something posted by a fan or friend, that fan or friend receives some recognition for sharing something with their network. They will be notified that you shared their post, and in turn you are drawing attention towards yourself by appearing on their page or newsfeed.
2. Tagging Other Professionals or Brands: Tag, tag, tag! Not only will tagging help your followers navigate around to news and other resources, but it will play a tremendous role in your networking strategy.
3. Remain Informative, Yet Unbiased: To keep your posts simple but to the point, it’s best to have a one or two sentence summary of the content shared, rid of biased jargon, followed by a question to engage viewers. Make sure the question is direct, as if you were talking to the person face-to-face. Also, leave the question open-ended so it cannot be answered with a simple “yes” or “no.”
4. Title and Description of Content: When you post a link copied directly from another website, it doesn’t always have an appropriate title. Pay attention to the title that shows up on your page before sharing. To change the title, hover over the title or description. The title will gain a highlighted background and if you click it you will be able to make edits to both the title and description. This is especially useful with long titles. By shortening, the whole look of your post becomes cleaner and crisp, and adjusting the title will provide some originality to the post.
5. Thank Yous: When someone makes a comment on one of your posts, make it a point to go back and “like” it. Even if you disagree with what they are saying, you are showing your appreciation of their feedback. And remember – liking your own content isn’t nearly as important as liking user-submitted content, comments or engagement.
As real estate virtual assistants, it’s our goal to help you use social media to your upmost potential. Recognizing other professionals on Facebook as well as engaging with others on a regular basis is imperative to creating a strong online presence.
Contact Carrie
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Use Facebook Ads to Target Your Market!
Friday, August 26th, 2011
Creating a dynamic marketing strategy for social media is an effective way to build a strong base of potential clients.
Once we build our clients’ social media sites and post great content on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ for a few weeks, we take some time to build up their fan base. Whether it is inviting all of our clients’ personal friends to “like” the page or running an incentive or contest, it is our job as Real Estate Virtual Assistants to go above and beyond just posting to a page. We also have to focus on getting our clients the fans they need to start interacting and getting business.
One of the things your Real Estate Virtual Assistant can do is to create a custom Facebook ad that announces the page and helps get more fans. Facebook makes this very easy due to its incredibly targeted marketing strategies. The more criteria you give, the more targeted your ad becomes.
You can target your ad to a group as small as 100 people if you use the target criteria to its fullest potential. This is appealing because you can insure that you’re targeting people who would be your ideal client. Now, Facebook has even offered brand-new targeting criteria: the zip code! Here are some of the other demographics you have to choose from:
Geographic Location: You can target by city and state, country, and you can even specify how many miles outside your targeted city you want to target. Facebook has recently gone a step farther by including zip codes in their geographic targeting! This makes it easier for you to fine-tune your targeting so that your ad only reaches the zip codes you want it to. It helps narrow down your target demographic.
Personal Interests, Professions, and Workplaces: Do you specialize in golf communities? Try targeting people who have “golf” listed as a Facebook interest. It’s possible. You can also target people in certain professions or who work for certain companies. If you live by a few hospitals, and therefore have a lot of doctors in your community, use that when you’re placing your ad. The narrower you make the target demographic, the more likely it is that the people who would be potential clients would see your ad.
Education, Marital Status, and Gender: Do you only want to target married couples? Would it be hard for someone to afford a home in your area without a college degree? Believe it or not, these are factors that you should consider when placing a Facebook ad. You can target people based on what you know about your community. Believe it or not, the more you specific you make your demographic, the more it shows you know your client base, and the more likely you are to see interested leads come from your ad.
As Real Estate Virtual Assistants, it is our job to help you get the most out of your social media presence. A very effective way to build your fan base and market your brand is through Facebook ads. With these targeted components, including the brand-new zip code demographic, you can narrow down your demographic and run an effective ad.
If you need help getting your ad up and running, or just want some help getting up on Facebook, ask your Real Estate Virtual Assistant to help!
Contact Carrie
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Where Should I Find My Facebook Posts, Anyway?
Friday, August 12th, 2011
When we first begin our social media setups for our clients, we create something called a “cheat sheet.” This cheat sheet has everything from our clients’ hourly social media budget for the week, to links to their website and blog to client preferences to a list of resources we should use for posts. The cheat sheet is, in a way, our social media lifeline for each client. By glancing at the cheat sheet, we know exactly where to go to find what to post for our clients and what geographic area each client is in. It’s a way to save time, be more efficient, and focus on what’s important in social media marketing: getting interaction.
Many real estate agents struggle to figure out what to post. They want content that will be interesting to their fans, but they want to keep things professional and relevant at the same time. It can be a struggle, but if you create you own “cheat sheet” of go-to resources for your social media posts, we can almost guarantee that you’ll spend less time figuring out what to post and more time interacting with your community, which is what social media is all about!
We have a list of a few go-to real estate, community and technology resources that we’d like to share with you, to make your social networking efforts easier. Here are five of our favorites:
HGTV Front Door: If you’re looking to post buyer and seller tips, this is the perfect site for you. Full of how-to guides, to-do and not-to-do advice, and informative articles about the real estate process, this website has some perfect articles that you can share with your fans in order to educate them. People love reading about the changing trends and tactics in real estate, particularly if they’re thinking about putting their home on the market. You can always find something different to post on FrontDoor, so use it well!
REALTOR Online Magazine: This online magazine has daily real estate news updates that are interesting to real estate agents and consumers alike. They provide insightful and relevant information about the real estate market, and they also give some thoughts on what the latest trends are in the market, which could be interesting to your fans. We go on this site at least once a day to see what’s happening in the real estate world.
Mashable: Mashable is an online news site that is technology-focused. As irrelevant as it might seem, technology is incredibly popular right now. The whole world is waiting for Apple or Android to launch their new product or for the latest Facebook news. While some of the headlines might not be relevant to your fans, trust us when we say that the consumer will want to read about major tech news or social media tips. You can post things from this site once in awhile to change up the content.
Patch: If you’re looking to post something community-based, Patch is the place to go. If your town has a Patch site, chances are you’re probably been on it. All of the news on this site is community-focused, and they offer frequent, daily updates about the latest events in town. It also gets updated all day, so you can check back frequently to see what’s new in your community. You can even subscribe to a daily newsletter that gives you an overall summary of the latest news in your town. It’s quick, easy, and doesn’t require much effort to access. You’ll find several community posts on Patch.
This Old House: In a buyer’s market, home improvement projects have become popular again. People are always thinking of ways they can add to their home, in order to boost its value. In this economy, the majority of homeowners are looking for ways to fix up their home without breaking the bank. This Old House is a great resource for DIY home improvement projects and will give your fans some great ideas. They have great posts that are both Facebook and Twitter material, so we like to keep this one bookmarked.
If you’ve been struggling with figuring out what to post on Facebook and Twitter, these five resources can give you a head-start. The more you search and utilize these resources for your posts, the easier it becomes to find quality content for your social networking sites. If you’re looking for someone to help you post quality content or get your social networking presence set up, ask your real estate virtual assistant!
Contact Carrie
Visit us Online at RealSupportInc.com
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How To Put Testimonials to Work for You!
Friday, August 5th, 2011
Information is instantaneous in our day and age which can be good… and bad. Let’s think in the realm of reviews and referrals. If your friends go to the newest restaurant in town and love it, you’re sure to hear about their experience. Whether you talk in person, read it on their Facebook page or follow them on Twitter, their review can be easily received by many people at once. Chances are, all of their friends are now eager to check out the restaurant and word begins to spread quickly.
The bottom line? Whether good or bad, a single review can have a ripple affect which can boost or bury a business.
As a real estate agent, you have a great opportunity for word-of-mouth marketing. Buyers and sellers are dealing with a large financial investment and will look for referrals for which real estate agent to use. Their friends and families opinions will play an important role in who they choose and when there’s a great real estate agent in town; chances are word will spread quickly.
So how can you generate more reviews or client testimonials? Ask them! More than likely people don’t think about writing a review of their experience unless they’re asked. Having a written review or testimonial is great because:
- It gives you a direct quote to add to your website (with their permission, of course).
- It allows them to think through their experience and when friends ask them about it, they’ll already have thought through the answer!
Here are 3 great ways to gather reviews:
1. Ask for reviews in your monthly newsletter or weekly email.
2. Setup a Yelp or Trulia account. Both of these offer mass email options that you can send to your database.
3. Ask for reviews on your Social Media sites. If others see great reviews on your Facebook or Twitter page, this can encourage them to do the same!
Having a testimonial page on your website and reviews on other social media sites can allow potential clients to get a feel for how you deal with clients and the services you offer. It also gives you more credibility and builds that trust that people are looking for in a real estate agent.
Your Real Estate Virtual Assistant can help boost your business with generating reviews and client testimonials! Whether you need a testimonial page added to your website or want your REVA to set up your Yelp or Twitter account; we’re here to help!
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