RentalsGuy

Yesterday I commented about how I’m starting to use social media and social networking to market our clients rental properties. Today I finally broke down and added something I’ve been considering for a while…and I’m going to test it to see if it yeilds any noticable results. This new fangled technology isn’t very new by web standards but it’s new to me — it’s call TwitPic and it allows me to post photos to the web that can be viewed on the TwitPic site — but it also automatically adds the photo to my tweets as a URL so that people can see the listing.

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As the chief developer of my real estate company’s marketing plan for our customers’ rental property, I am always looking for additional ways to cost effectively market a house, townhome or condo to the largest possible (and most relevant) audience.  Starting early this year I began testing a variety of social media and social networking sites.  You can click to see some of the services and sites I use like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo and more.

If you’re not familiar with social networking on the web, I found a pretty basic but good web site that explains social networking fairly well.  If you’re a more visual person, do a search on “Social Networking” on YouTube and you’ll find a mixed bag of videos that visually explain how they work.

One of the interesting things I’ve found over the past several months is that there is an uncanny interest in the unusual on the web.  For example, if I comment about a property that is in an upper price bracket — lots of people click to see it.  It seems like everyone suffers from that “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” influence and has to see what an expensive home looks like.  If I simply post “here’s a new listing…” I get very little response (especially since my mom died).  But if I can find something unique and/or interesting about a property and highlight that single feature — people tend to click the link and look at the property.

Let’s face it, though, this kind of traffic isn’t particularly targeted unless you’ve got an audience of renters following your every online move.  And that’s the toughest part of the equation.  How do you get potential renters to want to follow you online and look to you for their housing solution?

I have some very basic methods that I’m just now starting to employ.  I’ll blog about my efforts in future posts.  I’d be very interested to see if others have comments or questions about social networking and how it relates to marketing houses — or any product for that matter.