Twitter for Real Estate Gets a Permanent Home

Twitter for Real Estate now has it’s own page serving as a roundup instead of the archived post. The page will be updated as new information crosses my desk. Recent additions include tools lists, a few usage ideas and discussions of TwitterLocal.

Easing Pain for Real Estate Sellers

Over at the Bloodhound Blog, Eric Blackwell has put together a great article about how to

accomplish EVERYTHING that needs to be done to MARKET and SELL a home, with as little pain (or even ANTICIPATION of discomfort) as possible. And, of course, then the process needs to be turned into a system and scripted.

(all caps are his)

While the article probably doesn’t cover everything it does a great job of getting the conversation rolling.

At the end of the article he asks for help in making the inspection process better. If you have a moment, head over, read the article and get involved in the conversation.

4 things you can do right now to improve your website home page and why

For most sites, the home page is by far the most visited. The visitor segments are the most broad here too: random search engine traffic, sometimes advertising ends up here (though I, personally, recommend against that), sometimes a link from someone’s blog ends up going to your home page. All of these wide, varied audiences need to be directed and channeled to the place that will help them get something done.

Too often, home pages end up getting fractured and fragmented due to a lack of focus. These tips should help you get focused.

Here’s a quick list of simple things you can do to make your real estate home page more effective. To be honest, several of these tips could work for any business site with a little tweaking.

1. Have one main headline that tells users what can be done on your site. Resist the urge to use the generic “Welcome to my homepage” stuff. People aren’t on your homepage to feel welcome, they are there to accomplish a task. You can’t make them feel welcome by saying “Welcome.” You can, however, make them feel welcome by making it easier for them to accomplish their task (like buy or sell a property).
2. Have a page title (the text at the very top of the browser) that relates to your headline and contains the search term you want most. This will help in two ways: it will help your search ranking and will improve the usability of your listing in the search engine result page.
3. Include a clear call-to-action. You probably have a desired outcome for people who come to your site. Know what that outcome is and make it easy for your site visitors do what you would like them to do.
4. Include a visual and direct link to the thing you want to sell most, like a featured property listing, a page with your listings on it, a page with listings that you like to represent, whatever it is that you do best. Some of your site visitors know exactly what they are looking for and will likely skip over your offer. But other visitors will appreciate your suggestion to get them started down the path to do business with you.

What are some other things you can do to make your home page better?

More Maps for Real Estate: Mortgage Maps

New York Fed Mortgage Maps via a tip from Matt Carter. The server is crushed at the time I write this so you’ll have to play with it yourself. See also the previous post on Economic Maps of the US.

Twitter for Real Estate Roundup

I’ve got a busy week here so no big whopper posts. I’ll be taking the tried and true path of bloggers in a time crunch: The Roundup.

There’s been a lot of chatter lately about Twitter for Real Estate. Just in case you’ve not been paying attention I’ll give some links and quick summations. Also, don’t worry if you don’t know what Twitter is, most of these articles include a brief description.

Daniel Rothamel gives you all the basics in Welcome to Social Media for Real Estate 101: Twitter.

As you’re getting started and wondering who to follow, Jeff Turner’s Active Rain post about TwitterLocal is a great tutorial.

What’s TwitterLocal you ask? Look no further than PR 2.0 post “Twitter Local Connects You to Local Voices.”

How to write kickass Twitter posts gives you a great list of guidelines to give the most with your tweeting and prevents you from being dull.

Using Twitter to Stay in Touch at Connect gives a nice little rundown plus one use for the technology: keeping in touch during conferences.

Transparent Real Estate has more Twitter for Conferences information.

Joel Burslem breaks out a great use for Twitter: Business Intelligence. His post entitled Using Twitter to Listen to your Customers reviews the excellent BI/Reputation Management tool TweetScan. Includes examples.

Jessica Swesey is using Twitter to listen to general chatter about the real estate market.

If/when you get a group of people following your Twitter feed, perhaps Information Week’s suggestion for using it as a broadcast medium will be useful.

A laundry list of uses and examples can be found at Examples of Twitter Providing Business Benefits.

Even more business benefits and basic usage suggestions are at Twitter: Where’s it @ for Business.

Example of reputation management from 37Signals at the Twitter blog.

If, like me, you don’t much care for Twitter’s interface, check out the list of Twitter clients (I’m partial to Twitterific for my iPod).

A list of various tools to help you get more out of Twitter can be found at Jeremiah Owyang’s Web Strategy blog.

Did I miss anything?

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