RealBird Blog

We like it: Sponsored post on ActiveRain about our Facebook Open Graph implementation

Our post titled "Don't Forget to Like Yourself - Facebook Listing Pages with RealBird" is now at the top sponsored position on ActiveRain for 24 hours. It's paid for, but nevertheless at the top position :)

http://activerain.com/blogsview/1634764/don-t-forget-to-like-yourself-facebook-listing-pages-with-realbird

Facebook Profile listing widget, new ActiveRain and blog embed code and other feature updates

We had many feature releases in the last couple of weeks, plus many improvements of existing features. The article below summarizes the result of the last month R&D efforts here at RealBird. I organized the new and updated features by products, but note that some of the improvements are interconnected, hence providing additional benefits by channeling visitors from one of your RealBird services to the other.

But first thing first. Check out these examples of the just released embed code optimized for ActiveRain, Localism and your regular blog with SEO in mind. Just enter your listings in RealBird as usual and use the new link on the member management page called "Embed it in ActiveRain & blog post". You can configure the width and show or hide contact info and center or left align the widget.

New RealBird embed code examples

PGA NATIONAL GOLF ESTATE - Escape To Your Private Oasis

Overview Maps Photos Features Description Video Neighborhood Market Stats

$2,499,777 Single Family Home For Sale Main Features 7 Bedrooms 6 Bathrooms 1 Partial Bathroom Lot: 0.86 acre(s) Location 5 Rabbits Run Palm Beach Gardens, FL 33418

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Nestor and Katerina Gasset International Properties and Investments, Inc (561) 753-0135 [email protected] http://www.wellington-luxury-homes.com Listed by: International Properties and Investments Inc.

Our recent listings Short Sale Historic Grand View Heights-West Palm Beach FL 33401 Short Sale Condo with Ocean-IntraCoastal and Pool Views! Short Sale -14289 Calypso Ln Wellington Florida 33414 Short Sale - 752 Lake Wellington Drive Wellington 33414 3419 Pony Run Wellington Florida 33467 Short Sale Subscribe to our listing feed

See more Palm Beach Gardens, FL real estate for sale

Unforgettable Views Olympia Waterfront

Overview Maps Photos Features Description About Olympia

$999,000 Single Family Home For Sale Main Features 4 Bedrooms 3 Bathrooms Interior: 3551 sqft Lot: 0.64 acre(s) Location 7500 Sandy Point Beach Rd. NE Olympia, WA 98516

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Mike Conner City Realty, Inc. (360) 970-4408 [email protected] http://www.cityrealtyinc.com Listed by: City Realty, Inc.

Our recent listings Stylish New West Olympia Condo Unforgettable Views Olympia Waterfront Perfect West Olympia Starter Multi-Family Zoning Near Downtown Olympia Gorgeous Olympia Rambler Subscribe to our listing feed

See more Olympia, WA real estate for sale

Live Work TownHome in Market Common - Incredible Location and Price

Overview Maps Photos Description

$329,900 Townhouse For Sale Main Features 2 Bedrooms 2 Bathrooms 2 Partial Bathrooms Interior: 2150 sqft Location Howard Avenue 2834-D Myrtle Beach, SC 29588

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MIRELA MONTE BUYERS' CHOICE REALTY (843) 251-2378 [email protected] http://www.MyrtleBeachHomes.US Listed by: Mirela Monte

Our recent listings Windy Hill Dunes Oceanfront Condo for Sale in N. Myrtle Beach SC Kenley Court - Apartments for Sale in Loris, SC Live Work TownHome in Market Common - Incredible Location and Price Adorable Home in Cherry Grove Beach The Best of Both Worlds: Ocean and Marsh Merger Subscribe to our listing feed

See more Myrtle Beach, SC real estate for sale

RealBird Listing Publisher - new features

• "Homes for Sale" tab widget for both your Facebook Profile and Facebook Page
• New ActiveRain and Localism optimized embed code with stunningly good looking slideshows (see examples above)
• New Photowall listing inventory widget
• Updated configuration tool for the Featured Listings Map widget with Google Earth 3D view and options to generate maps for your sold and pending inventory as well
• iPromote integration
• Your RealBird single property websites now link to your RealBird Property Search, providing more comparable properties for your visitors. All leads go to you.

RealBird Property Search - new features

• The search RSS now includes MediaRSS extension
  Photos are now attached to the RSS items with the industry standard machine readable MediaRSS extension, hence allows advanced reusability, e.g. tou can use it now to create slideshow and other media widgets using 3rd party services
• Mapped search results as default option
  PRO subscribers can now configure the service to show the mapped results by default.
• Advanced configuration options.

• Configure the service so that clicking on the property search result keeps the details page in the same iframe. The default behavior is to break out of the embedded frame into new window.
• Hiding header and footer for smooth integration.
• These are PRO options as well. Please contact us for instructions.

• Your featured listings are now promoted on your Property Search interface.
• Cross-market and showcase your own listings under a prominent "Featured Listings" tab. This is a PRO feature also.
• The RealBird widget for Facebook Pages and Facebook Profiles also links to your RealBird Property Search

New PRO subscription option - go monthly for only $11.95

Some of the new features are RealBird PRO only options, like the industry-first Facebook Profile and Facebook Page widget, MLS-compatible unbranded virtual tours, ad-free Property Search. To make your upgrade decision easier, we introduced a monthly payment option for only $11.95/month. You can upgrade instantly through the member area. Just log in and click the Upgrade link either on the member landing page or on the listing management page

If you like these new features, please consider upgrading to the PRO account in the RealBird member area. It's only $11.95 per month (equals only a few bucks or less per listing per month)

-- Zoltan 
RealBird.com

 

Win an iPod Touch. A social media experiment

This post is reblogged from our ActiveRain blog

Another week, another promotion. We are now experimenting with social media marketing. More specifically, we are attempting to create a viral marketing event in the form of a sweepstakes. Aside from the obvious, which is to promote our own brand, we want to be able to demonstrate to our readers and members how to utilize social media to achieve a marketing goal. We selected ActiveRain (as the viral hub) and Twitter to be the core platform for this experiment.

Twitter this message to participate

In our opinion, the four rules below are the basis for a successful social media campaign:

Rule #1 - The transaction cost for participants has to be as low as possible

Transaction cost means not only the monetary cost, but the abstract cost of efforts, time and mental resources as well. We designed this sweepstakes so that it only takes a few seconds to enter. Just click here to post the following message to Twitter and you are in.

"RealBird http://bit.ly/YSWDK is giving away a free iPod Touch #realbird1 ReTweet to enter Rules: http://bit.ly/96ge"

Rule #2 - An incentive has to be provided

Incentives do not have to be monetary in nature. They can be a reward as trivial as feeling good because of the participation, as it would be the case in charity campaigns for instance. In this particular case, the incentive is two fold: 1) the Apple iPod Touch which will be the prize for one lucky participant - this is a monetary incentive 2) the excitement of participating in something of this nature - this is a mental incentive. I suggest not to underestimate 2) either in terms of its effect.

Rule #3 -Ideally, do some good in the process

Related to Rule #2, good campaigns are those with secondary or by-product value for participants. We designed this campaign in a way that the tweet contains a link to randomly selected active RealBird listing website. So while the message will be traveling on the web, every instance of the message will link to a random RealBird listing, hence bringing exposure for a RealBird member and their property; for free.

Rule #4 - Be as transparent as possible

Transparency creates trust. Trust increases participation. We made sure that you will see as much of this campaigns internals as we do. You'll see all participants by searching Twitter for the topic #realbird1 and you will also be able to see the click-through rate, peaks and drops, viral hubs and sources through the amazing URL shortening service bit.ly.

Enough of the theory: this is the single step to take in order to participate:

Simply Twitter (or retweet) the message below. Make sure that the Twitter topic #realbird1 is presented in the message.

Enter sweepstakes: RealBird http://bit.ly/YSWDK is giving away a free iPod Touch #realbird1 ReTweet to enter Rules: http://bit.ly/96ge

Current participants: See as participants join the sweepstakes

Click-through traffic: See bit.ly stats here

Sweepstakes rules and disclaimers:

1. No purchase is necessary to participate
2. A participant is defined as a Twitter user, uniquely indetified by his or her Twitter username
3. One prize for one randomly selected participant: an 8GB Apple iPod Touch (2nd generation)
4. One entry per participant no matter how many campaign tweets are posted
5. US and Canadian residents can win only (although we welcome others to retweet )
6. Drawing is on April 2, 2009
7. Free shipping of the free prize, no cost to the winner
8. The linked, random RealBird property website may contain 3rd party advertisement. This advertisement only shows when visitors arrive through this campaign's channel and there are no advertisements on the RealBird single property websites otherwise.
9. No association or business relationship is claimed by RealBird with ActiveRain, Twitter, Apple or any other party mentioned in the campaign.
10. While RealBird employees and their families can Twitter the message, they can not participate in the sweepstakes and their Twitter account will be excluded from the list prior to the drawing
11. Prohibited where local and state laws disallows such promotions
12. The winner will be announced on this blog and we will contact him or her via email, Twitter and phone (if it is publicly available) for delivery information. If we can not reach the winner within two weeks from the drawing date, we'll conduct a new drawing.

So are you in?

-- Zoltan
RealBird.com

Updated referral statistics

The updated pie chart below shows the relative click-thru traffic from major real estate portals; i.e. consumer destination sites where RealBird listings are syndicated to (automatically or manually). It is based on the web analytics data of the last 200,000 click-throughs to RealBird single property websites:

Some notes and assumptions:

• Craigslist is a manual distribution option for which we provide all the instructions and code. However, - due to the fact that it requires agents to manually post their listings after entering them in RealBird - the number of RealBird listings published on Craigslist is much less than the number of listings automatically syndicated to portals (Trulia, Zillow etc.). The traffic ratio of Craigslist would be way higher if all RealBird listings were published there as well by our members.


• Trulia and Zillow consumer traffic is comparable (see Compete.com) but the click-through traffic from Trulia is almost three times as much. I suspect, that this is due to the fact, that Trulia has a big, prominent button "See more photos and details" linking to the RealBird property sites, while Zillow has a smaller, regular link on their property pages. In other words, Trulia's property page is more click-through friendly, hence more consumers actually end-up on the RealBird listing websites.


• Since our number of syndicated listings is relatively small compared to the whole for-sale, active, US listing dataset, this chart does not implies in any ways the importance of those sites in terms of consumer traffic or the level of exposure your listing will receive. Statistically speaking, this chart can not be used as a base for making projections on traffic of the included portals. Our dataset is not a representation of such information. It only shows the distribution of traffic sources to the RealBird dataset. Use Compete.com or Quantcast.com for more accurate info on this.

  Update: Based on the conversation with Sara from Zillow (see comments below), I'd like to emphasize it again, that the chart shows the ratio of referral traffic only, which does not have direct relationship with other metrics, like lead conversion etc. For example: one may receive more leads directly on the sites we syndicate to, without the user ever clicking-thru to the RealBird listing website (hence no referral traffic is tracked).



• It is interesting to see that the click-throu traffic from Overstock.com is higher than the traffic from Vast.com, even though OverStock.com's real estate classifieds are powered by Vast.com. It is probably due to the fact, that Overstock has way higher traffic than Vast.com (See Compete.com for details)


• We decided to include ActiveRain traffic that is not click-through referral, but impressions of RealBird widgets embedded on ActiveRain. It may artificially improved the relative rank though. We did so, because we wanted to emphasize the importance of posting listing widgets on ActiveRain, and because we could not find an easy way to separate the two types of web analytics data

Other notable sources of traffic are: Geebo.com,Walmart Classifieds and recently, StumbleUpon

Thank you for Juliet Johnson for making us create an updated chart :)

-- Zoltan
RealBird.com

ActiveRain closes on to reach the 100,000 members mark

ActiveRain - one of the leading and certainly the most dynamic  real estate social networks - has 91,690 members, as of the time of writing this post. ActiveRain is free service and the value is unprecedented in terms of access to the vast amount of information shared by other real estate professionals and online marketing in general.

We call on all of you, real estate professionals (agents, brokers, appraisals, stager, mortgage lenders etc.) to join for free and let's help them together to reach the 100,000 members count.

• ActiveRain is a blogging system in the sense that it
  enables you to write articles, it lists them in chronological order,
  syndicates it via RSS and feeds the search engine monster for maximum
  exposure and clearly identifies you as the author and authority.
• ActiveRain is a training ground:
  Many of us come to ActiveRain for advice, discussions and to learn from
  each other. Training each other on business, marketing etc. is what
  creates the loyalty and incremental benefit, and this sets ActiveRain
  apart from other services.
• ActiveRain is an ecosystem and a team marketing platform:
  One participant's success depends on the success of the overall
  ecosystem and AR members directly and indirectly enhance each others
  marketing efforts. For example, there is such a deep interconnection
  between the 1 million+ AR pages Google knows about, that search engines
  pay extra attention to content published via ActiveRain and value the
  content as highly relevant.
• ActiveRain is a unique social network:
  Valuable social networks are those, where the connections between the
  participants create a value-add, which would not exist without these
  connections. That is, there are 1) new and 2) valuable information born
  from these relationships. In other words, the relationships between
  ActiveRainers are as important as the content generated by individuals.

To celebrate ActiveRain's contribution to the real estate industry, we - at RealBird - have released an ActiveRain Social Network Widget, which can be used to merge your ActiveRain and RealBird account into a handy, great looking, team marketing platform.  Market your ActiveRain associates (the ActiveRain members you selected as your inner circle), each other's business profile, each other's listings (published through RealBird) and each other blog posts!

Below is an example of the widget with viral marketing capability built into it:

The widget above shows our own RealBird ActiveRain associates, their RealBird listings and the blog posts. To get your own, join ActiveRain and RealBird (both for free) and get your own widget from the RealBird member area.

Enjoy the benefits and let's give ActiveRain a helping hand to reach the 100,000 member mark.

-- Zoltan Szendro
RealBird.com