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What you say and when you say it means everything on social media!

Do you want more people to see your Twitter content? Post it on a Monday between 1:00 p.m. and 3:00 p.m.!

In a recent article from the NDG Knowledge Base, you’ll find out the best times to post on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and more.

Do you want more likes and shares on Facebook? Create content people want to actually share!

Another great article reveals that the biggest factor for creating engagement is creating content that is relevant to both your brand and your customer. Click here for more great insights into creating engagement on Facebook.

As we continue to explore social media marketing, I got to thinking about Klout—a service that measures your social web influence and scores you based on your Facebook and Twitter activity.

The service has many benefits. For brands, the service identifies your most influential topics and, more importantly, helps you build brand awareness by connecting with more influential people.

In addition, you can offer influencers a perk, then—assuming they like it—they will likely spread the word through their social networks. Since people generally value others’ feedback and recommendations over traditional advertising, that social share is great for your brand.

Currently, the makers of Klout are working to measure activity on Facebook pages, YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, Blogger, WordPress, Last.fm, and Flickr.

Klout is not the only service out there measuring social web influence. There’s also Kred and PeerIndex, to name a couple. Click here to read about similar tools.

Curious to know which homebuilders have the most Klout? Click here.

Earlier this week, Facebook announced that Timeline for brand pages will be pushed live on March 30.

One benefit to the new layout—photos will become a main focus. According to Dr. John Medina’s book, Brain Rules, “we learn and remember best through pictures, not through written or spoken words,” meaning better and faster brand recognition and engagement.

The purpose of the Facebook brand page will be less about selling and more about telling an authentic story and sharing your company culture. This is another opportunity to express what makes your company unique and build an emotional connection with fans.

Here are a few things you can do to prepare:

Start thinking about your company’s cover photo. It’s the perfect spot to showcase a new product or promotion.
Go through your company’s history and mark milestones to share on the timeline and show a more complete story.
Make sure all of your information, photos, and videos are up to date.

Check out the links below to learn more about Facebook Timeline for brand pages:

Over the past few months, we’ve added quite a few new articles and e-books to the NDG “Knowledge Base,” our internal library of online content.

Looking to drive more traffic to your website via Facebook? Check out “Beyond the Facebook Business Page: How to Generate Traffic and Leads with Facebook,” an interesting new e-book publication from HubSpot. Learn how to make Facebook a major part of your marketing strategy with tips on keeping your content fresh, instructions on how to advertise successfully, and more. Click here to download this free e-book today.

Content Marketing vs. Traditional Advertising, an infographic from Marketo, shows how content marketing—the creation and sharing of content to promote a product or service—is competing with traditional advertising, and benefiting marketers. Some of the most popular content marketing tactics include social media—with 55% of marketers using Twitter, 54% using Facebook, and 38% using YouTube to distribute their content—e-newsletters, and blogs. Click here to see the infographic.

Last month, I attended Digital East, a conference on the future of digital media, in Tyson’s Corner, Va. The seminar was very informative about future trends and what to expect next in the digital advertising and marketing world.

Lets start with the fact that we are now creating more than advertisements; we are creating experiences. Instead of measuring digital advertising effectiveness simply by whether or not it performed in a cost-effective way, perhaps we should be looking at experiences in terms of consumer involvement. Did the advertisement aid in establishing a relationship with a consumer? If so, the ad was beneficial! Because creating relationships leads to loyalty.

The biggest takeaway at Digital East: That everything leads back to social media. It’s really important to use it as a way to disseminate information, but even more important to use social media to encourage 2-way conversations with the consumer.

Oscar de la Renta launched its new fragrance on Facebook, with support from Twitter, email, and fangating. The fragrance sold out within 12 hours.

Under Armour drove paid media to its Facebook with its “footsteps” campaign, offering tabs with exclusive content, a YouTube homepage takeover, and callouts on athlete Facebook pages.

We need to give fans truly exciting and meaningful content in order for them to want to share it and ultimately increase the fan base. Give them something to do. Challenge them to participate and upload photos. Let fans become the global voice.

Finally, the last important takeaway at Digital East: What’s even more important when it comes to social media, is that if you aren’t going to use it or keep up with it, don’t even start. If you cannot commit the resources required for success, you will lose prospects because they don’t know how to communicate with you and/or your brand or company.

Want to know more? Contact me on twitter @badrgirl.

Sarah Eckel,
NDG Director of Account Services

Nearly a week after the launch of the new Google + social network, Facebook has just unveiled its anticipated Skype-powered video chat feature.

Skype CEO Tony Bates described the new Facebook video feature as a “mini-Skype client”—built right into chat, easily accessible with the click of a button at the top of your chat window. And if the person you’re calling doesn’t answer, you can even leave a video message.

Unlike the Google + “Hangouts” feature, which allows up to 10 people to engage in video chat, Facebook’s video chat offers free one-on-one capability only. So why didn’t Facebook launch group video chat from the start in effort to stay head of Google +? Facebook responds that one-on-one chat on Skype is more popular; however, it’s worth noting that Skype currently charges for group chat and relies on this feature for revenue, indicating that Facebook is unlikely to offer group video chat capability anytime soon.

All in all, both social networks’ video chat features are useful for entirely different reasons: Facebook’s Skype-powered video chat is simple, direct, and easy to use, while Google + “Hangouts” offers a number of social options for connecting with various groups of friends or colleagues in different ways, in any combination you like.

Do you use video chat now? Will you be more likely to use it on Facebook or Google +? And do you anticipate incorporating this capability into your company’s public response, just as “live chat” has become a necessity for many websites? We’d love to hear your thoughts!

Sara Badr,
NDG Marketing Manager

Big news in the social media realm: No longer are the days that you must share information in the form of status updates with hundreds of friends or acquaintances all at once. Google launched a trial of their new Google+ social network to a limited number of users this week.

Now, Google+ wants you to be able to connect with others in more ways than one. The new social network includes features such as a news feed known as “the Stream,” video chat in “Hangouts,” and the ability to group chat on mobile devices with the “Huddle” option.

The creators at Google+ also recognized that you may only what to share something with a certain group of friends. For example, maybe you want to brief industry professionals or interested clients on an upcoming meeting you’re holding. With Google+, you’re able to group friends into various social groups or categories called “Circles” and relay information to those people only.

Google+ will gradually open up to the public over the coming weeks. Will you try it out?

Continuing our Step-By-Step Process to Staying Focused and On Track in Today’s Market, this week, we’ll discuss how Social Media can help you distribute your content online to help achieve your search engine marketing and optimization goals, as well as help you achieve real authentic customer engagement.

Facebook, YouTube, Twitter—there’s a growing number of social media channels and platforms out there. It’s easy to get overwhelmed and off course trying to be everywhere, so we’re going to set the record straight about what you should, and shouldn’t, expect from your social media marketing efforts.

Make sure to review NDG’s online integration map for flowing data (content) throughout the fundamental online marketing components for Homebuilders, Developers, and Real Estate Brokerages.

NDG recommends that our clients have a living strategic plan for implementing, engaging, and monitoring your social media outreach. While social media can help build brands and maximize publicity efforts, do not expect these marketing components to instantly drive traffic or sales. Social media platforms are recommended because of their word-of-mouth generation capabilities and because of their wide-ranging reach across many varied demographic audiences. Do NOT abandon all other forms of marketing; rather, integrate social media into your current marketing strategy and, most importantly, your corporate website.

As a first, fundamental step, develop a blog to serve as the “content repository” to feed timely, relevant content to your corporate website. This same content can be distributed via a Facebook fan page. Then, you can add other platforms such as Twitter and YouTube to your mix as you develop more content appropriate for these digital meeting places. Your website is the hub of all your marketing and advertising, and from this hub are distributed communications, each tailored to the channel you’re using.

Finally, remember that Content is Queen, and especially so for the social media. If you’re just shouting the same stuff down these channels, you’re wasting your time and money, and potentially damaging your brand and reputation. The ROI on your social media outreach will be directly influenced by your investment in generating good content, because this is what will help your Search Engine Results Page (SERPs) rankings grow higher and higher, and create more authentic engagement with your prospects—not repeating the same weak content over and over, which will just get you ignored by both your prospects and the search engines.

Widely regarded as the authority on new home sales, best-selling author Myers Barnes is the among the building industry’s most requested advisors and speakers. Now, as the nation’s premier New Home Sales Trainer, Myers has just launched a new page on Facebook specifically for New Home Sales Training, offering valuable resources like training videos, innovative strategies, and the ability to share your thoughts, insights, and success stories with other sales professionals.

There’s a wealth of information, tactics, strategies, and even scripts for success at the Myers Barnes website and at the New Home Sales Training page on Facebook. So take advantage of these incredible, free resources—before your competitors do!

NDG Communications, Inc.

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New Home Sales Training with Myers Barnes