RealBird Blog

Automate your social media and RealBird listing marketing with Missinglettr

One of the main challenges of social media marketing is keeping up with sharing and re-sharing of your content that you created on an ongoing basis. The attention span of your potential clients on social media are extremely limited (just think of how much time you spend on a single shared item of someone else). The amount of content in the firehose of social media channels is also overwhelming, hence, a key to social media marketing success is to re-share content consistently with enough mix to keep shares unique and proper frequency so that you don't alienate your readers.

Enter missinglettr 

missinglettr takes your blogs and RSS feeds, monitors them 24/7 and creates campaigns out of the items that's been posted. A campaign is a set of future shares, scheduled a year in advance. Once a campaign is approved by you, the rest is taking care of by missinglettr automatically.

The service is more than just a time saver! The problem with the time consuming requirement of resharing content, is that most people (us included) will give up after a few times. It's not just the time it takes, it's the fact that without missinglettr or similar services, you have to manually manage the sharing calendar and sharing content for each of your posts, while being busy generating new content AND actually taking care of your real estate business (which is the objective of all of this, after all). In most cases, people just skip resharing the content on an ongoing basis hence reducing their social media marketing effectiveness big time.

We'll write more about missinglettr and how to use their service. Below are some of the ways you can utilize them right away !

Add your RealBird Listing Feed to missinglettr and market each listing ongoing, automatically

This is pretty neat, this is how it works:

1. RealBird PRO provides your own RSS feed of your listings. (You can find it in the member area, under the Listings Widget tab, under the RSS section).
2. Just copy this RealBird RSS link and add it to your missinglettr account as a new site.
3. They will then create a year-long campaign for each of your current listings on RealBird, and a new campaign every time when you publish a new listing in the future
4. When you sell a property, just update its status to Sold on RealBird and the service will continue to promote it completely automated, linking to the by then sold property site.

Add your Wordpress or Active blog to missinglettr

Just like with listing marketing, consistent re-sharing of your blog posts you worked so hard on is crucial for delivering lasting traffic to your content. You can just copy the regular Url of your Wordpress site or your ActiveRain blogs RSS link (e.g. our is at http://activerain.com/blogs/realbird/rss) and missinglettr will create yearly campaign for your articles. 

We hope you like this new service as much as we do.  

 -- The RealBird Team

Full disclosure: we are an affiliate of missinglettr and we may profit if you sign up with them. 

 

Create social media images from your listing photos for easy sharing

Your property photos on RealBird are now now also shareable social media images.

As a follow-up feature for the popular photo branding tool, you can now create social media shareables from your RealBird listing photos with a few clicks. We integrated the service called Pablo from Buffer within the RealBird member area. 

You can access this feature on the list of listings page and on the listing photo management page. Just click the "Create a social media listing photo" link, which will take you to the Pablo editor, which will be automatically pre-populated with your property picture.

From there on, you can create different sizes for different social media sites with custom overlays and download or share them right away. Pablo also offers you an optional browser extension for easy image sharing, but this is not required for theRealBird integration.

Pablo lists 10 fun ways to use the service on their blog

 

Give it a try and let us know what you think!

Unifying the RealBird mobile user interfaces

By looking at our web analytics of the last few months, we noticed a solid month-to-month growth in smartphone access on the RealBird property marketing platform. 15.4% of visitors on the RealBird members' sites were using smartphones in November 2011 and the number has been growing ever since. As of February 2012, it is up to 18.6%, up more than one percent from January's 17.5% and there is no sign of slowing down.

We have been planning to unify the RealBird mobile user interfaces for a while, but this trend convinced us that the time had arrived for implementation and we just launched the first set of updates today.

See below the summary of the new features, all of them are automatically applied to RealBird PRO property websites:

1. We are now "deep linking" into your RealBird Mobile Real Estate Site to show the property details. 
2. "Deep linking" now applies no matter where your visitors come from: via your SMS text keyword marketing, your QR codes, or following a link on social media or blog posts, from any sources as long as the consumer is using his or her smartphone to access your listing information
3. When the mobile listing information is "deep linked" to (vs navigation from your RealBird mobile website's homepage), the header of the details page is slightly different: your mobile property page shows the "Home" icon on the top left, "Info" as the header and a "Nearby" button on the top right. The "Home" icon links to your RealBird Mobile Website's homepage, where visitors can see your other listings, start a property search or read your blog posts. The "Nearby" button links directly to your RealBird Mobile Search form so that they can find other properties and send inquiries about those to you. 
4. We also added a second call-for-action link - called "Schedule Showing" - below the primary photo. It opens the same inquiry form as the previously and still available "Request More Info" button at the bottom of the mobile listing page. We've noticed a great deal of improvement in visitors-to-lead conversion, ever since we added the "Schedule Showing" button to the regular single property websites, so we decided to add it to the mobile version as well.
5. Finally, "Draft" listings (unpublished RealBird listings, saved as Drafts) are shown on the mobile devices. This is only applicable for deep linked property pages, so they won't show up in your featured listings list if the mobile user starts the navigation from your RealBird mobile website's homepage.

This last option - i.e. showing draft listings - is a very powerful marketing tool for Expired and FSBO listing interviews. You can now set up a "Draft" listing on RealBird for your prospective sellers prior to the interview. And because the property site has "Draft" status, it won't be syndicated, search engine indexed or shown on your public RealBird widgets. However you can create its own SMS text keyword, QR code and demonstrate your mobile marketing capabilities for your prospective sellers. Just ask them to scan their own QR code on their smartphone or text the SMS keyword to the phone number and they can see the instant result. Wow them with your mobile marketing services. When you win the listing, you can log back into RealBird and you can "Publish" the draft property website easily. Just a quick note: in case of expired listings, make sure you don't use copyrighted materials: e.g. the previous agent's photos, notes etc.

Let us know what you think?

Thanks and Enjoy !

-- The RealBird Team
www.realbird.com 

 

 

Facebook Listing Pages - Open Graph and RealBird integration

We just released the Facebook Open Graph integration with RealBird. This new feature enables you to create a Facebook Listing Page from your RealBird single property website and use it as a social media notification platform. When you have an open house to announce, just add it to this page and all the people on Facebook who liked your property will get notified instantly via their News Feed. Pretty neat, isn't it? You can use it for posting many different kind of updates and attach video, photos and links, just like with any other Facebook Page status updates.

Below are the simple steps you have to do to enable this feature on your RealBird account and to create a Facebook Listing Page for your listing. It takes literally less then a minute to set it up and then a second to create a Facebook Listing Page. 

1. Login to RealBird or register here for free (free for up to 3 listings and only $99/year for more). 
2. Connect your Facebook account with RealBird (takes only 5 seconds)
3. Visit your own RealBird single property websites and click "Like" (takes 1 second)
4. An "Admin Page" link will appear next to the Like widget at the footer area of your RealBird website, above the translation tools. Clicking that will take you to the automatically created Facebook Listing Page. It is also auto-populated with your main property photo, listing info and link to your property website on RealBird

Here are some screenshots showing the simple steps:

 

 

 

 
Listing courtesy of Mike Conner of City Realty inc in Olympia, WA

More details on why we think this is a big step in social media marketing can be found on our ActiveRain blog

-- 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