Which Social Media Should I be Using?

Which Social Media Should I be Using?

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, tumblr, and numerous other lesser well-known social media websites are inundating our Internet faster than most people can keep up. Regardless of your industry or your business, being on social media has become important and if you’re not on at least one of them you can get left behind. Today’s consumers want to know that they can find you anywhere and with more and more social media business pages and industries popping up in the search engines, not being included can lose business and customers. But how can anyone keep up with all of them?Which Social Media Should I be Using?

The key is to find the social media that you’re going to stick with and use.

Don’t be on every social media if you’re not going to use them or don’t know how. There’s no point to have a twitter account if you’ve never tweeted anything, you have no followers, and follow no one. Social media is exactly that; social. If you don’t engage your clients, respond and carry on discussions, there’s no point to have the account. It might look impressive at the bottom of a blog but if someone find you on the social media and you have nothing to offer, they’re not going to follow you or respond.

The key is finding the social media that works for your industry. Visual sites such as Pinterest and tumblr work very well with businesses that showcase food recipes, arts and crafts, and retail products. Google+ is excellent for real estate agents and more high-tech industries that connect with each other, converse, share ideas, and permit each other’s businesses. Google+ is excellent for indexing individual posts as opposed to Facebook, which individual posts and status updates are not indexed by the search engines. When you post something in a status format on Google+, it can be indexed and showcased in the search engines by all the follow you. But again, if no one followed you there’s no point to show up in the search engines for your post.

Facebook is great for keeping clients and potential customers interested in changes, latest events, updates, and status reports. This can work for a wide variety of businesses but if you’re not going to use it properly and respond or carry on discussions with those that comment and like your posts, you will probably lose followers and potentially miss out on business. View Vision Realty on Facebook and Huntsville real estate pro Amanda Howard.

Twitter makes a great one-phrase statement that can either be a link to your website, picture, post, or a great way to blanket conversations by tagging people and joining in conversations about specific topics using hashtags.

Tumblr is kind of a combination of everything where you can have images and pictures, ‘like’ posts and follow people, write articles and content as well as promote links and information. I would suggest tumblr is not the best for discussions and conversations but it still can be useful in connecting with your clients. If you’re unsure of which one to use, tumblr might be the best option but it’s also used as a form of a blog and social media combined into one.

Regardless of which social media you choose to use, and it could be a variety of several, make sure you give your clients and your readers the option to share your information on which ever social media network they choose. It’s a great idea to have sharing buttons for Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, and numerous other social medias. View Hawaii Realty Pro for examples of both. Google and other search engines follow these shares quite heavily and the more something is shared or liked, the more important it must be.

So don’t miss out on social media but you don’t have to get overwhelmed and confused by it either. Find what works best; it may simply be what you’re already using for personal use and simply blend that into business.

Personal SEO offers a variety of coaching and training on social media as well as blogging and SEO tactics.

 

Real Estate Events and Activities – Stuff to Write About

How much of my website should be about what I do?

Real estate bloggers might feel a little bit of writer’s block when they’ve written about every neighborhood or subdivision their community. But this is when you need to branch out and talk about other events and local information. Festivals, venues, and local events always take priority, especially holiday festivals, on the search engines. While you don’t want your entire website to be about festivals and activities, because that’s not what the majority of your content is about, it is a good idea to spread out your topics and talk about local information and geographical events. The search engines will find a greater benefit all around to your website and classify it as higher authority when there’s more information about your neighborhood than simply real estate. Big Event Tent Sign

Jay Lieberman is a real estate agent in Agoura Hills California and while his website mainly talks about real estate, his blog discusses all aspects of Agoura Hills and the surrounding neighborhoods. This weekend, Saturday, April 20, Agoura Hills residents as well as those from Westlake Village and Oak Park are participating in the Scandinavian Festival located at 60 West Olsen Rd. in Thousand Oaks California, just minutes from downtown Agoura Hills. This event brings in thousands of native Californians and transplants from Scandinavia to enjoy children’s activities, Nordic culture events, fun food, and Scandinavian music from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland. This is a great event to discuss on his website or his blog.

Steven Walsh spends his time discussing fringe benefits and prevailing wage consulting for contractors and business people but he also takes the time to discuss fun events, seminars, webinars, and activities going on across the country. Because his business is more nationwide rather than localized, he can focus on national news, reports, and cover a wide variety of events and activities outside the basics of his business.

What to write about on your websiteChad Lauletta is an expert at landscaping and trees services around Delaware County Pennsylvania. This covers the areas of have or town, Springfield, Drexel Hill, and Ridley and does an excellent job is not only discussing local gardening tips but wants to expand his blog with local events, and festivals, specifically focused around gardening.

Don Reinhard has been an expert at real estate and now focuses on pool cleaning and servicing in the Havasu City Arizona area. While he can specialize in different blogs about pool cleaning and maintenance you can’t throw in a blogger to about local events and activities, especially things that have to do with water.

As long as about 75% of your blogs and your website discusses exactly what you do and your services, the other 25 to 30% can be local information. If it’s too far off the beaten path you would want to many of those. If you feel the need to put in a news report or story that’s just not relevant to your website I would do so with caution. As long as search engines can easily identify the main services and objective of your website you can hold onto that authority and still offer a variety of topics and articles that can be easily found on the search engines.

Leslie Knope

My love of Leslie Knope

Leslie KnopeShe may not have it all together but by golly, she’ll figure it out and have friends there to help!Image from Salon.com

Duplicate Content on your Site and your Blog

How to Have the Same Content on your Blog as your Website

Unless your website and your blog are one and the same, many times people have and off-site blog or subscribe to a blogging platform. While this is important as the blogging platform may have the higher authority and get your blog indexed quicker, if you want to copy and syndicate the blog post over on your website there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it.Same Content on your Blog as your Website

If you want the same information on and off-site blog as on your website that can be tricky but it’s not impossible. The ideal way to do this is to post first on your main website so that your website has the authority and carries the higher value. Once your website has been indexed or you can find the blog post or article on the search engines, then copy and paste (syndicate) that post over to your blog. The vital and crucial part to this step is posting were crediting where the content originated. Somewhere within the new syndicated post or article there needs to be a link back to your website where you originally published the content. It can be an anchor text link or a naked link of the actual URL but somewhere there has to be a link to the source of where the content originally came from.

Related Post: Keeping Things Unique

If you don’t put this link in the content Google will think you have scrapes this content illegally and plagiarized it without giving proper credit to where it originated.

The Internet is full of duplicate content in the form of news briefs and syndicated articles but the reason that they work is that the original author, whether it’s you or someone else, is always credited.

Peggy Wester and Beth Atalay both have WordPress websites that they blog for on a regular basis, but they also blog off-site on ActiveRain. While they benefit from the instant indexing on ActiveRain, they may want some of their blog posts to syndicate over on their website. My suggestion is that this is done minimally with only the articles you truly want in your website and properly link back to the source for optimal as SEO results.

Other websites can have a blog off of their main website but still offer the same information just in different formats. 100% Australian offers a blog at 100% Aussie.com with reviews and link backs to their main site but still maintains all the major content on the main site. Advantage Legal Group has a WordPress blog where they blog about Bellevue bankruptcy but still maintain a main website for contact and basic services.

Choose your content carefully and try to keep them separate so you can be found for more information in more places.