I have been with eROI, in the interactive marketing industry, for over five years and seen the space evolve with email marketing, social networking/social media, blogging, and microblogging, i.e., Twitter. Running campaigns for clients online can be very exciting and stressful – as the Internet is always on. There is no other medium that moves as fast as the Internet and has as many ways that people can consume content. With the onslaught of social media sites and Twitter, information spreads faster than most people realize – people share feeds, sites have open APIs to pull information and post to other sites, Google constantly crawls and indexes these high traffic sites. One posting on Twitter or Facebook can result in hundreds or thousands of pages of syndication in minutes.
The real estate industry has always done a good job locally with information but it never spreads very fast (Sunday paper listings is the “information superhighway” of the real estate industry), which is one area the industry has seriously slacked. I am very lucky with my realtor as Jennifer King is a top realtor in the Portland area, with whom I have bought and sold a number of homes with. She has and is continuing to do an amazing job. Recently Jennifer switched to doing websites for properties and not leaving fliers. Jennifer is traditional in her methodology, so I knew she had all the bases covered. With the current state of the housing market, not many homes are moving very fast, so as traffic was slow for two weeks (during spring break) I reached out to a friend and colleague of mine, DJ Waldow from North Carolina. He was looking for a realtor online to help him sell his home and found his Realtor by asking some questions on Trulia Voices, a real estate Q&A social networking community. After some back and forth, it was a perfect match. He recently had a story published on him about using Twitter to promote the sale of his house. Anderson Cooper tweeted his story which promoted it only more. Soon thereafter, they had accepted an offer to purchase their home. DJ pointed me to Trulia and Rudy Bachraty, Trulia’s Social Media Guru, who helped him socialize his home on Trulia, Trulia’s corporate blog and on Twitter. So I was hoping to have a similar success by following suit.
I had a Twitter conversation with Rudy and he gave me a helping hand. Jennifer became a Trulia Pro to help promote my home up to 7x more on Trulia compared to that of a non Trulia Pro and I tweeted about my home for sale as well as posted a message on Facebook. Using URL tracking functionality by idek.net (written by Adam Covati). I was able to determine there was a major impact on the traffic and interest in my home.
Within two days of Jennifer posting my home on Trulia, my tweeting efforts and the Facebook posting the number of site visits to my property website more than tripled and we increased that again with a spike of page views on Trulia. In addition, due to the social effects of sites like Trulia and Twitter, there are nearly 250 listings on Google for my home. I have personally received a over 15 referrals from friends for people they know to look at the house.
The impacts of social media sites is wide reaching and exponentially effective. Coupled with traditional real estate marketing techniques we have increased not only site visits but also more than doubled the number of showing requests. Hopefully this dual marketing strategy will help us find a buyer for our home more effectively.
