Zoomf Blog - UK Property Blog.

On Saturday afternoon, I was pretty much lazing around on my laptop and watching TV with no plans for anything cooler than that. On Saturday night, I went to Ultimate Fighting Championship at the O2 Centre with the CEO and COO of Zappos.com, partied with fighters and sponsors and eventually ended up in Mo*Vida for Mike Bisping’s after party. I had an amazing night and I have a strange source to thank…Twitter.

By now most people have heard of Twitter, whether or not they use it or think it has any use for them is a different story. I love fads (I have the slinkies and pogs to prove it) but after two weeks of tweeting I can say that Twitter has firmly gained a nesting place in my heart. And that’s despite all the downtime that the site has been having. In fact, I’ve never known such a temperamental product to have quite such a following. But that’s because it becomes like that friend you have who always forgets where you were meeting up, lets you down at the last minute and flirts with your girlfriend. Twitter can be a jerk, but over all it’s pretty great.

I first tweeted on May 22nd, some nonsense about eBay, then I went quiet for a few days. I gradually started tweeting more and more, realising that although no-one’s really listening in the early days you just have to keep tweeting to ever get into it. And that has to be my first piece of advice, follow people and keep tweeting. You don’t want to tweet incessantly, just don’t feel disheartened when you see someone with 6000 followers compared to your 3 (brother, colleague, random stranger).

At time of going to (word)press I’m ‘following’ 209 twitterers (or twits as Robin calls them) and being followed by 64, that’s after two and a bit weeks and no promotion of my Twitter feed outside of Twitter. And I must mention, I have no offline friends using it.

I started following a lot of people by searching various real estate terms and finding who other property bloggers follow. There’s no search functionality for tweet history on the main Twitter site but you can use Tweet Scan to do the job nicely, I looked for people who had tweeted about Zoomf for example and started to follow them. It’s all unspeakably easy to get the hang of. Using it successfully as a property professional is not so easy, and I promise we’ll be discussing that on the Zoomf Blog over the next couple of days.

Have I had any Twitter success since I got my wings? Well, in the short time I’ve been using it the Zoomf Blog has had record weekend traffic, and I can see from Analytics that this is all due to referring links from Twitter. And of course I got to have an amazing night with Tony and Alfred from Zappos as mentioned earlier (and continuously in the office just to make the boys jealous).

I really recommend you give it a go and also that you stay tuned here to find out what the real estate industry can learn from Zappos and how you can use Twitter to it’s best potential.

Oh, and go follow me!

Mario Yamasaki, Tony Hsieh and my good self…all thanks to Twitter! More pics here.

Technorati Tags: Real estate, property, twitter, zappos

Not sure if blogging and social media can really help you to sell houses? Then read this interview with Teresa Boardman from Minnesota. She’s a real estate agent and broker who’s tweeting, youtubing and facebooking her way to real estate success. She believes that around 80% of her business comes from the internet now and SearchEngineLand have conducted an insightful interview with her from which you might be able to garner some hints and tips! Read the full interview here.

Technorati Tags: real estate, property, online marketing

Regardless of any downturn in the property market, we’ve known for a long time now that press advertising was going to fall out of favour with agents. Advertising properties online allows anyone in the world to see your properties and let’s face it, people don’t just move within the perimeters of their weekly local newspaper area!

Local newspapers have always been a staple part of the marketing mix for estate agents, but as more and more people come online it’s hard for agents to resist the allure of online advertising. In 2008, house hunters want to look at all the properties in a specific area with a certain number of bedrooms, bathrooms, features etc. Leafing through page after page of teeny abbreviated listings with just the one photo is not ideal for anyone. Who has the time?

Regional press advertising is unlikely to dry up completely any time soon, but in today’s tight market online advertising is coming out on top as offering better returns for a smaller spend. Yesterday, Daily Mail and General Trust warned that its regional papers were suffering and placed the blame mainly on a lack of property advertising. The news sent shares plummeting to their lowest in more than a decade.

DMGT, which publishes the free London papers Metro and London Lite amongst others, said property advertising in March and April fell 12.7% and early reports for May seemed to indicate a further decline. Here at Zoomf on the other hand, we’ve seen a huge surge in the number of agents wanting to advertise with us. We’re definitely not complaining about this change in trends!

Technorati Tags: Property, real estate, advertising, online marketing

It’s a topic that’s understandably close to our hearts and as a search engine we see ourselves as the eventual winners in this battle for online house-hunters hearts and minds. But people get stuck in their ways. We use the same brand of toothpaste for decades because it’s just ‘what we do’. This can be a real point of frustration for us when we’re talking to agents who don’t want to put the time into reconsidering their online marketing, they could often be getting a better return for a lot less money by turning their attention away from the portals and towards the search engines. But now that agency budgets across the country are tightening, the case of the online marketing budget has come to the foreground for many. It was certainly a point of debate in this fortnight’s edition of The Negotiator (released 21st March), the popular magazine written exclusively for agents.

Unfortunately, The Negotiator doesn’t publish articles online but anyone with a paper copy can flick to pages 17 and 18 for an in-depth look at the portals and the search engines and details of which sites can give you the most bang for your buck. There’s some pretty interesting stats, the savings that could be made by shuffling your online alliances were substantial. I work for Zoomf and even I was surprised!

The Negotiator found that an agency with ten offices who currently subscribe to the two main portals, Rightmove and Primelocation, could save just under £100,000 per year by switching over to Zoomf and buying 30 keywords, and that’s not a saving to laugh at! It wasn’t just the big agencies that stood to save a fortune either, a five office agency was estimated to be able to save £45,000 per year and a single office agency with 10 keywords could drastically reduce their online marketing budget by 85%! Gosh. If you’d like more details about our clever targeted advertising then you can contact greg@zoomf.com for an overview.

And whilst we’re on the topic of online advertising, we’re currently getting very excited about our next seminar for agents. We’ve got a new venue, Interbrand on The Strand, and it will be taking place on the 24th of April at 6.30pm. Along with the usual Zoomf experts there will be presentations from Oodle and Yell, and of course the opportunity for you to have all your questions answered. We’ll be discussing Google AdWords, targeted advertising and all sorts of lovely things to do with online marketing on a tight budget. It’s free to attend, but places have been snapped up impressively quickly, so make sure you email marianna@zoomf.com if you want to guarantee yourself a place!

Technorati Tags: Real estate, Property, Online Advertising, Portals