New ReachFactor Features - October 20

Endorsements Marketing

ReachFactor has already made it easy for you to send Surveys to your clients so you can collect feedback from them.  So far this has just been for your own knowledge.  We've already heard some great stories from some of the folks using ReachFactor that this has been really useful by itself but we wanted to provide you with more.

Share your Endorsements with the world

Now, you can choose to share this feedback across the web.  When you choose to market an endorsement you can choose where to share it.  It will always show up on your ReachFactor Profile and you can add Facebook and Twitter to the mix.  We also make it easy for you to add a Endorsement Widget to any website you may be on.

ReachFactor Profile

Endorsements that you choose to syndicate will show up on your ReachFactor Profile.  They'll show in a tab right on the main page for potential clients viewing your profile to peruse.

Facebook

You may have already started using our Listings tab on Facebook - well now there's an Endorsements tab as well. You can choose to share Endorsements with all the browsers to your Facebook Business Page.

Twitter

Hopefully, you're already using Twitter to advertise yourself and your listings.  If you don't we can help!  We already make it easy to advertise your listing on Twitter and keep your audience up to date when the price changes.  We'll help you market your endorsements to your Twitter followers, too.

Widget

We make it easy to pull the Endorsements from ReachFactor into any website you want.  Just check a couple settings and copy and paste a little code into your website.  That's all.

Endorsement Verification

Make your Endorsements have more impact.  Let us verify them for you.  Many review sites have had problems with customers thinking the reviews were not legitimate.  If you provide us with some extra information we'll do the homework and verify that an Endorsement came from an actual client so that potential clients will feel confident that your reviews are legitimate.  If we ever suspect an endorsement is not valid we'll send you an email letting you know.  You can still share the review but it won't be on the verified list until we're comfortable putting our stamp of approval on it.

Share your listings by email

You've got a few email addresses of interested buyers or huge email lists you want to broadcast your listings to?  Great!  We can help.  When you choose to Email a listing we'll help you by sending a beautiful property flyer with a link to the listing on your ReachFactor profile and a customized message from you.

10 ways Agents can be more "Liked" on Facebook

1) Get your Facebook business page up. If you don't have the business page you're only building a friend network, which is not the same. A Facebook business page is the right way to market a business and there is currently no limit to the # fans you can have.


2) Expect to put up several (10) posts on there before you start marketing it. No one wants to see or Like a blank Facebook page.


3) Start close to home. Get other Agents in your office to like your page and vice versa. No one wants to be the first person to Like a page.


4) Get your Listings inside Facebook. Include pictures and make sure the listings look great. Let your homeowners know you went through the expense of getting their property into Facebook. Ask them to visit your Facebook page and 'Like' their listing. This promotes the listings through their network.


5) Ask them to get their friends/family to like the listing as well.

(The average person has 130 friends on Facebook. Each 'like' promotes the property and your page to another 130 people).

6) Add frequent Status Updates that might appeal to the people you want to attract, but don't over think it. Just post updates. Maybe there's a local bar that just added a new beer on tap. Maybe there's a halloween event coming up? Maybe you were invited to list a house in a bad part of town and had a funny (scary) experience? Post an update.


7) Post pictures if you can along with your status update. Keep the post short and at the end ask provoking questions.. "Hit "like" if there's a better than 50% chance I'll see you at this Halloween fest this weekend."


8) Not everything has to be "liked" - use your business page as a platform to promote business. Definitely post the date and time of open houses. Link to the Listing you created in Facebook.



9) If you are more advanced you can create a custom Landing Page (static FBML) and make it the default page non-fans arrive at. This should pitch people on the benefit of becoming a "Fan" immediately. Tell them why it's to their benefit to be a Fan. 


10) On your static FBML Landing Page you can hide content that becomes visible when someone likes you. Do this if there's compelling, immediate gratification someone can get from becoming a Fan immediately. This works well if there's non-public information or insider information you can share. Pocket sales opportunities? Investor auction tips? Anything that might not be generally available to the public.

West coast sales rally - and a Winner!

Our very own Karl Jebsen recently attended the Century 21 West Coast Sales Rally. I heard that we had a lot of people visit our booth and were enthused by our goal to help Agents and Brokers collect great endorsements and use them to increase their conversion rates. 

While he was there Karl gave away a ReachFactor Max account ($1800 value). Congratulations to Rosemary Skillman with Century 21 Earll for winning the grand prize! Hope to see you at the next event.

Here are some pics we took at the event:

5 steps to a Facebook business page for real estate agents

Facebook has announced that they will no longer support Tabs on personal profiles, so everyone needs to migrate their tabs over to a Facebook business page (or lose them forever).

The first step is to get a business page created in the first place. This pdf shows you how.

One thing to keep in mind - once you name your page you cannot edit it (you can only start over). So pick something that you'll like for a while.

Let us know if you run into any problems.

Need help with Yelp?

I recently got this letter from a concerned business owner asking for help with a review of his business on Yelp.

He felt strongly that the negative review about him was fraud, but Yelp was filtering the positive reviews and left the negative one front & center. He felt helpless and was pleading for assistance because it was harming his reputation and business.

This brings up a good point about reviews & review sites in general. You (real estate Brokers, Agents & Offices) should be vigilantly monitoring sites like Yelp for reviews about your business (especially negative ones) because left unchecked they can cause a lot of harm to your business.

Review sites have become wildly popular because they make it to compare businesses or service providers before deciding which to choose. The problem is that anonymous review sites like Yelp are easily abused. Someone's competitor can easily post crank reviews of them or post extremely flattering reviews of themselves. Yelp works hard to filter bogus reviews but they don't catch them all.

2 tips immediately come to mind to combat negative reviews:

1) Always be collecting your own reviews, get them verified & share them everywhere. This is probably the one that will give your business the highest payback over time. Make it a habit to collect real feedback from your customers and share that feedback (your endorsements) everywhere. These endorsements can also be 'verified legitimate' by a 3rd party service like ReachFactor.

Once you have them, promote endorsements on your website, make sure they're announced on Facebook and Twitter, and make sure the endorsements are easily indexed by Google (Google shows endorsements in Pages and map results). You want as many positive statements about you appearing in as many places as possible online.

Sound hard? It's not -- ReachFactor was specifically created to automate the endorsement-gathering-and-disseminating process for real estate professionals. You can use it to collect endorsements for free, forever.

2) Don't be quiet. Be sure to comment on negative reviews in a thoughtful, professional manner. If you suspect the review may have been posted by a competitor ask the reviewer to post proof they've used you before. People reading review sites want to hear the entire story, so be transparent and ask the reviewer to be transparent also. If they're perpetrating a fraud, chances are good they'll go silent and it'll become apparent to anyone reading your reviews who was telling the truth.  A negative review is a chance to show future customers how you handle customer service - it's another opportunity to shine.

Can you think of other ways to handle negative reviews (real or not)?  Let us know!

If your business is slowing.. check this first!

Many business owners who've experienced success in the past tend to fall into a trap. They stop thinking about whether their client's behavior has changed.  This is especially true in highly dynamic markets like real estate where technology's played a huge role.

Though the service you offer may still be the same it always has, you have to stop and think about where your potential customers get their information, how they make the decision to 'buy' or not, and what traits they value most.

There was a great blog post by Les McKeown over at Predictable Success about this very topic and he sums it up nicely:

Does your business growth seem sluggish? Not sure why? Then chances are, you're seeing your target customer / client through a distorted, out-of-date lens. 

The answer? No matter how much you love them, don't allow your current customers to act as an echo chamber for your misperceptions. Instead, go talk with very recent prospects - especially those you didn't land as customers or clients. They'll tell you what they were looking for that you didn't see or 'get'. Re-calibrate accordingly.

Hope you can make this kind of reflection a standard practice in your business..

Are you a ReachFactor promoter? We'd like to reward you!

Thanks everyone for your referrals. We wanted to do something great to reward you for helping us spread the word. We just released a new feature called Invites that rewards people who refer us business as well as those people who sign up because of a referral.

Using Invites is easy. While you're logged into ReachFactor click the Invites tab. You can import your address book or enter the email address of colleagues you'd like to refer to ReachFactor. Both you and they will earn free marketing credits when they register for a ReachFactor account.

You can visit the Invites tab at any time to see how many Invitations you've sent, how many have accepted, and how many marketing credits you've earned.

Tip: for those of you with large networks -- sign up for a Free ReachFactor account and invite all your friends/colleagues. You'll basically end up earning a high-volume ReachFactor account for free, and you and the people you've referred will save hundreds of dollars per month. Pretty sweet? We think so!

Happy marketing.
Suresh