We talked quite a bit at Unchained about profiles on Social Media Marketing sites. Once you’ve made a commitment to a site, you’ll be adding a significant amount of content to that platform. When someone comes across something you’ve done, their natural impulse is to click through to your profile. If they do, what will they see?
Chances are, when you first signed up for that site, you blew right past the profile page, plugging in the minimum necessary information to get your registration done. You wanted to get to the content, after all, to find out if that site even met your needs. You discovered over time that it did, but you probably never thought to go back and complete your profile.
This is a mistake. Your profile is the space that web site provides for you to sell yourself. At a minimum, you can direct interested people back to your own weblog or web site. Some sites will provide multiple links. Some will let you flesh out a free-form “about me” section, so that you can say exactly what you want in your own words. Some will permit fairly elaborate HTML coding, with links back to specific landing pages on your web site: You can sell relocation to relos, rentals to investors, re-fi’s to the equity-enriched.
A couple of different times, I mentioned my Zillow.com profile. Zillow is pretty liberal in the kind of coding you can do — allowing links and photos in the “about me” section, for example.
Vance Shutes asked me to share my Zillow profile with him. I thought it might be better to take up the issue in the blog. I can talk about what I’m doing, you can talk about what you’re doing, and we all can learn better ways of building Social Media Marketing profiles.
So: Between the horizontal rules is the code we use on our Zillow.com profile, as well as on other sites:
Why do we deliver so much more value for our clients? For one thing, it’s a great strategy for marketing our real estate brokerage. But even before that, we love selling real estate, and we want to do the best job we can for our clients.
Our Phoenix real estate practice is a boutique real estate brokerage working in Central, North Central and Suburban Phoenix. We would love to help you buy a home in Phoenix or to sell the Phoenix home you already own. If you’re relocating to Phoenix, we’ll show you some hi-tech tactics we’ve discovered to save you time and money. And if your goal is to invest in Phoenix-area rental homes, we’ve helped dozens of investors realize their financial goals.
We work a lot harder than the agents we compete against. As an example, take a look at everything we do to list historic, architecturally-distinctive and mid-century modern luxury homes for sale. No one does the kinds of things we do, and we’re just as detail-oriented — and exuberant! — when we work with buyers. Day by day, task by task, home by home, we want to get as close as we can to perfect performance as Realtors — a virtual virtuosity in real estate representation.
We write, too — could you have guessed? BloodhoundRealty.com is our main real estate weblog, but we also publish DistinctivePhoenix.com, which is devoted to historic and architecturally-distinctive homes in Central and North Central Phoenix. Our most famous weblog, though, is BloodhoundBlog, our nationally-focused real estate industry, marketing and technology blog — which puts us in the vanguard of hi-tech real estate brokerage.
But that’s all just credentials. We’re thoroughgoing Realtors, contemplative Realtors, innovative Realtors, very hard-working Realtors. We’re definitely hi-tech Realtors, and the internet, surely, is the second best tool a Realtor can deploy — and we use the internet better than any of our competitors. But the best tool — always — is integrity, and without integrity there is nothing.
We believe in clear, detailed, complete communication. Where other Realtors might hope to dazzle you with pretty pictures, we bend over backward to tell you the whole, unvarnished truth about real estate transactions — how they succeed and why they sometimes fail. It can be a comfort, at times, to ‘leave it to the experts.’ But real estate decisions can have very costly, life-long consequences. If you want to know every detail about your transaction, we want to share them with you.
Our passion is to do the best we can do, to find the best house at the best price, to find the best-qualified buyer for your home, to negotiate the best terms, to help our clients reach the best decisions, making the best possible investment. We’re not about doing deals, we’re about forging relationships. We want for you, as our client, to be so delighted by our efforts that you could not conceive of working with another Realtor.
Above all, we are about family — yours and ours. And while we might be a small business, there is nothing small — or small-time or small-minded — in the way we do business. We want to be your Realtor for life. We will do everything we can to make that happen.
Want to find out more?
Please do!
You can visit our main real estate web site at BloodhoundRealty.com or you can pick up the phone and dial 602-740-7531. (Outside of Arizona? Dial 1-800-508-5430.)
Either way, we’re proud Bloodhounds at your command — devoutly loyal, smart, frisky and eager to please…
Zillow doesn’t honor the positioning I’m doing with the photos. It throws them all to the left. Other sites, Trulia.com is an example, throw away my links, a much more serious concern.
Okay, so what’s going on here: This is a long-copy ad, in the sense that we’re taking the opportunity to sell our brokerage at some length to self-selected volunteers. Early in the copy, I’m trying to peel off people with a specific interest: Buyers, sellers, relos, investors. In each of those cases, I’m sending them to a specific landing page on our blogsite, rather than to the front page of the blog. If someone is specifically interested in relocating to Phoenix, I want for them to find that specific information.
We believe that our long-term future is in listing distinctive, historic and luxury homes, so I’m taking the opportunity to tell people everything we do that none of our competitors do to market high-end homes.
If I haven’t pushed you off to one of our weblogs yet, I’m going to take one more swing at the ball, in this case directing traffic to the front page of one of our three real estate blogs.
By now I think you’re a hard case, so, if I can keep you reading, I’m going to show you some stunning photographs while I talk in a general way about how we do business: Hi-tech, integrity, communication, relationships, family.
When I wrote this copy, Brian Brady really liked this section:
We’re definitely hi-tech Realtors, and the internet, surely, is the second best tool a Realtor can deploy — and we use the internet better than any of our competitors. But the best tool — always — is integrity, and without integrity there is nothing.
Further down, this is copy that I wrote and have reused since we first built a BloodhoundRealty.com web site in 2003:
And while we might be a small business, there is nothing small — or small-time or small-minded — in the way we do business.
I think that’s a lot more effective than a Fair Housing logo.
Finally we close with one more outbound link and a call to action. If someone has read that far, my hope is that they’re ready to act. If they are, I want to make taking action as easy a possible.
But: What say you? What are you doing differently? What should I be doing instead? The profiles are infinitely malleable, so what can we do to make ours — and yours — better? If we work on this, we can come up with some insanely great ideas.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing, real estate training, technology, Zillow.com
Vance Shutes says:
Many thanks, my friend. The collective mind of BHB will undoubtedly refine and add to this SM profile. I’ll work with it for a while and let you know what changes I’ve made.
May 22, 2008 — 2:25 pm
Joseph Runtz says:
Greg:
Into each life a little rain must fall…well, my friend, I liken my attendance at the BloodHoundBlog Unchained this past weekend as encountering a monsoon with a portable umbrella. As the official “Unchained” rain makers, you guys over seeded the clouds to the extent that resurrection of Noah’s ark is the first call to order. The deluge of information is overwhelming…actually swamping.
Russ Shaw touted me on BloodHoundBlog about a year ago, so I tuned in. I liked what I read…somehow, someway my tuning fork started to vibrate. Ahh…the need for resonance! Albert Schweitzer’s eloquence says it best…”Sometimes our light goes out but is blown again into flame by an encounter with another human being. Each of us owes the deepest thanks to those who have rekindled this inner light”.
A simple thank you doesn’t seem to get the job done…but for the time being, it’s all that I have. Thank you.
Joe
May 23, 2008 — 8:41 am
Teri Lussier says:
This is exactly what I was so impressed with when I first found your BHR site, just prior to applying as a Project Blogger apprentice. I went there thinking like a buyer, I went back as a seller, I went back again as an investor. I thought about being a family, and single. You addressed it all without ever smacking me over the head.
In fact, it’s only now that I understand what I was really doing was looking for a reason *not* to like your website. I kept clicking through to other pages waiting to be driven away, screaming in horror. When that didn’t happen, I knew there was a very good chance of learning something from you. 😀
June 28, 2008 — 10:30 am
Greg Swann says:
BloodhoundRealty.com is built as a blogsite. It was just a static site when Teri first visited, but we rebuilt it over the new year. What this means is that the static pages are WordPress “Pages,” easily edited by anyone. Teri sent me into our relocation page today, and, while I was there, I rewrote the headline. That’s the beauty of working in WordPress.
June 28, 2008 — 11:20 am