Real Estate Marketing & Beyond
Google+ has been unfairly written off by social media gurus as a "ghost town" and deserves more attention from real estate pros, according to Mark Traphagen, senior director of online marketing for Stone Temple Consulting, a digital marketing agency in the Boston area.
"Google Plus is without a doubt the most misunderstood social network ever introduced," Traphagen writes in Maximum Exposure Real Estate. He says it's not comparable to Facebook, in that "what Google has created is [different] from every other social network in existence."
The first benefit is one of search engine optimization. Traphagen says that posting on Google+ allows your site to be indexed "almost instantly," which is weeks or months faster than how the search engine usually files the existence of new material online. He says in his research, he found some of his Google+ posts retained very high SEO for months, while similar posts on other social media networks faded quickly.
But Traphagen says the true value of Google+ came in 2012, when the search engine rolled out "Search Plus Your World (S+YW)." Today, if you're using Google search when you're logged onto your Google account (usually Gmail), your results will be different that they would if you were not logged in.
"The larger your Google/Google+ network is, the more people whose search results you are influencing. And that’s how Google+ can help get you in front of more people who never would have found you otherwise," Traphagen says.
"Combined with localization, the S+YW effect becomes even more powerful. That’s because in most cases Google can see the general location of a searcher, or the location she is searching for."
Finally, Traphagen suggests real estate agents take advantage of the benefits Google Authorship. Letting Google know you are a verified author confers benefits in the search process, such as a headshot, a clickable byline that goes straight to your profile, a note about the number of people who follow you, and a “More by…” link that leads to search results pages that show just your content.
