Real Estate Solutions

From my bookshelf

I’m not a Florida Realtor but that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy their always current and interesting Florida Realtor Magazine. In fact, I like it so much I recently bought my own subscription. I find myself taking notes, highlighting, and folding down corners of the most interesting articles. But if you don’t feel the need to own it, you can read Florida Realtor Magazine online.  The online magazine uses some pretty nifty technology called iMuris, a digital publishing platform. Reading the magazine online is a breeze, unlike some attempts by online magazines which are downright clumsy. 

Give it a try. I think you will enjoy an article in the Nov/Dec issue called Lead Generation, Click and Close.

My Facebook Experiment

The goal shouldn't be to have a lot of people to yell at, the goal probably should be to have a lot of people who choose to listen. ……..Seth Godin

I admit I came to the realization that I needed a Facebook Page pretty reluctantly. In fact, you might say I started a page kicking and screaming. I was really sick of getting those “Rebecca Maloney suggested you become a fan of Rebecca Maloney” messages. Or worse yet, “Jon Kelley suggested you become a fan of South Park Subdivision in Birmingham, NY.”  I mean, why would I want to do that?

After listening to Mike Mueller at a number of events mention that Facebook rules prohibit using a personal profile for commercial gain, I became convinced. Mike helped me set up some tabs and I created both a Ledyard CT Real Estate Page and a plain Ledyard CT Page which has no real estate references. It was a bit of an experiment.

I invited a few (less than 10) friends to my real estate page to get started but pretty much ignored the simple Ledyard page for several months.

Ledyard CT is a small (less than 15,000 population) town in Eastern CT. There aren’t many Ledyard folks twittering and that was where I was spending most of my time. An event in town changed my thinking. Like many towns, Ledyard is facing some severe budget issues. The school system was looking at some reorganization and parents took notice. They created a Page on Facebook called Ledyard Residents for a Common Sense Budget and it quickly grew to over 200 fans. I had no idea that so many people in town were on Facebook and many of them were past customers or people I knew. I soon became Facebook Friends with many of them and began to engage by talking about anything but real estate.

Most importantly, starting about 3 weeks ago, I began contributing some good content on my Ledyard CT Page. Today as I write this, I have over 250 friends on my Ledyard CT Page and most of them are town residents, not real estate agents, like most agent fan pages I see. I could have easily sent out a mass invite, “Linda Davis suggests you become a fan of Ledyard CT” and had 1000 fans, most of them other agents. That wouldn’t be me. I’m building my page one relationship at a time.