REBarCamp Phoenix this last Friday was great – great discussions, great location, great people and great food! Part of me wishes that you could stream it all but then, it’s a whole other experience being there face-to-face with people and that’s sorta the point. Nevertheless, I thought I’d recap a few things… Mark Madsen did have a great post on discussion’s he had hoped to have at REBarCamp Phoenix and for the most part, I think all of those discussions successfully took place…

Re: Facebook

• We discussed the differences between Profiles and Pages. Basically, if you’re going to market your listings, make sure you have a Business Page, otherwise, it’s against Facebook’s Terms of Service to market commercial content on your Profile Page.
• Get organized with “Lists” for personal and professional contacts.
• Plan out your content. If you want to build an audience, you need to post media consistently to your Facebook Page. Fresh content is better than using an auto-feed.
• Still, Bill Risser (and I agree) asks: “Is an Agents time better spent trying to build a Facebook Page or is it better spent elsewhere?” Sorry Bill, that might have been word for word but for the most part, I still think that an Agents time is better spent building the core content for their blog and then they can spend time marketing their content on Facebook. Just because Facebook has a lot of people doesn’t mean it’s the right marketing vehicle for you. That’s my take anyway, what do you think?

Re: Twitter

• Overall I think we agreed that Hootsuite is everyone’s application of choice. Great application, awesome analytics, easy way to schedule Tweets, etc.
• InboxQ is a neat tool for performing keyword searches to questions from other Twitter users that you might have answers to.
• Still, how do you use Twitter to build a local audience? Is this really effective/practical for a Real Estate Agent or is this nothing more than a time-suck?

Re: Real Estate IDX Best Practices

The Google vs Social Media session was a great one. Mark Madsen with Shelter Realty in Las Vegas, a recent Diverse Solutions client, led the discussion sharing how his Brokerage and Agents are using their blog and our plugin to build hyperlocal content that drives traffic. In short:

• If you run a Brokerage and a multi-author blog, assign each Real Estate Agent a coverage area and make writing part of their prospecting time. In other words, set the expectation that they have to write weekly about their coverage area (a mix of listing and market data and other local community info). The goal is to be a local, valued and trusted source of information.
• Educate your site visitors on how to use your IDX product. Here’s a great post from Jim Duncan: http://www.realcentralva.com/2011/04/04/5-steps-to-searching-for-price-reductions-on-homes-in-the-charlottesville. Another idea would be to do a screencast showing your site visitors how to use your Home Search Tool. Has anyone else done a screencast showing site visitors how to use their Home Search tool? If so, link to it in the comments please…

Re: Contact Forms & Other WordPress Plugins

I think this topic deserves a post all of it’s own, so I’m going to do just that. In the meantime, if you have any favorite WordPress plugins, feel free to share those in the comments as well.

Photo/Video Recap:

What was YOUR biggest takeaway from #REBCPHX?? What did you learn or what didn’t you learn (what discussions do you wish people had covered)?