Jul
23
Build your own online community with a property forum
Filed Under Online Marketing, Social Networking
Imagine having a part of your real estate website that people visit again and again to interact with other property buyers and sellers - asking questions, giving advice and sharing experiences. Your staff of real estate experts would participate in the discussions, helping people out, bolstering your estate agency’s image and even winning clients over. And all the while, you are accumulating pages upon pages of text, full of property-related keywords for the search engines to index, so you get still more visitors.
That, in a nutshell, is what you can achieve by starting your own online property forum as part of your website. (Just in case you don’t know what an online forum is, you can see an example here.)
Now before you start thinking that all these benefits of having your own property forum seem too good to be true, there is something you should know. You see, getting a successful real estate forum off the ground is pretty much like kicking off a great party - people will only visit your forum if the other people visiting it make it worthwhile. This means that you will have to put in some extra effort at the beginning, to get the ‘party’ started until your forum grows in popularity.
How to set up an online property forum
Setting up and hosting your forum is quite straightforward for your web designer to do, and there is even free forum software that you can use. Contact us and we’ll be happy to help you get started.
On the other hand, you will have to give some thought to how broad or focused you want your forum to be - something that will depend on the market you are trying to capture. Most likely, you will want to have your property forum revolving around the geographical area you operate in, of course, so that it attracts visitors who are also your potential clients.
Another thing is to organise the forum into categories such as ‘Legal Questions’, ‘Holiday Homes’, ‘Property Investing’, and so on. Get some ideas from other property forums you like and then come up with your own categories that you think will appeal to your audience. Be sure to include an ‘Off Topic’ section, where people can socialise and discuss things that have nothing to do with property at all.
Getting people to join in
While we’ve already said that this is the tricky bit, there are a number of things you can do to get the ball rolling.
1) Get staff, family and friends to participate. Pretty much everyone is involved in property in some way or another, be it buying, selling or renting, so it should be easy for them to come up with some questions and have a good discussion.
2) When clients ask questions that are not of a private nature, you could try and persuade them to use your real estate forum. Failing that, you can reword the questions and get your friends to post them for you to answer and discuss in forum style.
3) If you have a strong blog readership, you try posting about controversial topics like interest rates, property bubbles, and so on and provoke your readers into a forum discussion.
4) Visit other property forums and make friends with the most prolific users and invite tehm to participate on your forum too.
5) As a last-ditch solution, if you have the pocket for it, you could even consider paying people to participate in your property forum, until it gets off the ground. Remember, you don’t need to spend a lot on expert writers for this one, and anyone willing to talk about their property experiences will do.
Of course, if you could push a button and have a thriving community of people interested in property visiting your property forum, every estate agent and his brother would have one. But if you are able to take the lead and keep working at it, you should see your forum gradually begin to thrive and turn into a great source of new business as well as a way for people to find your real estate website by landing on your forum pages from the search engines.
Go for it! And good luck!
Comments
One Response to “Build your own online community with a property forum”
Leave a Reply
View John Beckley's profile
It is very important to focus on your web design while planning for an online community. The design must be user friendly and easy to compliance with web 2.0. The home page must be accessible from all sub pages.