A Facebook business page (also known as a Facebook fan page) can be a great way to promote your real estate business, even taking the place of a standard website if you don’t have one yet.  (Facebook business pages are free, versatile and easy for non-techies to edit and add content to.)

The problem is that 90% of agents who want to gear up on the social media scale end up never getting around to it.  If that sounds like you, I recommend checking out Mike Mueller’s AreWeConnected site and possibly hiring him to set up your Facebook business page for you.  I haven’ t used this service myself, but I’m a fan of his own Facebook business page and I can tell he’s really active on there and on Active Rain; overall, he seems to really know his stuff.

Here’s the link:  http://areweconnected.com/facebook/ - if you scroll down the page you’ll see samples of Facebook business fan pages he has created.

Eyejot is a cool real estate marketing tool that agents can use for sending short video messages via email.  My friend and colleague Greg Perry (a self-made techie and one of the first local agents to become a powerful blogger) pointed it out to me a few months ago, and I just noticed what a great job he did of branding himself on his Eyejot page.

Click the graphic on the left to see his profile on Eyejot, and I highly recommend checking out this video about the Home Buyer Tax Credit deadline that he is sending out to his real estate clients today for an idea of the type of useful videos you could create.

Eyejot has a free option, and their premium option that allows longer videos and more branding is around $99 per year.  Check out Eyejot’s membership options here.

Love Facebook?  Hate Facebook?  Have a personal Facebook profile, but not sure how to use it for your real estate business?

(All of the above?)

Regardless of which category you fall into, here’s what you need to know:  Having a Facebook business page (also called a Facebook fan page) is a great way for you to market yourself online as a real estate agent.  It’s free, easy to set up, and easy to keep updated with content such as links to interesting articles, photos, and even videos.

How much or how little you put into it is up to you.  But, here’s the catch… most real estate agents don’t know how to create a Facebook business fan page to begin with!

Fortunately, it’s easy.  Here’s a video I made showing exactly how to do it, along with tips on choosing the right title for your Facebook business page.

Are you getting questions about mortgage refinancing from your real estate clients?  I am, and I recently found a good consumer’s guide to home loan refinancing by the Federal Reserve Board.  One of the reasons I like it is that it  seems to clearly explain some mortgage topics that people commonly get confused about, including:

• Comparing home loan refinance options
• Understanding ‘no cost’ refinances
• Calculating when you recoup the expense of refinancing a mortgage
• Home mortgage prepayment penalties

There’s also a glossary of home loan refinance terms that’s highly useful.

The pamphlet dates from 2008 and is 29 pages, it opens up in just a few seconds via pdf – here’s the link at the Federal Citizen Information Center:

A Consumer’s Guide to Mortgage Refinancings

Looking for a nice way to reconnect with your real estate clients?  At this morning’s office meeting I heard from some agents who are popping by their clients’ homes to say hello and drop off a Hot/Cold thermal bag as a gift.  These bags keep items hot or cold for up to 3 hours, and are great for summer get-togethers and picnics.

Personally I’d be pleased if someone dropped one of these off on my doorstep - I don’t have any, and they look really handy.  You can currently get Hot/Cold thermal bags for just $2.38 each ($119 per case of 50) at the American Bag Company.

Are you sending out real estate marketing via email to your prospects and clients?  Email can be a powerful tool for you and an incredibly useful medium for your readers, as long as you remember… real estate email marketing needs to be approached CAREFULLY. 

Here’s a recent graph from the marketing research firm Marketing Sherpa that shows the top reasons why people unsubscribe from business emails.

A whopping 58% of people unsubscribe because the emails they get are not relevant to them, and 44% unsubscribe because they receive too many emails from the sender.  Notice that those top two issues are completely under the control of you, the sender.

The Big Points

1. Real estate email marketing needs to be primarily about the reader.

When we write content for the ready-to-send email newsletter service we provide for real estate agents, we structure the entire newsletter around fulfilling needs in the life of the reader, not the agent.  If you’re writing your own newsletters, so should you.

(Ultimately, this also fulfills a need in your life by developing trust and positioning you as the expert.)

2.  People are even more protective of their time when it comes to email than they are with direct mail.

It can  be very tempting to overdo it when you use a marketing medium like email.  But opening an email to find an article that reads like it was written on the fly, or that contains just superficial information, feels like a betrayal of trust.

(Worse, how often will people keep opening your emails if they get an email blast every time you put a new listing on the market, or you feel like reminding them that it’s time to move?)

Bottom line?  Email is an ‘abuse it and lose it’ marketing medium.  Unlike direct mail, which you know people are at least going to have in their hands at some point, with email people can completely tune you out.

Whatever you do, don’t send ‘fluffy’ emails to your clients!  This will get easier and easier to do as more companies try to adapt to online marketing, and it’s potentially disastrous.  Things like cute postcards that work for direct mail eventually make people blow a gasket when they receive it in their inbox.

Remember, always focus on your readers’ needs in your emails, and make sure they’re immediately better off because they clicked ‘Open’. 

Better yet, leave it to us!  I value my own time so highly (and have unsubscribed from so many email lists just recently myself) that it’s our personal mission to not waste your clients’ time, and to always make them feel like you provided value with the newsletter we sent to them for you.

The proof is that agents love our email newsletter service, and they get great feedback from their readers.  Click here to find out how you can get started with our done-for-you email newsletter service completely risk-free.

The best real estate logos not only look good, they also get the message across about what the company does.  Ideally they do it in an imaginative way that leaves you saying “I get it!” and “Whoa, how cool!” at the same time.

Can I tell you how DIFFICULT it is to find a designer who actually accomplishes those two things consistently?  I’ve spent hours and hours (and hours) looking at logos, and a lot of the time it’s a bit underwhelming.

So I’m happy to recommend Josiah Jost, owner of Siah Designs - I stumbled on his site last night when I was looking for Twitter graphics and was totally blown away.  Here’s a link to the Siah Designs logo portfolio, check it out.  (These aren’t real estate logos, but they totally hit the mark, so I’m sure he can do that for your real estate business.) I also talked to him and I think his pricing is very reasonable.

By the way, if you use him for your real estate logo design I’d love to hear how it goes!

I was cruising around the Yahoo real estate section the other day and stumbled upon an interesting research study about how home buyers and sellers choose real estate agents.  I definitely think it’s worth your time to read, especially since it’s pretty recent, from April of 2008.

The report is called “Online Engagement Affects Agent Selection Process”  and it’s here, on the Broker page – it’s the second report in the list at the bottom of the page.

Here are a few facts I picked up from the report:

• Most people (74%) rely on word of mouth to initially choose an agent for consideration, then they follow it up with research for confirmation.

 

• People use an average of five sources to research agents.  (See the graph on pg. 9 of the report, which breaks the five sources down further.)  Seventy-seven percent use the Internet.

 

• Of people who use the internet, 50% spent 4 to 20 hours researching agent information online (pg. 10.)  Hey, that’s a lot of time!  (How did your website fare?)

 

Page 19 starts off a really interesting quadrant analysis using this format:

Keep in mind that while topics in ’3′ are less influential in selection, they are still highly researched, so having information about them on your website or other marketing increases your chances of people finding you in the first place.

There’s a good section about how people use real estate agent websites in hiring an agent.  I just want to point out, regarding page 24 where it says that 31% of people used the agent website only to get the agent’s contact information:  I think in a lot of cases that’s because the agent uses a generic company site and the only pertinent information on there is the contact information. 

(In other words, the 31% is not a reflection of the fact that websites are unimportant.)

There’s more interesting stuff on there and it’s definitely worth your time to look over.  (Plus, lots of graphs – it’s a quick read.)  Another good one on that page is “Embracing the Online Real Estate Market.”

Here’s a link to the Yahoo Broker page with the reports again.

Yesterday I needed to join two calls on a Blackberry Pearl so that I could record the conversation.  I flubbed it up, and then looked online and found that it’s actually quite easy.

Here’s the short version, or you can click here to go to the AT&T 3-way calling Blackberry tutorial.

1. Connect with the first call.

2. Press the ‘phone’ button to make the second call.  Either choose from recent calls, the address book, or click ‘one-time dial’ to dial manually.

As soon as you connect with the second call the first is automatically put on hold.

3.  With the two calls connected (one on hold) click the trackball and choose “Join.”

Now both calls should be joined with you to allow a 3-way conversation.

To join more calls just repeat the steps above.

Tip:  If you use an online recording service like Audio Acrobat, you need to be able to use this 3-way feature to record a phone conversation, since the call to the recording service is the second call that needs to be ‘joined’ in order to record the conversation between you and the first call.

By the way, here’s a list of Blackberry Pearl shortcuts, and here’s a map of the Blackberry Pearl keypad layout.

A few days ago I posted about Scribd, a cool online service that let’s you embed documents into your web and blog pages so that people can read them without having to click on a link to open them.

(And if you don’t have a website, you can still upload documents to Scribd and let people read them there.  Way more convenient than attaching them to an email.)

So today I thought it was pretty interesting when I was reading the  transcript account of Flight 1549′s landing on the Hudson River and saw that the entire transcript is embedded in the New York Times article using Scribd!

Here’s a link to the article, worth reading in any case, and you can see an example of how Scribd works:

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/05/faa-releases-flight-1549-tapes-2/?hp

Tip:  Notice you can click on the Tracon Transcript link at the top at the top of the embed, which takes you to a page where you can download the document if you want to.  If you use Scribd for your own documents you have the option to disable this option by making the document private.