How to Use Trulia Voices, Zillow Q&A and “Interest Based” Social Networks to Build Your Own Brand

Published by Joseph Ferrara (2) September 5th, 2008 in Social Network.

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An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along ~ Andre Maurois

There are a plethora of Question and Answer forums and websites real estate professionals (and any other pros) can use to showcase their expertise to (hopefully) attract clients. [Let's leave aside the issues of real estate agents (or their contacts) leaving set-up questions, agents from other markets answering questions in yours, and any point system.]

Here are two general real estate Q&A forums:

TruliaVoices
Zillow Home Q&A

These are great, but the main problem I have with them is they are in “red oceans”(instead of blue) — you are competing with hundreds of folks in the industry. At the RISMedia Leadership conference yesterday, Trulia said it gets 1,000 questions per day. Now, if you figure each question generates between 10-20 answers, that translates to 10-20,000 responses per day! That’s a big red ocean, my friend.

I am not suggesting you abandon these Q&A sites. Quite the contrary. Use them, but also leverage them in creative ways to stand out from the crowd and enhance your own brand. Look, you gave them the content to help enrich their brands — why not take advantage of YOUR content to build YOUR brand, on YOUR home turf?
Here are a couple of ideas:

Use Their Q&A on YOUR Website or Blog

Select Questions from these venues and write posts about those issues on your own blog or website. (of course, leave your answers on the other sites too)
Advantages:

1. Traffic to your website or blog.

Google search engine traffic will find YOUR Q&A post and YOUR blog or website, as opposed to TruliaVoices or Zillow’s Q&A , with all the other agents’ answers. To help your SEO, use your market keywords in the post title and first sentence.

TIP: Trulia Voices questions may not contain your market keywords and be kinda boring. Turn them into compelling headlines with Googleicious market keywords. Outrank the Trulians. You can do it.

2. Focused audience (captive, in marketing lingo).

On Zillow or Trulia, you have to share the page with others– and you may be way down the page. Visitors to your post or website ONLY see you; they cannot be distracted by other agents answers, ads or other “eye candy” on those sites. What’s more, they not only see your Q&A post, they see everything else you have to offer– like listings. They do not have to click to go your site from Trulia Voices or Zillow– they’re already there!

3. Greater added value to the consumer.

The Zillow and Trulia Q&A sections are somewhat limited in space and lack the functionality for you to communicate in-depth, multimedia-rich answers. The answers there are usually short, with a “contact me if I can be of further help”. Kinda weak. If you bring the Q&A home to your blog or website, you can give a detailed answer PLUS you can use images (you know I love images to communicate ideas effectively)– such as charts, graphs, market studies, etc., and multi-media (slide shows, video, etc) to convey a lot more information. You can’t use charts or multimedia in the Trulia Voices or Zillow Q&A.

Overall, your blog post will provide a better showcase for your answer, which is of more value to the consumer.

4. Take general Q&A and make them market specific

Many questions on Trulia & Zillow are general: what’s the difference between pre-qualified and pre-approved or the difference between a co-op and a condo (geez, that question must have been asked and answered on TruliaVoices a gazillion times). By taking this Question to your home turf, you can relate it to your market, your neighborhood. And you can build on it to provide added value to the consumer. Maybe there is a new condo development where the sponsor is offering financing at great rates and no closing costs. Or maybe you have a listing with a motivated seller who will finance without pre-approval being necessary.

5. Avoid censorship/moderation for marketing & self-promotion

In the example above, you’d probably be prevented from sharing that information with the consumer on Trulia or Zillow. They have policies against self-promotion/ marketing. [let's skip the issue that it is advertised as a marketing tool]. While this censorship/moderation policy is understandable in their venues, the “transactional visitor” misses out on this information. On your home turf, you can provide this added value to the consumer freely.

~~6. Links to all your other Trulia or Zillow answers.~~

From your Q&A blog post, you can link to your other answers on those sites– heck, you spent so much time answering a zillion questions. But do it one better. Trulia provides you with a Q&A widget. Imbed the widget on your blog or website so your visitor doesn’t have to leave you to go to the Trulia red ocean. Note: The Trulia Q&A widget used to list everyone’s answers but I think they fixed it so only YOUR Q&As appear on the widget. See comments of Laurie Manny and Mary McKnight.

5. Link to your branded profile

Yes, you can link to your Trulia or Zillow profiles, but wouldn’t you prefer to link to your own profile page on your branded website or blog? Sure. Your Q&A posts allow you to do this. If you also want to sent them off to your profile in the red oceans, you can still do it. But why would you?

Contribute to “Interest Focused” Social Networks

These are social networks that are built around lifestyle and social interests, which are not necessarily centered around general real estate (but can be for niches).

Advantages:

1. Non-competition from other real estate agents.

There are a lot of specialty forums populated by folks who have an interest or passion for something other than real estate. By participating in these forums, you build a rapport based on an affinity of interest. People like to do business with folks who share the same interests. So, if you are a hunter or antique collector, get involved in these sites. If you are genuinely there to share your interest, hobby or passion (we all have regular lives right?), people will know, either by your link, or in conversation, that you are a real estate professional.

2. Genuine social networking

Real social networks, in my opinion, are those that are in fact, not based on getting business. Let’s face it, people who go to Trulia Voices are not naive enough to suppose you are giving answers without a motive, i.e. to get their business. In fact, that’s how Trulia promotes it — as a marketing technique to get clients. And consumers know this. BUT, in a genuine social setting, where there is a sharing of life interests, that self-promotion notion is out the window. True social bonds are formed. It is from these bonds, that relationships are forged. So when a friend from your fishing forum needs a real estate agent, they’ll call you as their fishing friend, that happens to be a real estate broker. This is social networking in its purest form.

Here is a website that list some specialty Q&A websites. If you know of others, please share them in the comments.

To find niche forums, simple search for “your interest forums” and choose one or more. As an aside, when I embarked on the blog tour last year, I joined a RV forum and made some friends there, one who later reached out to me on a legal matter. That was enlightening.

3. Focused “Niche” advantage

These focused real estate forums and sites are great for professionals who primarily work in a certain housing niche or specialty practice. It makes better marketing sense to be in these niche venues than the general real estate Trulia or Zillow forums, where your niche may not even be represented. More importantly, these sites are used by consumers interested in that niche. It could be anything from historic homes to houseboats to timeshares. Green housing is the fast growing trend if you’re looking to specialize. For example, blogger and Modernist Todd Carpenter recommended Dwell Connect for those real estate professionals interested in modern housing.

Try Face to Face Social Networking: Meetup.com

One of my favorite social networking sites is Meetup.com. I like it because it uses the web to create offline social networks. You actually get to see, touch and hear people with common interests. Nothing builds rapport faster than personal interaction. And at a meetup, you are able to engage people one-on-one.

Advantages:

Besides sharing the same advantages of the Interest Focused social networks/forums, there are added advantages:

1. Face to face interaction builds rapport faster than online interaction.

Face-to-face reality always beats virtual reality when it comes to relationships. While the internet allows you to connect with folks across a wide swatch of earth, the relationship is not very deep. It takes awhile for it to grow. I noticed from traveling the country that when I met a blogger at a meet up, we forged a faster and stronger bond than existed when we interacted solely online.

2. Folks like to do business with people they like and share common interests.

In a one-on one personal meeting, you are better able to communicate your personality. There are qualities of a person that just don’t translate well online– sense of humor, body language, smiles, facial expressions, tone of voice, etc. At meetups, this aspect of one’s personality is allowed to shine. I attended a meetup after the RISMedia Conference, struck up an interesting conversation with a fellow there and we’ll being doing business. I spoke with him today.

3. Easier to reconnect

Because the meetups are in your city or town, the people are local– like real estate. Once you make a personal connection, it is easier to follow it up with other meetings.

So, go ahead and swim in the red oceans of TruZilla but don’t forget to look for your own blue oceans where you can swim alone.

TIP: A real estate agent I met in San Francisco at the Inman Connect told me his little blue ocean was LinkedIn:Answers. (Use the Search and Advanced Search functions to find questions by category and subcategory).

Where’s your blue ocean?

Recommended Reading:

Dig Your Well Before You’re Thirsty by Harvey Mackay

Technorati Tags: social networks, web 2.0, trulia voices, zillow, blue ocean strategy, sellsius

susanbaker1

Hi Joseph, thanks for sharing the tips through this informative article. I’ll Digg it or tweet it on other social sites. I think such suggestions will really help a website owner to boost his brand. Such a thing brings in a sheer volume of traffic to the site. And, I agree with the fact the social networking sites do play an important role in powerful marketing. I hope it works with real estate websites as well like Lrgboston.com which is known for unique listings for Boston condos.

jfsellsius

True Susan

Jill Wente

Great advise, Laurie on not mentioning the large listing site aggregators by name, limiting the use of keywords in your responses, and not linking to them. We are competing against the aggregators more than we are individual agents in our local areas.

jf

Thanks Laurie (and Mary ) for the agent perspective and great tips to build your own traffic.

You hit the nail on the head-- USE THEM them instead of letting them use you. And you are right about the widget-- don't use it. Instead, create your own Q&A widget and keep the G-juice for yourself.

Mary McKnight

I'm going with Laurie here - Trulia, especially is riding up the rear of of agents in the SERPS - why would any agent willing give up their link juice to help their competition (and in terms of search- these companies are their competition) in the SERPs? I agree with everything but using the widgets and giving these mega sites links. Use them, don't let them use you.

LaurieManny

OK I'm done ranting now. :)

LaurieManny

The Trulia widget has hidden links in it sending juice back to Trulia! Agents are placing it on the front page of their sites - the most powerful place for it to be. This gives Trulia POWERFUL front page backlinks from EVERY site that puts up the freakin widget!

The result? Every one of these links tells Google that Trulia is more relevant than the agents site and it is OK to rank them higher.

LaurieManny

As you said in your post these questions are getting 10-20 answers each. Of those if half were other agents local to your area you would have placed yourself into a very competitive situation - IF there were business to be attained from the consumer.

Considering that the majority of the answers will be redundant you should strive to stand out from the crowd and drive the consumer to the link that you leave. Get them off of that page and onto yours. Then keep them there!

LaurieManny

Large sites, like you have mentioned here, are powered up by the listings that they aggregate and the content that Realtors contribute. By sheer volume, this level of content guarantees them top placement on the engines. With so many of them now in existence and more on the rise, how are Realtor blogs and websites going to compete for those cherished positions?

Isn't it bad enough that the big brokers have aggregated agents listings to these sites without considering how they were going about it? But agents contributing to these sites should know a few things.

When you contribute your local keywords you are aiding in the rise of that site.

For instance, if an alleged consumer is asking a question about Long Beach and you answer using the words Long Beach and then go on and mention the neighborhood name a few times, you have added to the relevance of the site in Google's eyes in Long Beach.

Solution: They already know you are discussing Long Beach, so say LB. Instead of giving up the name of the neighborhood, say, in the area you are asking about. Don't use the abbreviation of a state, they too are keywords.

I think the real solution is to look at the question, go to your blog, write a post that answers the question and powers up YOUR site, then go in and just say something very nice and explain that you have addressed this in an article they might be interested in checking out and leave the URL.

Keep your keyword contribution down to an absolute minimum. Remember that the words; real estate, home/s, condo/s, property/ies, are all nation wide keywords as well and contribute to the problem.

So far, I have been successful at this for most of my keywords. Even with handling it this way, Trulia and Yahoo are nipping at my heels at the neighborhood (short tail) level and at the top of the food chain (long tail) on Google, because others in my area are contributing without knowledge.

Also, I did a search of my site and found all outgoing links to these and other large sites and I disabled them. Every time you link to one of these sites you are telling Google that the site you are linking to is more important than yours. You all should know that when I did this, I jumped back up on some of my keywords and those that were linked to dropped down a little. It worked.

Nothing is more important than YOUR site if you are a Realtor.

I do answer questions at T....a - occasionally. I don't answers questions that could cause potential legal situations and am VERY careful about the advice that I dole out. Realtors should understand that their E & O insurance covers them while they are in a transaction, not if they made a mistake on one of these sites. I feel shame for the agents who are in there answering every question, and doing so very badly. They should stop, the consumer thinks they are idiots.

Consumers call me direct from T....a all the time. Most of them will tell me that I am one of the few voices that seems to know what they are talking about. It is important to respect the intelligence of the consumer when answering these questions and remove your ego. Quantity will not win over quality.

I know I have run on here but this is a subject that I feel very strongly about and hope that others will as well. It is more important than most of you realize. Never give up your juice!

Make a note that while I was writing this comment I took special care to keep the keywords down to a minimum as it relates to these sites. Once you get into the habit of deciding where the juice goes, it gets easier.

LaurieManny

Hi Joe,

I agree with much of what you said about using these networks to promote traffic, but:

Re: #6, you are kidding here, right? You are not really telling people to give up their juice and power up Trulia and Zillow with backinks? You do realize that giving up these backlinks will cause both Trulia and Zillow to bury these people on the engines, don't you?

jfsellsius

Ideally, your content should attract visitors to your site from the git-go, instead of your content getting visitors to trulia or zillow (& then maybe back to you). So your point is well taken vis-a-vis the link juice (even via the widget) helping TruZ build authority w/ the Google gods to outrank agents who gave them the content in the first place. The question then becomes: Can you answer questions on TruZ AND still outrank them on Google? I say you can. And if you use the blue ocean Q&A sites, I think you get a greater marketing edge.

I am a tru believer in building your own brand and standing out from the crowd and playing exclusively in TruZland or AR is not the way to do it. Not the way I'd do it. I don't want to tell a client'-- "Go see my stuff at these guys' joints". I want them to see my stuff at my joint.

Hey. maybe the way to take advantage of their high traffic forum to YOUR benefit is to answer the question by saying "Short answer is (yes or no). If you want the answer in more detail than I can provide here, click here (sending them to your Q&A page). Hmm...

Kathy M.

I too liked this article. I noticed on Trulia that an Agent in my area is all over the place, and even though I have a good answer the other Agent shows twice as much. I am going to re-read this,especially about the Widget, it makes perfect sense to me. Thanks.

Michael Daly

Love this post, Joe- a REAL game changer!
md

jfsellsius

When asked about his success as a hitter, baseball legend Wee Willie Keeler
would say: "Hit 'em where they ain't". He had a lifetime batting average
of .341 after 19 years in the majors

pete stopper

how about specialized sites like www.condo.com ?

jfsellsius

Fine. But I would leverage the content there too, because you are still competing with other real estate agents on the site. You want readers of your content on your website or blog-- and them to return to you, rather than the third party site.