May 29, 2013 •mattd
Property search website Zoopla recently announced the launch of its Property Power 100 – a list of the top 100 Estate Agents in the UK based on their Social Media output. We have several Estate Agents as clients so were very interested to see how the criteria for this was judged. Due to confidentiality agreements we can’t disclose who has come where in the table – however I was intrigued to see the criteria that Zoopla are basing their Power 100 on.
The main criteria is as follows:
Retweets; Which can increase your influence by exposing your content to extended follower networks.
Mentions; People looking for your attention by mentioning you. We also take into account the differences in types of mentions (e.g: “via”).
List Memberships; Being included on lists curated by other users (demonstrates your areas of influence).
Followers; Follower count is another factor in your Score, however we heavily favor engagement over size of audience.
Replies; Replies show that you are engaging your network.
These are all relevant criteria, but looking through certainly the top ten of those listed, there seemed a real varying degree of how each agent was implementing these. The top agent at the time of writing seemed to be doing a lot of retweeting, rather than having much of its own content retweeted for example. It also seemed to be doing a lot of mentioning, rather than being mentioned. It did however have followers approaching the 20,000 mark.
The reason I find this list so interesting is that Zoopla is taking something as subjective as Social Media and forming a league table from it, and although there are of course a number of measures and reports that can be gained from Social Media marketing, by its very nature it is dynamic, changeable, and based largely on opinion and subsequent engagement.
And different forms of online marketing can mean different things to different businesses.
For example, one of Zoopla’s guidelines suggests not tweeting every property that you are instructed on, as users can find this boring and it can make them subsequently dis-engaged.
However if I was looking to rent or buy a house, I think I would find it quite useful to have a full list of the very latest properties to be able to look at in real-time on Twitter. A separate account for this purpose could be doubly-effective and a great sales tool don’t you think?
When we have implemented this tactic for clients, we have seen a big uplift in traffic to websites from the respective Twitter accounts. And Google likes it when relevant traffic is coming from Social Media direct to company websites – in fact it’s now a major SEO factor. So from an SEO point of view, it can easily be argued that having a list of your properties on Twitter is a very good thing indeed, as our clients’ page one ranking testifies.
We have been advocating the use of Social Media by Estate Agents for a couple of years now, and we see some great results across the board, so for highlighting how important it is for Estate Agents to adopt, I applaud Zoopla wholeheartedly. However in my opinion, I think that the overall placements on the list should probably be taken with a pinch of salt.
What do you think? Let me know in the comments below.
Written by Matt Davis.