Tuesday Tip: Facebook Timeline

Step 1. Cover Photo.

The cover photo is the first thing fans will see when they visit your page. Think of the cover photo as a showcase of what your brand represents. Therefore, you will want to pick an image which represents your area of focus - whether it be sales, rentals or a certain area. The cover photo is a great way to keep your page exciting and visually stimulating. A good practice is to keep your cover photo fresh and current. For example: changing the image according to seasons.

Another thing to keep in mind with the new changes are the Facebook Policies i.e. Facebook does not allow Calls to Action within the cover photo.

Step 2. Profile Picture

Choose a profile picture that is at least 180 x 180 pixals. In most cases this should be your logo. The Starbucks brand page does a good job of reflecting the brand personality and making the page attractive.

Starbucks Facebook Timeline

Step 3. Apps

You can customize images for your apps and rearrange them in the order of importance.

For example: We have optimized this client's (image below) custom apps section to show featured listings & property search to appear at the top .

Facebook Timeline App Customization

Step 4. Milestones

You can also start thinking about significant events and milestones within the company that can be added to the timeline. For example: the company established date, new hires, pictures of founders, a significant sale, awards, opening of new office etc. Check out the ESPN Sportcenter Timeline for inspiration on milestones.

Step 5. You can also ad large photos with date and location and 'pin' the post to keep it as an entry at the top of your page. Many of these features can also be useful for highlighting featured/exclusive properties.

Below is a quick overview of the Timeline using Boston Logic an example:

Boston Logic Facebook Timeline

Boston Logic Facebook Timeline 2

Thoughts on video for listings

So, I'm sitting in a panel on video for real estate brokerages. It's part of the Leading RE annual conference.

Here's the scene: there are 4 guys on the panel. They're all smart and know video and mobile too! Note, they all sell video products as well. So, that's the situation.

All of these guys agree that you need to pay for good video. They also agree that you need to pay professionals. The illustration they used was to show 2 videos, one made by an agent of a shabby, small condo. The second video was of a mcmasion obviously done by a professional at considerable cost. Of course, the expensive video was light years better.

Here's my question - if the average agent can't afford high production value videos, how do they compete?

Boston Logic Launches New Chicago Website!

Chicago Real Estate Artists recently became our first client to utilize data from MRED, the MLS covering the Chicago metro area and beyond!

They came to Boston Logic ready to start a new brokerage, and needed a new website which could be up and running fast and on a budget - and they wanted the look to be as sophisticated and quintessentially Chicago as possible. For brokers and agents who need quality design work fast, we have just the thing - our Personalized Theme design option. Starting with any one of our already outstanding ready-to-deploy standard design themes, the Personalized Theme process lets you change colors, fonts, and images to make the theme match your existing brand collateral, or simply just make it suit your individual style. Within a matter of only a few days, Boston Logic worked with Chicago Real Estate Artists to make their new Sequoia website platform a visually compelling part of their brand identity.

If you are on a budget but want top notch visual impact, or need to launch a new site that speaks to your unique aesthetic in a hurry, our Personalized Theme design package might be just the thing for you. Contact us today to learn more!

New Sequoia Site Launch: Spark Realty Group!

Spark Realty Group, Inc. recently opened their doors on Boston's fashionable Newbury Street and knew their website had to be built from the ground up with a look and feel to match their premium branding. As a new firm, they also knew the importance of getting as many leads as possible right out of the gate. Boston Logic's Sequoia platform and our Modified Theme design package proved to be the perfect combination for Spark, blending the most powerful software in the real estate industry with our award-winning design.

The result is a stylish and easy-to-use website with an attractive user interface, plus all the tools Spark Realty Group will need to capture leads and close deals.

In addition, with the busy schedule of a brand new real estate company, Spark knew that creating unique, search engine optimized content for their new site would be a daunting task. Fortunately for them, Boston Logic offers content creation at levels from the very basic all the way up to highly comprehensive packages such as the one Spark Realty Group opted for. In addition to creating content for the basic pages of the site, such as the property search pages and contact forms, our marketing department filled Spark's new site with original and optimized content about the neighborhoods they serve, as well as a large number of Boston and Cambridge luxury buildings which the Spark team focuses on in their boutique high-end firm.

Only a few brief meetings between our project management staff and Spark's core team were needed for Boston Logic to take the wheel of this project and craft a handsome, feature-rich website loaded with quality content.

We wish Spark Realty Group all the best as they continue to grow and succeed in the lucrative Boston real estate market!

If you're interested in learning more about how the Sequoia Website Platform could be designed to meet your needs, sign-up for a no-pressure demo! We host one every Wednesday at 2p EST.

Join Us at Agent Reboot on Wednesday – Special Discounted Rate!

CALLING ALL LOCAL REAL ESTATE PROFESSIONALS...

This one-day, fast-paced program will prepare you to leverage the latest technologies in your daily lives with expert training from some of the industry’s leading speakers. Amongst these industry leaders will be Boston Logic's President and Founder, David Friedman, who will sit on a Social Media Insights panel with Matthew Shadbolt, Director of Interactive Product & Marketing for The Corcoran Group, and Heather Allen, Director of Sales and Marketing at HubConnected.

Inman Agent Reboot will take place on the 3rd Floor of the Hynes Convention Center in Boston, MA from 9am-3pm (registration begins at 8am). We'll be handing out a ton of candy and good advice, so be sure to register below and come visit us at the Boston Logic table!

Topics throughout the day include:

15 Mobile Tools That Will Make You Stand Out
Developing a Content Strategy That Sells
Social Media Insights - Making the Smartest Investment of Your Time
Capture Consumers' Attention with Video
Getting Down to Business: Optimizing Online Lead
Lifestyle Branding: Why it Matters

BOSTON LOGIC IS AN EXCLUSIVE ASSOCIATE SPONSOR
This means we are able to offer our constituents a special discounted rate!

New Sequoia Real Estate Website Launch: Phoenix Realty!

Phoenix Realty Group had Boston Logic build a custom website for their real estate business several years ago, and has worked with us ever since to help build their presence online through real estate SEO. In order to take advantage of all of the cutting edge tools we've created since, Phoenix Realty Group recently opted to transfer their existing design theme to the Sequoia platform.

"It was a pleasure working with Boston Logic. They did a great job of listening to my needs and building my site to perfectly suit my business." - Ken Glass, Principal

Working with Boston Logic over several years, Phoenix Realty Group first built a fully customized website, and also took advantage of our LogicRentals rental inventory management system. Realizing that the Sequoia platform offers not only the best suite of tools available today, but that that toolset continues to grow constantly, Phoenix Realty Group recently moved their existing design to the Sequoia platform. In addition, they are also now using the RentJuice system, fully integrated with Sequoia to offer rental agencies a managed listing database solution.

Our Mimic Theme design option lets you keep the look and feel of your site intact, while moving onto the best software platform in the real estate industry. For Phoenix Realty Group, this was an obvious choice. The process is smooth and painless, and can typically be accomplished in very little time.

Phoenix Realty Group is a sales, leasing, and property management firm with offices in Allston and Brookline. Their rental-friendly website is easy-to-use and easy on the eyes, featuring key features such as a custom graphical map search interface which allows users to easily find their next great apartment.

Learn more about the Sequoia platform and our various design options - Contact a member of the Boston Logic sales team today at 617-266-9166!

New Video About the Sequoia Platform!

There's no doubt that the Sequoia platform encompasses the most cutting-edge real estate website software available on the market. But how is this done? What features are available on a Sequoia website? How does Sequoia help you succeed in your real estate business?

We've put together a great real estate website video that breaks down exactly what it takes to make your real estate online marketing campaign to be successful. Click the image to view the video, or visit the Boston Logic YouTube page.

First, you need to drive traffic to your website. To do this, the Sequoia platform helps your site rank higher in search engines for highly applicable search terms. The platform also helps you leverage social media websites like Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin. All of this is tracked using state of the art Analytics so that you can hone your campaign based on performance and actual usage statistics.

Next, when users arrive at your site, they should intuitively know where to click, and they should be able to quickly find what they came looking for. For example, many users on real estate websites arrive and want to immediately search for their perfect home. Once they’ve found what they want, or feel like they’re getting close, we want to compel them to provide their contact information. This is when the visitor converts from an anonymous user into a lead.
Throughout the user experience, prominent calls to action give easy access to tools which allow your customers to contact an agent, schedule a showing, save a favorite property, take notes on listings to help organize their search – even share a listing by broadcasting it to social media sites or emailing it to a friend.

How Can Sequoia Help?

The Sequoia Platform educates your clients by showing them the complete MLS listing. In addition, we’ve integrated the Sequoia platform with Yelp!, Walkscore, Education.com, Google Maps, Zillow, and myriad other data resources to provide relevant information about the town or neighborhood where your customers are looking to buy or rent. All of these tools help educate the user and ensure that your website becomes the foundation of their search for a new home.

Now that you have generated lots of leads and your site has become the foundation of their online home search, you’re going to need tools to incubate those leads until they’re ready to buy or rent. Not all leads are ready to close at the moment when you first identify them. So, we’ve built extensive functionality designed to maximize the ease of workflow and help you manage your pipeline.
We’ve also automated many of the tasks that you perform most often. The Sequoia system makes it quick and easy to create and print listing sheets, communicate with clients, schedule and coordinate showings, print showing sheets, search your MLS or rental database, send listing updates, follow up, and never forget a task.

While you’re at it, you’re going to want a record of your communication with each client. The Sequoia platform helps you precisely track your website’s user activity. You’ll know exactly what your clients are doing on your site, including how often they’re coming back, what they are searching for, homes they’re looking at, which listings they liked the most, and much more. All of this data will help you serve your customers better and close more deals!

When it’s time to put in an offer, the Sequoia platform helps you stay organized with our deal tracker component and virtual documents feature, making the process an organized procedure, rather than a mess of paperwork and tasks to juggle.
By facilitating this process, Sequoia makes your real estate online marketing campaign successful while making you more efficient! The Sequoia platform even helps you sign new seller clients by making your listings look great and maximizing the exposure of those listings on sites like Facebook, Trulia, and Zillow.

To learn more about Boston Logic, and how we can help you achieve results online, please give us a call or contact us for a demonstration.

Warren Residential New Real Estate Site Launch!

The Warren Residential Group has been a Boston Logic customer for many years, and their custom website brought them much success in that time. Looking to build on that success with an eye to the future, the Warren Residential Group recently opted to transfer their existing design theme to the Sequoia platform.

The Warren Residential Group's successful Newbury Street real estate brokerage is a perfect example of how leveraging your Web presence can grow your business exponentially. Working with Boston Logic over several years, the Warren Residential Group first built a fully customized real estate website, taking advantage of every tool available at the time. Realizing that the Sequoia platform offers not only the best suite of tools available today, but that that toolset continues to grow constantly, Warren recently moved their highly acclaimed design (also by Boston Logic!) to the Sequoia platform.

Our Mimic Theme design option lets you keep your aesthetic, emotional, and financial investment in the look and feel of your site intact, while moving onto the best software platform in the real estate industry. The Warren Residential Group constantly receives amazing positive feedback on the look of their website, so this was an obvious choice for them.

We can talk at length about the power of the Sequoia platform and how it can benefit your business, but this testimonial from The Warren Residential Group sums it up nicely:

"Boston Logic has been a huge part of my company's success. Their technology and design have helped move Warrenre.com to the top of search engine rankings and convert visitors to customers. But, most importantly, they have acted as a part of my team just as if they worked directly for me. They don't just build websites, they help build businesses." - Nick Warren, Broker

The Warren Residential Group is one of Boston's leading full service real estate agencies. Located in the Back Bay, they focus on luxury residential properties in the Boston area and beyond, and their focus on technology and customer service consistently earn them rave reviews from their clients.

Learn more about the Sequoia platform and our various design options - Contact a member of the Boston Logic sales team today at 617-266-9166!

New Sequoia Feature Launches: 4/21/2011

Boston Logic has recently unleashed a slew of amazing new features (as we always do!) designed to make your online presence ever stronger, and the process of turning leads into deals easier and faster than ever before. Here are just a few of the choicest highlights:

Mapped Search

If your search parameters for a new home can’t be defined by conventional constraints like towns, neighborhoods, ZIP codes, and the like, we now offer you the opportunity to “think outside the box” and literally define your own custom location. Using our new Mapped Search Tool, you can draw a shape – any shape, with unlimited sides and angles – on an interactive Google map. Want to live within a certain stretch of your favorite scenic drive in the country? Draw a boundary around it and click Search to see only listings right where you want to be. Longing for a view of the waterfront, but maybe not if that waterfront happens to include a freight terminal? No problem – draw a boundary around your favorite beach or lake.

The power is literally in your hands to define exactly where you want to find your dream home. No limits, no boundaries – except those you draw yourself. Not to mention, the tool itself is a pretty mean piece of eye candy! It’s also available for setting up Town Pages as well, so if you want to create just such a custom search for your clients to be able to access with one click, the sky’s the limit. We’re sure you’ll want to learn more about this great new tool – you can always feel free to contact us for more info, or for a comprehensive, step-by-step guide to using this and all of the other features of the Sequoia platform, be sure to visit our new User Guide.

Custom Lead Capture Timing

Using our Modal Lead Capture tool is perhaps the single most effective way to turn visitors to your website into viable leads. And that is a very modest use of the word “perhaps”. That said, it has often come up in conversation with our clients that it is often advantageous to offer a few property views before your users are prompted to register.

To that end, we’ve now added the ability for you to control how many listings a visitor can view before being required to register. As always, you can turn the feature on or off for sales, rentals, or for Developments if you have this component installed. Now, you can also set the number of property views a visitor is allowed before being prompted to register – the number is up to you.

You can even allow different numbers of views for sales, rentals, and Developments individually. This is great if you want to offer a “teaser” of a few listing views to get your visitors engaged further in the use of your site, which can increase the likelihood that they will be inclined to register and become a viable lead in your sales pipeline.

Those of you who are active with social media (good for you!) know that Facebook has dropped their FBML program, which allowed for custom development of integrated tools like property searches for your company’s Facebook page. Instead, they now support using iFramed tools instead, a radical departure from their previous strategy.

iFrames are like the web's version of Russian Nesting Dolls.

For those of you who don’t know the term, an iFrame is a portion of a website designed to be inserted within another web page such that it appears to be a part of the original page the visitor is viewing. It’s basically the Web’s version of those classic Russian nesting dolls – the ones you open up only to find a smaller but otherwise similar version nestled inside.

As soon as we got wind of this, we immediately developed a tool for the Sequoia platform which installs an iFramed Facebook Search Tool, themed to match your Sequoia real estate website, onto your Facebook page. This tool was tested and ready to use months in advance of Facebook’s plan to phase out FBML. Take that, Zuckerberg!

When your Facebook page visitors perform a search using this tool, they are taken to your website, captured as a lead, and tracked as having come from your Facebook iFrame to help you measure the success of your social media campaign. We can install this tool as part of our immensely popular Social Media Accelerator program for real estate agents and brokers looking to empower their business strategy with the potent fuel of social media.

Contact the Boston Logic sales team today to learn more!

New Sequoia Site Launch: Gibson Sotheby’s International Realty

Boston Logic is excited to announce the launch of yet another Sequoia platform website built with our Custom Design Theme option: Gibson Sotheby’s International Realty. Gibson Sotheby’s is a top-shelf brand, and only the best would suffice for their new website. Boston Logic’s Sequoia platform along with our Sequoia Custom Design Theme option was the only sensible choice. Every Sequoia platform real estate website comes with myriad tools built from the ground up to make your life easier, get more leads, and close more deals. Only a select few, however, get the royal treatment a Custom Theme affords.

The global elements of the website such as the fonts, headers, and footers are all customized to suit client needs and wants. The layout of the home page is tailored specifically to the client and their brand through an extensive creative process managed and executed by the best team in the business. And every interior page of the site, from luxury development pages to agent profiles to Town Pages, are customized to give the ultimate in flexibility and brand identity to the Custom Website Theme client. Truly the offering of choice for the most discerning real estate website clients, this design option allows you to make your online presence stand proud from the pack in a way only the services of Boston Logic’s expert design staff can deliver.

Gibson Sotheby's Agents Can also get their own Real Estate Agent Site!

Additionally, Gibson Sotheby’s has engaged Boston Logic in an ongoing Search Engine Optimization plan designed specifically to draw quality, targeted leads to the new Gibson Sotheby’s website. Our campaigns are based on results-accountable, tightly managed, and skillfully executed techniques which have proven time and time again to boost our clients’ online marketing and lead generation programs predictably and with fantastic results. Coupled with the outstanding design and superior usability of the new Gibson Sotheby’s site, our SEO campaign is sure to produce the results that continue to bring clients like Gibson Sotheby’s Realty to Boston Logic in order to power their online marketing to the next level and beyond.

Gibson Sotheby’s International Realty offices are independently owned and operated franchises of the Sotheby’s International Realty brand, one of the most recognized and respected worldwide. Boston Logic is proud to add them to our client roster. Visit them to find the home of your dreams, rent one of their outstanding luxury properties, or simply admire their stunning new website!

Interested in learning more about the Sequoia real estate website platform, or to discuss your Custom Theme options? Contact us today!

Tuesday Tip: Facebook Timeline

Related Links:

Thoughts on video for listings

Related Links:

Boston Logic Launches New Chicago Website!

Chicago Real Estate Artists recently became our first client to utilize data from MRED, the MLS covering the Chicago metro area and beyond!

If you are on a budget but want top notch visual impact, or need to launch a new site that speaks to your unique aesthetic in a hurry, our Personalized Theme design package might be just the thing for you. Contact us today to learn more!

Related Links:

New Sequoia Site Launch: Spark Realty Group!

The result is a stylish and easy-to-use website with an attractive user interface, plus all the tools Spark Realty Group will need to capture leads and close deals.

If you're interested in learning more about how the Sequoia Website Platform could be designed to meet your needs, sign-up for a no-pressure demo! We host one every Wednesday at 2p EST.

Related Links:

Join Us at Agent Reboot on Wednesday – Special Discounted Rate!

CALLING ALL LOCAL REAL ESTATE PROFESSIONALS...

Topics throughout the day include:

BOSTON LOGIC IS AN EXCLUSIVE ASSOCIATE SPONSOR
This means we are able to offer our constituents a special discounted rate!

Related Links:

New Sequoia Real Estate Website Launch: Phoenix Realty!

Related Links:

New Video About the Sequoia Platform!

Related Links:

Warren Residential New Real Estate Site Launch!

Related Links:

New Sequoia Feature Launches: 4/21/2011

Related Links:

New Sequoia Site Launch: Gibson Sotheby’s International Realty

Related Links:

Search

Archives

What is the Sequoia System

Recently Written

Categories

Related Links:

Related Links:

Chicago Real Estate Artists recently became our first client to utilize data from MRED, the MLS covering the Chicago metro area and beyond!

If you are on a budget but want top notch visual impact, or need to launch a new site that speaks to your unique aesthetic in a hurry, our Personalized Theme design package might be just the thing for you. Contact us today to learn more!

Related Links:

The result is a stylish and easy-to-use website with an attractive user interface, plus all the tools Spark Realty Group will need to capture leads and close deals.

If you're interested in learning more about how the Sequoia Website Platform could be designed to meet your needs, sign-up for a no-pressure demo! We host one every Wednesday at 2p EST.

Related Links:

CALLING ALL LOCAL REAL ESTATE PROFESSIONALS...

Topics throughout the day include:

BOSTON LOGIC IS AN EXCLUSIVE ASSOCIATE SPONSOR This means we are able to offer our constituents a special discounted rate!

Related Links:

Related Links:

Related Links:

Related Links:

Related Links:

Related Links:

Search

Archives

What is the Sequoia System

Recently Written

Categories

BOSTON LOGIC IS AN EXCLUSIVE ASSOCIATE SPONSOR
This means we are able to offer our constituents a special discounted rate!