The last couple of blog post we have suggested ways to promote real estate properties through the blogging system of PropTrackr. We quickly discussed how important it can be for our clients to take advantage of the ability to blog. How blogging can improve your overall search engine optimization and rankings, read the full article here.

We also showed you a simple example of how to create a blog posting to advertising your real estate properties, click here to read the full article. By simply taking an hour or so to write up a blog posting to promote a real estate property can improve and help your organic search engine optimization.

We will now give you an example of what tools you can you use to promote your real estate property blog postings to the social networks. The tools we suggest are free to use and you may already be using them with in your business.

Tools to use to promote your real estate business

Here is a list of the social network sites and tools (click here) you can use to automate the process of advertising your real estate properties through your PropTrackr real estate blog. The idea behind this it to make an automated process for advertising your real estate properties. To break down the process in a nutshell, write a blog post in your PropTrackr account and the automated process posts to Facebook, Twitter and Digg allowing you to advertise on those sites without logging into them every time.

Social Networks & Tools

• Facebook Fan Page (read how to setup a fan page)
• Twitter
• Digg
• Hootsuite

The first step that needs to be accomplished is to set up your PropTrackr Account and configure your blog to show up on your PropTrackr website. Simply follow these steps here on How to setup your PropTrackr Real Estate Blog. Once your blog is setup you are now ready to link all of these social sites to your new blog postings. Linking your blog to your social networking sites will post ALL of you blog postings, if you would like to link them to categories in you PropTrackr blog you will need use the RSS feed that is specific to that category, see step four below for further details.

Step two – make sure you have setup your Facebook Page, Twitter account and Digg account. Having your username and passwords handy makes the linking the accounts quicker.

Step three – sign up for a FREE account with Hootsuite. Hootsuite is a 3rd party web based application that allows you to see all of your social networks in one easy to read dashboard.
HINT: if you use Google Chrome as your web browser you can create a web based application shortcut. Its a lot like a bookmark but instead of showing the webpage in a new tab or window, Google Chrome starts the web application like a normal program.

Step four – Create your first blog post within the PropTrackr system. Once you have created your first blog post you will need to locate the XML feed or RSS feed for your blog. This is easy to locate, simply navigate to your PropTrackr real estate website in your web browser and in the address bar after your address, type or copy, /feed/rss/ and place it after your websites address. For example here is PropTrackr’s rss feed for our blog http://proptrackr.com/feed/rss/. This is a complied list of all your blog postings, in every category. If you would like to locate each RSS feed for every subcategory of your blog, simply navigate to the category and place /feed/rss/ after the entire web address. For example if we would just like to pull all the blog posts from our category “Tools for Real Estate” our RSS feed would look like this ( http://proptrackr.com/category/blog/tools-for-real-estate/feed/rss/ ).

Step five – setting up your Facebook and Twitter account in Hootsuite. This is easier if you are already logged into both your Facebook and Twitter account and have them open in a web browser. Hootsuite takes advantage of the APIs that Facebook and Twitter have developed. By having both accounts active in a web browser, Hootsuite can easily make the connection to your social networks. To add a social network to Hootsuite click on the owl in the top left corner, navigate down to Settings, then to Social Networks and click on the Add Social Network button and choose the social network, Facebook Wall, Facebook Page, Twitter Account, etc.

Step six – LINKING EVERYTHING TOGETHER. This is were Hootsuite becomes very useful, allowing you to grab your PropTrackr RSS feed and posting them to Facebook and Twitter.

1. Login to your Hootsuite Account
2. Navigate to the top left corner ( the image of the owl ) and click for your settings. Click here to see a screen shot
3. Navigate down to Settings > RSS/Atom. Screen shot
4. Once you have clicked on RSS/Atom link, a window will popup (screen shot ) click on the “Add New Feed Button” located at the bottom of the popup window.
5. Copy your RSS feed from your PropTrackr website and paste it into the FEED URL box and set up how often you would like Hootsuite to review your RSS feed, How many posts would you like Hootsuite to posts on your social networks at a time and if you would like a some Prepend text before your posting. Be sure to check which social networks you would like Hootsuite to post to and click save feed. Screen shot here.

Your all set, you have now successfully added your PropTrackr Blog RSS feed to Hootsuite. Don’t worry you can always come back to Hootsuite to set up more RSS feeds or change and update the ones you already have.

Step seven – Setting up Digg to read your blog and automatically post your new advertisements on Digg. If you haven’t already set up a free account on Digg take a few minutes to do so. Just like Hootsuite, Digg takes advantage of Facebook and Twitters API login. Once you set up your Digg account and customize the features and information that is going to be displayed its time to make the connection between your PropTrackr Real Estate Blog and Digg. Navigate to the setting tab, top right corner near the search box. ( screen shot here ). Once the page loads, on the left hand side of the screen you should see some more navigation, click on the Import Feed link. ( screen shot ).
Copy your PropTrackr Blog RSS URL, explained above how to locate that url. Your url should look something like this (http://proptrackr.com/feed/rss/ ) and paste that into the Auto-Submit Content field. Choose where you would like the feed to display, here at PropTrackr we chose the Business category.

Once you clicked the “Add Feed” button you will need to verify that Digg is collecting your RSS Feed by placing a verification key in your blog post title or the body of your posting.

To place the Digg verification key in the description, login to your PropTrackr real estate management account and navigate to Posts, then navigate to your most recent blog posting. Click on the “edit” text link and make sure you are editing the body of the post in HTML format rather then the VISUAL format. Paste the Digg verification code in the body of you blog posting and click the update/publish button on the right hand side of the page.

Click back to your Digg account and verify that Digg is reading your RSS feed correctly.

You have now successfully added your blog’s RSS feed to post to your Facebook page, Twitter account and your Digg account. You can now focus on running and advertising your real estate properties and feel comfortable knowing that your blog is being submitted to your social networks.

Did this blog posting help you and your real estate business advertise your properties? Do you have more ways to connect your social networks sits together and make advertising real estate properties easier? We would love to hear about them, take a few minutes and join in on the conversation.