Social Media for Estate Agents

Posted on December 1, 2011 by Mark Bower

imageWe’ve been chatting recently to a great digital marketing company. One of the clients they are working with at the moment is an estate agent. 

That got me thinking… If I were an estate agent how would I use social media to promote my business. I’d…

  • Write a blog about my local area
  • Write about the local schools
  • Get a cheap video camera and record short interviews with sellers talking about the best thing about living in their area
  • Provide easy ways (on my website) for sellers to share their property details on Facebook and Twitter
  • Post loads of photos of the area
  • Provide practical advice home movers
  • Write about local walks, with photos/video
  • Talk about the little known ‘gems’ of the area… The stuff you won’t find on RightMove or in guidebooks… The amazing local organic bakery, the great landlord at the Red Lion…
  • Write local pub reviews
  • Talk about local history
  • Support community events and promote them on my blog

I wouldn’t…

  • Talk about interest rates or the economy
  • Endlessly retweet links to property listings
  • Write self-interested, salesy content

What do you think?

Posted in Marketing, Social Business | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

To Google+, or Not To Google+

Posted on November 23, 2011 by Mark Bower

With Google opening up its Plus social networking service to brands last week, the question we have been considering is whether it’s worth our time actively using the new brand pages.

Let me say before going any further though, you should definitely reserve a page in Google+ for your brand. It only takes a couple of minutes to register your page and you’ll ensure you won’t get hijacked by brand squatters.

Now, onto the question at hand… is it worth time and investment to create and maintain a fully functioning presence?

We can get an insight into the relative popularity of each service by looking at data from the Share buttons that proliferate across the web these days. We can use this as an indicator of the relative importance of each service.

For our study we looked took a sample of news and tech news websites: BBC, CNN, Guardian, New York Times, The Telegraph, Mashable and EConsultancy. Of those, only the The Telegraph, Mashable and EConsultancy have added Google+ sharing to their site.

Next we took the top 5 stories from each site at the time we did the survey and looked at the number of shares on each service:

Facebook

Twitter

LinkedIn

Google+

Telegraph

        

968

577

54

16

60%

36%

3%

1%

Mashable

        

610

5211

1684

108

8%

68%

22%

1%

EConsultancy

        

43

311

39

22

10%

75%

9%

5%

So there you have it, according to our admittedly rather unscientific survey, Google+ represents less than 5% of sharing activity on sites that have a Google+ button, and a much smaller percentage of overall sharing activity given that most mainstream sites do not have a Google+ button.

On that basis we have decided not to spend time maintaining a Google+ page (yet).

Have you created a Google+ page? What results are you getting from it?

Posted in Marketing, Social Business | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Why do people connect with brands on social media?

Posted on November 14, 2011 by Mark Bower

image

Do people have different reasons to connect to brands on Facebook vs. Twitter? There were some startling differences highlighted in last week’s report from ExactTarget…

For Facebook, the primary reasons are all about getting discounts and free stuff. For Twitter it’s all about information and keeping up to date.

This verifies what we have long suspected. If you’re a retailer, into discounts and daily deals, or you’re a B2C business, Facebook is the place to be. On the other hand, if want to position your brand as an authority in its industry, you’re a B2B business, or you sell bespoke services, Twitter is your more natural home.

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Video: The ROI of Social Media

Posted on November 9, 2011 by Mark Bower

Are you still trying to persuade your boss, partners or colleagues about the business value of social media?  This could help…

Here’s a video of CubeSocial CEO Linda Cheung at a recent Ariadne Capital/Entrepreneur Country event on the topic of the ROI of social media.

CubeSocial CEO Linda Cheung on the ROI of Social Media

Linda explains the value we have gained from social media, and also shows case studies of law firms using social media to win business.

The video is well worth a few minutes of your time. To quote a few of the live tweets from the event:

Linda Cheung hits it out of the park. Interesting, insightful, helpful presentation. And not an ad in sight. #ECWorkshop

Excellent coverage & energy from @LindaCheungUK of @cubesocial about the social & economic benefits of adapting to social media. #ECWorkshop

Very clever of @LindaCheungUK to use lawyers as her Twitter case study. If they can benefit, any sector can. #ECWorkshop

Shame no room for questions after talks, sure there would be a heap for @LindaCheungUK ‘s v enjoyable presso #ECworkshop #AVGevents

If you are organising an event and would like to ask Linda to speak, please get in touch via Twitter @cubesocial or email info [at] cubesocial.com.

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Gmail Integration is Here!

Posted on October 31, 2011 by Mark Bower

GMail-Logo2

We’ve just rolled out the latest updates to CubeSocial, and the good news if you have been patiently waiting for our Gmail integration… wait no longer. You can now import your contacts from Gmail and go discover where all your Google contacts hang out online.  Just click Import Contacts from your Contacts page and away you go.

Working with more than one organisation?

If you’re an agency or social media consultant we’ve made it easier for you to work with your clients. Simply go to your My Organisations page to create new organisations and manage your existing ones.

Set your communication preferences

We recently added the option to have daily email alerts for social searches and a weekly summary of the activity on your account. All the email options are entirely configurable from the Communication Settings page.

And a bit of housekeeping

We’ve beefed up some of the housekeeping features of CubeSocial and made it easier to delete contacts, users and even organisations too.

Enjoy!

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CubeSocial – The Movie

Posted on October 25, 2011 by Mark Bower

Well, maybe the world’s not quite ready for CubeSocial – The Movie just yet. But we have recently completed a short video with Microsoft about CubeSocial and our use of Windows Azure as our technology platform.

CubeSocial and Windows Azure

Thanks to Planky, Sara Allison and the rest of the folks at UBelly for arranging the day, and to Kirsty at Magic Bullet for the expert production skills.

Take a look at the video. It’s just 3 minutes long.

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Five Top Tips for Social Media Chicks

Posted on October 24, 2011 by Linda Cheung

image

Last week I was invited by Creative Barnsley to speak at the Girl Geek South Yorkshire dinner. As you might expect from a geek audience, there was instant feedback on social media!

Here are the tips those lovely ladies (and one brave gentleman) rated top for social media newbies:

#1 Don’t delegate social media to junior members of staff – if you wouldn’t send them to a corporate drinks reception in real life don’t send them to the virtual one.

#2 Find out where your contacts hang out online to determine which platforms to invest in – speak where your clients and prospects want to listen.

#3 Use social media to research clients and prospects. Time can be saved and conversations made more relevant when you already know areas of interest and mutual connections.

#4 Be aware of the dress code – consider how others will view your profiles. If your ideal client was looking for your product/service, would you profiles encourage them to approach you?

#5 Make the most of LinkedIn by providing links to your website, blog, Twitter, etc. and claim your public profile as your own by customising the URL to http://linkedin.com/in/yourfullname 

Explaining How Jonathan Ross helped me see the business value of Twitter also generated a flurry of #ggdsoyo tweets (and the birth of new Twitter game #snaptweets @stellamedia @lornableach) and I was asked to share my 5 must-dos to get started with Twitter during and after the evening.  image

Special mention @Cr8tveBarnsley (pictured) for being such a wonderful host, @JoelFryer for “sneaking in unnoticed(ish)!” and @louisewilkie9 who was inspired to open a Twitter account and in turn inspired the title of this blog Smile

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Catch CubeSocial Live

Posted on October 13, 2011 by Mark Bower

image

If you live ‘oop North’, you’re a girl and a geek, get yourself off to the Digital Media Centre in Barnsley tonight for the 3rd South Yorkshire Girl Geek Dinner.

The after dinner speaker will be CubeSocial CEO Linda Cheung. Linda will be talking about her start-up journey to-date: the good, the bad and the ugly.

If you can’t make that, there’ll be another chance to hear Linda speak at the Profit with Technology Entrepreneur Country event in London on October 26th.

We’ll also be making an appearance at the Hampshire Business Expo on November 3rd – so come along and say hello if you are in the area.

If you are interested in having Linda or Mark speak at your event get in touch. Current speaking topics include real-world tales from a tech start-up, social media for business profit, and building a business in “the cloud”.

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Twitter and Facebook Demographics

Posted on October 11, 2011 by Mark Bower

I found this really great infographic in my RSS feed this week. The data is probably a year out of date (Twitter supposedly now have 200m users, Facebook 800m) but some interesting things here nonetheless.

  • There are more school kids on Facebook, more graduates on Twitter.
  • Facebook users are more likely to follow a brand, but Twitter users are more likely to buy from a brand they follow.
  • There are more women than men on both services.
  • Facebook users are more likely to login everyday, but Twitter users are more likely to post new updates everyday.

Enjoy.

Posted in Marketing, Social Business | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Announcing the Forever Free Plan

Posted on October 6, 2011 by Mark Bower

Since we launched CubeSocial at the end of June, people have been keen to see more than 20 social media matches while making the most of their 30-day free trial.

This got us thinking about how people could discover where their contacts hang out on social media without subscribing to one of our monthly subscription plans…

Introducing the Forever Free plan

We’re excited to announce our Forever Free plan. We’ve automatically moved everyone who signed up for the old 30-day free trial account to this new plan. With CubeSocial Forever Free you get:

  • One user
  • Up to 1,000 contacts
  • One social search
  • Your social media conversations synchronised to CubeSocial every 2 hours

Totally Free. Forever.

You can buy a bundle of social media profile searches at any time, with prices starting from just £0.06 per match.

And of course you can upgrade to the full paid service whenever you like, to open up all the available features and reduce the cost of social media profile searches.

Refer a Friend, Get Social Media Profile Matches

Do you only have a few contacts that you want to find social media profiles for? We’ve got good news for you too! Invite your friends to sign-up to CubeSocial, and each time they do, both you and your friend will receive five social media profile matches. Our way of saying “thanks”.

Just go to Referrals in CubeSocial, and we’ll do the rest.

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