Top Marketing Tips From 20 Real Estate and Social Media Professionals

Top Real Estate Marketing Ideas

The process of selling Real Estate at times can be a daunting task. Selling a home can be an emotional roller coaster for a home owner that has to deal with getting their home ready every time a buyer calls to see it. Sometimes it can be at the most inopportune time when that buyer wishes to see your place, and you just feel like saying “NO” but in your heart, you know that would be a mistake. Ultimately every showing has the potential to be “the one.”

The goal of almost every home seller is to get their home under contract for the most money possible, in the least amount of time, with the fewest possible headaches. Any Real Estate agent will tell you that getting a property under contract is just as rewarding for them as well. So how do you make that a reality and not just a pipe dream?

To sell any product, it all starts with great marketing! Selling Real Estate is no different. What you are about to see are twenty of the top Real Estate marketing ideas from some of the top Realtors and social media professionals from around the country. These folks have been hand selected because they know what they are doing when it comes to online marketing.

I have asked each of them to give me one of their best Real Estate tips for getting a home sold. What you will see is nothing short of some great things you can do either as a home owner selling your property or as a Real Estate agent looking to get an extra edge in your marketing game plan. Let these real estate marketing ideas propel your business!

Get Your Listing Found on Google

I’ve heard many real estate agents complain that when they Google the physical address of their listings that they often can’t get on page one of Google.

Being found by the property address, however, is not going to get that many new eyeballs on your listing, since anyone searching the property address has obviously already seen the house somewhere.

To cast a wider net, write a blog post featuring your listing, and instead of using the address as your keywords, use a more descriptive title, something that you think potential home buyers may actually search for.

Two recent examples I’ve recently used are “Pool Home for sale in Four Hills” and “North Valley Townhome for Sale.”

If you are using an IDX provider that allows you to feature a listing and add custom content to it, make sure you maximize this opportunity by fleshing out your description of the property and by adding a video as well. Be sure to include details that may be hard to accurately describe before seeing the property emphasize the fact that you are the listing agent.

Not only will you be providing better content that the other agents are advertising your listing on their websites, but you’ll also be showing Google that your site is the best site for listing information on that property. An bonus is that your featured listing won’t be considered duplicate content. Point a few links at it sprinkle in some social media promotion and you ought to be competitive with the top sites very quickly.

Rich Cederberg – EXP Realty

Get On Pinterest

Real Estate marketing idea #2 comes from Rebekah Radice who says real estate agents should be using Pinterest. I happen to agree 100 percent! Did you know that Pinterest grew in traffic referrals by a whopping sixty-six percent in 2013? On top of that, a recent survey shows that Pinterest is now driving more traffic than Twitter, Linked, Reddit and Google+ combined. That is an exciting opportunity for real estate professionals!

Use Pinterest to create boards specific to your listings. Pin images, videos and community pictures that share the beauty of your listing and the area. And be descriptive! Draw pinners and potential home buyers into your pictures through the power of your words.

This is also an excellent chance for you to give any buyers moving into your area special insight and your unique perspective surrounding the city and neighborhood.

Rebekah Radice – Rebekah Radice

Hire a Professional Photographer

My number one tip is, hands down, hire a professional photographer (AFTER the home is prepped and staged for the market)! As a broker who primarily lists, I do take many of my sellers, buying in the area, as buyers also.  Those buyers repeatedly tell me that they are shocked by the number of iPhone photos or lack of photos used in high-end listings.  In my opinion, I believe this to be such a disservice to the sellers.

I don’t think that agents realize that often, buyers who are coming into town request that their agents select a few showings for them within a certain parameter (price, bedrooms, neighborhood amenities, etc.) to explore the different communities.  When agents view the properties in MLS, if the photos are dark or non-existent, we don’t even bring those buyers to see their listings.

Sadly, it COULD very well be the perfect home for these buyers but, based upon the photos; these sellers missed out on a potential hot buyer.  The same goes for the buyers’ home search – they look through listing-after-listing, and they also hone in on the ones with the best photos.

I feel that this is one of the main marketing tasks that I do for my sellers that keeps my days-on-the-market one of the best in the area.  For me, it’s a marketing investment well worth the money that I spend on professional photography for every one of my listings

Debe Maxwell – Savy + Company Real Estate

Stop Paying Premium Dollars to Feature Your Listings on ZTR!

Another fantastic real estate marketing idea comes via Bobby Caroll. Bobby states that by taking advantage of Google Adwords Network Display Ads on Zillow, Trulia and Realtor.com you save serious marketing dollars.
Advertising your listings on Network Display Ads by Google Adwords accomplishes these benefits!

• Network display ads cost pennies on the dollar versus buying ads on ZTR
• Exposes your listings to more potential buyers
• Makes your sellers euphoric
• Drives serious traffic back to your listing web page
• Most importantly, it gets potential sellers interested in your marketing approach

As an intelligent listing agent, you want to save money! You want to sale your listings quicker! You like it when your sellers think you are a marketing genius! You know you could use more opportunities for lead generation by gaining clicks from your display network ads. Your display network ads convince home sellers you leverage differentiated marketing tactics, so you gain more listings!

Now that’s a winning formula for effectively marketing your listings and gaining more listings too!

Bobby Carroll – Dakno Marketing

Use Google Plus and Engage

Work hard at building a large and engaging network on Google+, and don’t worry for now whether or not that network is made up of customers or prospects for your business. An engaged network will build your overall authority in Google search and other Google properties (such as YouTube), which will increase your opportunity for exposure to actual customers and prospects.

Notice I said an engaged network. It’s not really about the numbers here. Google measures the authority of Google+ profiles and pages by the number and power of active engagers with the profile. One good way to get that is to participate in active, public Google+ communities about real estate and related topics.

Mark Traphagen –

Use Scoop.it

Neil Ferree proclaims his top social media marketing tool is Scoop.it. It’s one of the key components in my social content marketing system. From a process perspective, I curate the majority of my content using Scoop.it and Feedly and excellent posts from my Google+ Stream for topic relevant content.

I cherry pick my Feedly feed by noting what other users from the Feedly community have already shared as Feedly denotes this metric within each of my folders/panels. I look for articles that have been shared 100+ times. Unless the article contains a catchy title and a juicy eye candy image, I click through to the next article.

I’ve populated my Scoop.It RSS Feed with some of the very best Social Media Marketing Blogs on the Internet. I apply the same filter (catchy title & appealing imagery) on which articles I will Scoop to one of my panels. Since I use the Pro version of Scoop.It I can add my Insight to my Scooped Story, and I can insert and anchor text and link the story to an appropriate article on my website.

The last step in my curate and syndicate model is to publish my Scooped stories to my Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn profile along with my most active LinkedIn Group. At the end of the week, I publish my most socially engaged Scooped stories to my satellite WordPress.com site.

The key component to this social content marketing model is in the Insight that Scoop.It provides. While the rich text aspect is good for link building and conversions, I see the real value add in being able to frame the social share so that I can answer what most users wants to know, which is:  Why should I read this post and how will it help me? The Scoop.it tool is a great way for a Real Estate agent to get their content out in front of more people. I have already followed Neil’s advice and used Scoop.it as one of my top real estate marketing platforms for 2014.

Neil Ferree – Ferree Money

Post Your Listings on Youtube

Another great real estate marketing idea comes from Katerina Gasset who says to make sure you are using Youtube.There are a lot of great tools to help you get your property sold and it is best to use a combination of them. The choices of which ones to use first should be determined by what consumers in your geo specific market are using to search and to find homes. For instance, using Yelp in California is the “norm” but in most parts of Florida it is not.

However, no matter where your property is located using YouTube to your best advantage is a choice that all consumers are engaged in. The use of YouTube to post your videos of your property is a smart move because consumers love images and video. They will more likely click on a video of your listing than just plain text.

It is fast and simple to upload a video to YouTube. You can even upload images ( stills) and using the YouTube video editor create a video right inside of YouTube without buying any video editing software!

Katerina Gasset – International Properties and Investments

Use These Blogging Tips

Top Tools To Sell A Home
This is a tie for me between 4 tools:

• Blog.
• Email marketing.
• Pinterest.
• Scoop.it.

Let’s be clear by what I mean by a blog.  Realtors, especially those with strong umbrella brands like RE/MAX, need a bloggy blog. Bloggy blogs have some categories, but are mostly flat and in reverse chronological order and are probably on WordPress.

Content  categories are always a good idea since the more blog content you ADD the harder it is to get to that great piece you published about staging a home last year (as an example).

One of the blog categories I strongly suggest is a Top 5 or Top 10 category. Doing a little keyword research with Google’s keyword tool (free and part of Adwords) is another big recommendation for realtors. Keyword research quickly separates online marketing pros from the “spray and pray” crowd.

Aligning your blog’s categories to search demand, easy to learn with Google’s keyword tool, creates Search Engine Optimization (SEO) advantages and your site is more engaging since it speaks the language your customers use.

Process Tip:
The coolest tools can’t help without ammunition. The most powerful real estate agent “ammunition” is satisfied customers. Great agents know their network is critical to listing and selling homes. The challenge is creating an expression of that network online! Here is how realtors create “an expression of their network” online:

• Prominent social share numbers (Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus).
• Testimonials in pictures and video.
• Home stories (stories about amazing homes).
• Buyer/seller stories (stories about amazing buyers or sellers).

A realtor’s process should be so content focused and tested that each time a home is sold its story, the stories of the buyers and sellers and a boatload of visual support is on a webpage. Remember people, not things sell online. The more pictures agents have with happy buyers/sellers looking with them at the camera, the better.

Take Pictures & Shot Video All The Time (DAILY)!
Every agent should be taking pictures and using their phones or pads to create video all the time, so it is a good idea to have a standard usage waiver buyers/sellers can sign that says you have permission to use pictures and stories on your website and social media without compensation or notice.

Most people are so proud of their home and so willing to share their stories having what they share included is something they want. Those who don’t sign a waiver keep off your website. Realtors should think of their visual archive, all those jpegs and movies on Dropbox or Google Drive, as a valuable online selling asset, one they can add to daily.

You can never have too many great pictures, videos or stories is an important online marketing truth.

Here is another online marketing truth that hurts agents. Google’s memory lives forever. Most agents sell a home and, as soon as it comes off MLS, the content is gone.  Why would anyone allow such valuable content to disappear?

Create a “profile page” for the now sold home with a story about the people who sold and bought the home. Discuss the home’s “bones,” it origins and include why someone bought it and what they plan to do with it (what improvements they want to make).

Tag these “homes sold” profile pages with keywords such as Tudor or Colonial, “new construction”, locations such as Durham or near Duke University, neighborhood tags such as “Trinity Park”, or tags to describe the buyers such as “first time home buyers” or “eastern transplants” also known here in the south as damn Yankees (lol). Include these tags in profile page title, in the copy, the alt text of the images and the headlines and sub-headlines.

Think of each webpage like pieces of a net. The bigger net you cast, the more fish you catch. Internet marketers refer to this concept as “pagespread,” or the number of pages in Google (something you can learn by using a simple site:yousitename.com command on Google, once you know YOUR pagespread you can determine your competitors to know if you are leading or trailing).

If you are using a WordPress blog, create a “homes sold” category. Eventually, you may need to subdivide into neighborhoods or home styles, but imagine the content value of having a little “Blue Ribbon” profile for every home you’ve ever sold. That is compelling content most agents wash down the sink when the MLS reboots.

Profile home buyers and sellers too. Most buyers and sellers already have Facebook or LinkedIn profiles, so build a little version of either one of those (or grab pieces of either of those). Stories are as important as arresting visual content. If you’ve sold ten homes to “eastern transplants” how would the 11th “eastern transplant” know? If you’ve sold more craftsman style homes than almost any other agent in town how would someone look for a craftsman style home know?

This “content tagging” and “content proliferation” or “pagespread” is another expression of a realtor’s network online. CONTENT is a basic building block for any online network, a building block as important as answering the phone is to get a listing or selling a home. He who tells the best stories, has the most arresting visual content (pictures, videos), the best pagespread and the most LIKES, links and shares WINS!

Martin W. Smith – ScentTrail Marketing

Use Social Media Networks

My number one tip for sellers, from a social media marketing point of view, is to hire an agent who has an active, consistent presence in social networks, especially Google Plus and Pinterest.

Both networks (as well as the other top sites; Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn) give agents the opportunity to market to potential buyers in ways that non-social media marketing tools do.

Sellers will benefit from utilizing an agent that fits this criterion far more than an agent who does not. We live in an online world where millions of people visit these places daily. It makes sense that a home seller would want to be in front of these people. Align yourself with a Realtor who has figured this out and is successful with it.

Lori Thomas Dickert  – Social Media Manager

Use The Web Wisely

The sale of a house is the outcome of a process that matches the right house, at the right price with the right buyer. And that can only mean one thing: visibility across the web and, particularly, in the search. There are several things that every seller should do to increase the chances of a house sale’s visibility across the internet.

First, location. In any listing make sure you put in as many details as possible about the location. Describe the house exactly and include pictures if possible. Two, video. The web is visual.

Make use of YouTube and include a 90-second video showing the house and announcing all the necessary details of the sale. Encourage sharing by including a call to do so for those who see it and may know someone who is interested.

Be personal and personable. Remember on video people are connecting with you, as a person, first. The house is incidental. Third, be visual. Use large, well-lit photographs of the interior and exterior of the house to show as much detail as possible. People who find it on the web are not there. So it is important to give them as much visual information as possible. Four, use Google Maps and Google Street View to “take the online visitor” there.

Finally, five, make sure that you include all of this, incrementally in your Google+ posts. Executed right, with a sufficient level of engagement, the chances of your house being seen by the right buyer increase exponentially. And the beauty of it is all this can be done at a marginal cost, with just a little time and a lot of careful thought.

David Amerland – Author Semantic Search

Hire An Exceptional Realtor

In my opinion, the degree of success achieved in selling your home depends on the ability to find a suitable buyer that is willing to pay the best price and that can close within a suitable time frame. So how do you go about doing this? The simple answer is to find a good Realtor with a good website.

You can qualify a good Realtor by the number of years of experience, reputation in the marketplace and whether he or she works full time or part-time. Experience is a key factor in that you don’t want to engage the marketing and negotiating skills of a newbie whose knowledge and abilities may not be fine tuned.

A good reputation is also important in that it can define the agent’s honesty and integrity with you the seller and command respect in the marketplace. Finally, only a full-time Realtor can properly service a listed home. A part-timer is unlikely to budget an adequate amount of time for properly marketing your listed home or to schedule meetings and visits that conflict with his/her other obligations.

So you ask, what makes a Realtor’s website good?  There are two things to look for here. First, a good website is one with clean and uncluttered pages, which avoid confusion and focus on getting a visitor to contact the Realtor. The second is a website that can be found on the first page of Google for real estate related terms for the area your home is located in.  With 90% of home buyers using the internet to start looking for homes for sale, the value of a good website is pretty obvious.

Elias Nathaniel – Bocazo Real Estate 

Don’t Over Use Blog Content

This may seem like an odd tip, and counter-intuitive to what people may have been told in the past, but don’t over-blog. We all know that “content is king” when it comes to search engine marketing (SEM) for your website. However, I often run into the problem of too much content on a website, and that’s almost as bad as not having enough content. I’ll explain.

If your content isn’t widely varied, you may become a jack-of-all-keywords and a master of none. I once had a client that wrote the same type of blog week after week. He would title every blog in a similar fashion, which would always include his city name and “real estate”- such as Phoenix Real Estate and Mortgage Rates or Phoenix Real Estate and You. He misunderstood the “content is king” idea and thought if he had the most content about Phoenix Real Estate, he would win the race.

In reality, his blog came off as spammy and repetitive. (And if it looks spammy and repetitive to a human eyeball, imagine how it looks to Google.) All of his results were on pages three and four and beyond. I condensed five or six 500-word foreclosure articles into one very insightful article, and that article crept its way to page one in about eight weeks, and there it remains.

Remember: content is king, but don’t say something in ten pages that could be easily stated in one. And then, instead of trying to build links and spread authority to 10 pages with same focus– concentrate all of your efforts into that single page and it’s singular focus. That’s not to say your blog shouldn’t have 10,000 pages- but it is to say that all 10,000 pages should be very clearly unique. Then, you will get the rankings for the niche phrases you desire (think “neighborhoods”). Use this real estate marketing tip to propel your blog to the top of the search engines!

Michael George – IDX For Realtors

Stage Well & Market Wisely

Think like a buyer – The buyer doesn’t want to see your personal sports collection or teapot memorabilia so pack up everything that’s personal including photos. Think of your home as a 4-star resort ready to please almost any inhabitant. Comfy, cozy and not personal. You wouldn’t see a picture of the manager’s kids on the night stand of a fancy resort.

You need to appeal to the majority of buyers out there, all genders, all types. No offensive religious or political décor. Visit Model showrooms and homes to get ideas on what buyers see so you, know how to compete. If you have no idea what your competition is.

Don’t Underestimate the Power of the Internet – Let the Internet work for you! Great information + Well Optimized Content + Social Media Promotion = Powerful Exposure to Your Listing! You never know who will buy your house.

Make sure you write great information about the listing, title it the way someone would find it or search for it and then share that information. Let friends, family and connections know you have a home for sale. You don’t have to be spammy to share your information. Let the Internet work for you! Share and continue sharing your information even when you are away from the computer.

Tammy Emenith – Personal SEO

Leave A Little Money On The Table

One of the most important concepts for any seller to understand when entering a transaction is to have a win/win attitude about everyone feeling good with the sale by leaving a little money on the table.  The buyer gets a good deal; the seller gets the home sold, and everyone is in the same boat rowing when the waves come up, which they are guaranteed to do.

The way to accomplish this reasonable goal is to leave a little money on the table when pricing the home.  Don’t go for setting a new high sales price in the area even if you have the best home listed at the time.

Be moderate in your price selection so that the buyer feels like they got a good deal, the appraisal will come in at sales price or above, when the inspection is completed the buyer won’t be nit picking the seller for batteries in the smoke alarm and everyone will be understanding when the cow pies happen during processing! Everyone wins when you leave a little money on the table!

Carra Riley – Cosmic Cow Pie

Use Slideshare & Haiku Deck

I think too many agents focus on switching on all of the bells and whistles when it comes to advertising a sellers listing.Those things are important, multiple high quality photos, professional staging, virtual tours so every button is enabled on the Syndication Websites etc.

However, most of the Syndication Websites pull the data, so the Big R, T and Z are going to get your seller’s listing sooner or later.We always make sure, before we hit the “enter key” after we have completed the listing data form with our Board of Realtors, everything is ready to go – I’m meaning a non-branded virtual tour link with all of the photos that have been renamed and are not stamped DCM122883 etc.

The reason that this is so critical, to have everything ready to go, is some of the Syndication websites you are pitching only pull the data every once in a while.  If you upload a listing and don’t have the pictures follow immediately, those listings that get uploaded may be without photos for quite a while.

Now for our “listing edge.”  Being on the tops of the SERP’s(search engine results in pages), where buyers are searching for real estate in our local cities.  Not in the paid results, although that is not horrible, being able to sit in front of a seller and have them search for real estate, as if they were a buyer, showing our brand being on page 1, that is true power.

Showing them the numbers of buyers leads, the click through rate on our sites and how “sticky” they are pushing us beyond anyone else in our Local Markets. While not all agents are going to be able to achieve this feat, and some will be inclined to “trick” the sellers with this tactic, with hard work and diligence, you can get places that you have only dreamed.

Tip:  Don’t neglect high PR sites such as Pinterest and Slideshare.net, that is why I pay the membership fee’s to websites like Slideshare – Because of their high PR rating, they hit like a sledgehammer in the SERPS.  It works, and you will see big gains about your brand. The “why” of slide share.  On Google we are good – however, on Bing and the other SERP’s, we were okay, but not as strong. Slideshare, a high PR site seemed to be the “silver bullet.”

Now, our brand is all over those sites when people are searching, using keywords that I made the titles of the video’s into, that we post and the “slideshare’s” we create.

To create a slide share – you can use Power point – I have the $99.00 a year membership to have all of the Microsoft stuff. – Word, Excel, Power point, etc.

Another Cool Tool I have been using that is an iPad App is Haiku Deck – it’s wonderful, I give it access to my Dropbox, where all the photos I own are, and I upload photos, write some text over them, and then share from HaikuDeck to Slideshare – it converts, and it’s ready for your further descriptive text.

What I do Slideshare presentations about Market Data available from Altos Research (love them).  I also use Terradatum Market Metrics for some great graphics.  I use Snagit 11 Editor to pull the photos off of my computer screen and save them to drop box. I then develop a presentation talking about the photo I placed on one of my power point slides.  I talk about how to use the real estate search engine(IDX) on our website.  I talk about what I write about on our Blogs and what I give access to and why.

I then upload all of the slides to SlideShare.net – add my text and tags and viola – Bing and Yahoo are loving me!!! Of course this is helping my results on Google as well.  It was just that Bing, where I was not, now my Slideshare’s are! Slideshare is one of the best real estate marketing platforms out there for a Realtor looking for more online exposure.

Connor MacIvor – RE/MAX Santa Clarita

Present Well Online

Real Estate marketing 101 – make your home standout online and in person! Marketing a home to sell is only as effective, as the home’s presentation. Therefore, my best marketing tip for selling a home would be that the home’s presentation be top-­notch. The presentation is always key. When selling a home, it’s vital that you arouse a Buyer’s interest by creating a great first impression, and you’ll do this through the home’s presentation.

So just how do you do it, you ask? Selling a home is about getting a home in front of as many prospective Buyers, as possible. There are some ways in which to do this, and it involves preparation. When you’re selling a home, perhaps one of the most important decisions a homeowner will ever make, it’s imperative that a home is presented in its best light possible, so the home shines above the competition.

The home must be sparkling clean, brightly lit, clutter free and any needed maintenance items having been attended to, before putting the home up for sale. This includes sprucing up the home’s exterior, as well. Part of the presentation package
includes many, high-quality photos that highlight the sparkling clean, bright lit, clutter free home. As a Real Estate Agent here in Broward and Palm Beach counties of South Florida, it’s my responsibility to make sure that the Seller’s home is presented and seen by the 90% plus Buyers that start their home search online, over the internet.

With my vast knowledge of Social Media and Marketing over the internet, any Seller can rest assure that their homes will be presented well and seen by this internet searching Buyers, as their homes are blasted across the internet being picked up by search engines across all the multitude of Social Media platforms and Real Estate sites. Without fair presentation, homes take longer to sell and sell for less money. Proper presentation gets homes seen by more Buyers which can increase competition amongst Buyers and drive up home selling prices.

Lynn Pineda – Keller Williams Partners Realty

Create A Lead Generating Website

One of the best pieces of advice I can share is to create a real estate marketing platform that will bring you web visitors. There are a hundred ways for Realtors, or marketers to get leads, so think creative & never feel like you have to do the same thing everyone else is doing.

Of all the marketing techniques that I have tried, nothing comes close to building a passive lead generation system. While a successful lead generation system does not have to be a website, there are no other marketing systems that I have seen which even come close.

However you cannot buy a successful lead generation website out of the box. They will never be a “get rich quick system,” but instead take a lot of work & investment of resources. I would not confuse a successful lead generation website, with the average Realtor website, which typically generates just enough leads to get by, if any.

Look at the successful websites close to your field, or expertise, what are they doing that you could do, or do better. Once you know what to look for, you can learn more from your successfully ranked competitors, than a barrel full of experts. Learn how to analyze those sites & systems, to find out what it is that makes them successful.

Chances are, your competitors, the experts & more than all the success stories you need to learn from, can be found on Google Plus.

Joshua Berg – Real SMO

Use Google Places

1. Include clear address and contact information on your web site and then claim your Google Places listing.  This latter step helps Google better understand where your business is located, and then this will help you get leads from Google.

2. Write great content that helps advise people about the home buying process and get them published in local media, including online and offline.  This will also generate leads for you an enhance your web site’s SEO value.

Eric Enge – Stone Temple Consulting

Use Real Estate Social Media & The Web 2.0

Traditional real estate as we know it died in 1993. With the commercialization (public access and an ability of two-way communication) of the Internet, the world as we know it changed forever. Some of us cultural alphas and visionaries predicted much of this disruption to follow and made the switch early. What is the switch? When you are truly ready to embrace emerging Web 2.0 technologies in your real estate career and personal life – not just using it as a marketing ploy.

You have to go all in. For instance, back in early 2002, I posted one “Apartment For Rent” advertisement on a little-known website called Craigslist and received over 500 responses in about 48 hours. (And I don’t need to go into how Craigslist then took advantage of the NYC real estate industry, so I digress on this subject).

What happened next? Websites dedicated to nurturing social relationships and sharing of ideas caught my attention, such as Friendster (2002), MySpace (2003), LinkedIn (2003)…. and on and on. And from then on, it snowballed into the Social Media Revolution. When I began experimenting with these social media sites, there were no books, no blogs, no how-to articles; I instinctively knew it would have huge implications on the future of my real estate business and life in general. Well, as it turns out, I was right.

During my real estate career, my team and I closed over 300+ transactions, and I met the love of my life beta-testing the Social Media site Google+. Moreover, my biggest secret weapon when the economic downturn happened was leveraging Social Media Marketing. After a fruitful, dynamic real estate career, what’s next for me? I now take my proven methods, expertise, and foresight and have launched Social Terra, which is a marketing consultancy that specializes in Social & Digital Media strategies for various small-mid size companies and brands.

Please be weary of those self proclaimed real estate Social Media Ninjas and Tech Gurus who have NOT ONCE sold or rented a property in the last few years. Lastly, I have one takeaway I want to pass on…. Social Media is not for the shortsighted, which isn’t always clear to many in the real estate industry and their bottom line, whether it is in New York City or globally.

If real estate companies and professionals don’t adopt Social Media into their marketing and business plans soon, their bottom line will be suffer for it, or worse, they will go out of business. Some have already made the switch, have you? The point here is that if you are a Real Estate agent you should be using all the major social media platforms daily in order to increase your business.

Stephanie L Davis – Social Terra Consulting

Use Real Estate Video

One of the most overlooked real estate marketing ideas is using video. This tip begins with a story about our home that we sold at the cusp of the real estate market crash. The year was 2007, and here in California, the collapse of the housing market was already underway, and that was apparent to anyone willing to see it. Instinctively, I knew we were already too late to get maximum value for our home, and we had real problems because not only did we owned this home but we owned a spec house as well. In well over our heads, the sale of this home was critical to financial survival if that were possible even with a sale. There is nothing like that kind of pressure to motivate innovation and aggressive marketing.

We had a real estate agent in the family who was going through the usual paces to sell this home, and that was generating nothing short of tepid, casual inquiries and no real interest. I quickly realized that no agent I knew was both willing and able to produce the kind of media that I thought should be used to market the home, so I created my photo and video tours. I created Craigslist ads back in the day when quite a lot of HTML was still allowed. I measured traffic to the website I created for our home listing and made a full video tour and photo tour available. At the time, there was nothing like it, especially for a home and my community class.

Virtually everyone who came to see the home had already seen the photo and video tours I had created and wanted to see more.

This was not the marketing environment we enjoy today. YouTube was in its infancy with video quality unacceptable by today’s standards. Vimeo was newly acquired by a corporation and had slightly better video quality and sharing so I was on my way with some fairly rare video marketing where the usual suspects were multiple listing (MLS) photos and sometimes a Circlepix style 360-degree image tour with a fish eye lens effect.

While there was no specific data to prove that video made the difference in selling this home, it certainly drew a lot more people than would otherwise have come to see the home.

Yes, we did sell the home at a loss from our original investment, but we sold it for a splendid price at the time it sold. Later, the home continued to collapse in value from the $650,000 we sold it for, all the way down to $461,000. That, real estate friends and marketers, is what you call a very narrow escape by the skin of your teeth.

One more story, a few years later, 2009 to be exact, I persuaded one of my early clients in real estate SEO that we could get some good visibility for his brand in YouTube when no one in his market was even thinking about that.  We created a series of videos, one of which lead to a sale to a buyer who watched it and contacted the agent. That one sale alone covered all the cost of every video that I have ever produced for anyone for any marketing purpose several times over.

The video for real estate is more accessible than ever. For many, everything from shooting the footage to editing, production, and uploading to YouTube with full content and linking is available right on your smart phone. For others, there are a few more steps to get it there, but the technical challenge is not very high. If you haven’t already done any video, it is well worth it to jump in now with both feet. For Mac/iPhone users the production piece at hand and best for the purpose for 99% of your needs is IMovie. For Windows users, I recommend a product called ProShow Gold. It’s in the $100 range and will make life way easier for you. Practice and get on video.

The opportunity here is still wide open because for whatever reasons, many people including real estate agents who know better, let their fear of being seen or even heard on a video stop them from marketing their product. Breaking the ice is well worth it. A video is something that even at its worst is appreciated more than its absence. Besides, there are multitudinous resources both free and paid to help you get the particulars of shooting good real estate video to an acceptable and marketable quality very quickly.

With all the work I do in making websites rank in Google, compared to the power of video marketing for many markets, SEO and website ranking pales in comparison to the opportunities available through video marketing.

Dave Keys – SEO Solutions For Real Estate

Inspire A Bidding War

Buyers love value, hey every shopper does. Many markets including mine in Charlotte NC have become seller’s markets. While clients can employ some strategies, lowering the initial list price 5-10% while notifying brokers the seller will not be accepting offers for a few days, can be successful in getting a home sold.

Clients in a true sellers market, with a properly priced home, should receive plenty of activity and valuable feedback. Since the best way to take advantage of a sellers market is to receive multiple offers, the feedback should be extremely valuable if the seller doesn’t receive an offer, and can assist the Realtor and seller in adjusting pricing strategy. In an ideal world, the price change should spur multiple offers.

Walid Muhammad – Prostead Realty

Whether you are are a new Real Estate agent or a seasoned veteran hopefully you have taken away a tip or two that you did not know about! A big thanks goes out to all these top social media and Real Estate professionals who have taken the time to provide their best marketing tips.

Hopefully after reading through this comprehensive post you have come away with some fantastic real estate marketing tips that will help explode your business in the coming years. I would like to thank everyone who participated in sharing their exceptional marketing expertise!