Google first page search results for Realtors

Controlling what consumers see when they Google you.

In our last post we recommended setting up your Google profile to control what consumers are seeing when they search for your name.

social media 300x299 How to lose clients part 3

So what are the other ways of controlling which sites appear in your search results?

One of the best ways is to be active on the most strategically important social media websites.

There are an unbelievable number of these that you could participate in, but the ones we want you to focus on right now are Facebook, YouTube and Twitter – we believe these are the most important to your real estate marketing success.

Participating in these sites doesn't have to be huge timesuck – you can use ping.fm to post to some of these sites automatically. You could also use posterous.com as this works in a very similar fashion.

Note. We will do a review of ping and posterous in the near future to get you started on these time saving applications.

Social Networking for Realtors is the new prospecting for real estate clients - so you will actually be killing two birds with one stone by participating.

Facebook:

If you don't get that Facebook is critical to your real estate success then you either have a successful hand fed REO business or you may be out of business and you just don't know it yet. Before you read any further, take a min to watch this amazing video, Socialnomics.

Ok, now you should clearly understand that social media has created a fundamental shift in the way we communicate. In part 1 of this blog series you will see that when I Googled myself my Facebook page ranked number one on page one.

If this isn't enough motivation, you should read some of our other posts about Facebook:

YouTube:

YouTube is currently the 2nd largest search engine on the internet, done correctly your video can spread virally and could potentially drive hundreds or even thousands of visitors to your blog.

Or more appropriate for Realtors, video marketing can expose your listings or describe your neighborhoods or even talk about market trentds to hundreds of motivated home buyers and sellers.

We will be posting an article soon about using a cheap video camera called The Flip – (Click over to Amazon to see the Flip Mino) a camera which is easy-to-use and has built in software and a USB port so you can post your videos to YouTube in just a couple of clicks.

In the meantime go ahead and open a YouTube account here.

Twitter:

Twitter may be the most popular site on the internet right now and it can be frustrating or confusing. It is full of SPAM and automated tweets that can easily clutter your focus.

However twitter does have its place in the social networking game … once you learn some simple tricks you can target and attract quality visitors.

Because of its popularity it seems that applications for twitter are being developed at the speed of light; here are a few of my favorite twitter tools for Realtors.

Take advantage of the twitter craze and use it to distribute relevant content to your readers. Use it to distribute content that supports and builds your brand equity.