Recently, we’ve been hearing many success stories from Trulia Voices members. Many have extended their online interactions with consumers to actual offline business relationships. By talking to them and observing Trulia Voices behaviors, we came up with 10 tips which hopefully can help all of you make the most out of Trulia Voices.
1. Complete your profile
After reading your question or answer on Voices, your profile is where consumers will visit to learn more about you. Upload a cool photo of yourself to stand out. Add a link to your personal website, blog or listing to boost its traffic. The more detailed you make your profile and the more you contribute to Voices, over time, the higher your page rank may be for your profile. Fill out the “about me” section, add testimonials, talk about your experience, interests and anything else that is important for you share.
2. Focus on the consumer
The majority of questions on Trulia Voices are asked by home buyers and home sellers—they want clear, informative and concrete advice that answers their question. They don’t want the hard sell.
3. Offer advice only when you can own the answer
The goal for Trulia Voices is to learn, share knowledge and provide advice. Likelihood is that if your advice is not relevant, the community will point it out either by commenting or by giving you thumps down, which will eventually reflect poorly on you. In addition, if you are not an expert in a certain geographic area where someone asks a very specific question, it may not be in your best interest to answer here. The caveat is that if the question is generic enough where you can add value, then by all means do. Real life experiences and stories can help illustrate your first hand knowledge on the matter. The key is to use your judgment wisely. Note - just because someone lives in a certain geographic area does not mean that they have all the right answers or adequate knowledge about the subject.
4. Compose your answer as a suggestion
When you are answering a question you might not have the full story. To protect yourself and the consumer who is seeking advice, present your answer as a potential solution to their problem and not as a guaranteed course of action.
5. Find your edge
Add some personality to your posts. People are looking to interact and work with people that share similar characteristics. Are you funny, or super organized or very sensitive? Show it!
6. Avoid aggressive marketing - Don’t hard sell
Answering questions with just “contact me” or “call me” or “ask a real estate professional” provides a disincentive for home buyers and sellers to participate on Trulia Voices – we know because that’s what they tell us. On the contrary, if you provide valuable advice you are more likely to be contacted by people who like your responses.
7. Subscribe for email alerts
You can select the area and the frequency and we will email you when questions are asked. This is a great way to easily identify questions that you can add the most value and establish yourself as the local expert. Click on the “My Trulia” link on the top of the any Trulia page, select “My Searches & Alerts” and click on “My Trulia Voices Alerts” tab to set up your preferences.
8. Remember the NAR Code of Ethics & Fair Housing laws
Follow your offline practices online! It is very important for agents to adhere to the NAR Code of Ethics and Fair Housing laws when you are online.
9. Give a little
In the unfortunate case where you might find yourself in front of a heated discussion—take the high road. A public pissing match adds no value to consumers and definitely doesn’t help the image of the person who started it. Heated arguments are best to be resolved one-on-one. Don’t forget, your questions and answers are archived. What you say today may come back to bite you in the future. So please keep this in mind.
10. Have fun!
Make friends, learn, share your knowledge and most importantly have fun while doing it!
Have we missed anything? Please post a comment to let us know!
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May 10th, 2008 at 10:10 pm
I’m in agreement with the entire list! My thoughts? At the end of the day, have something meaningful to say besides the traditional self-promotion piece. That will quickly get you no where whilst your colleagues with genuine answers will rake in all the publicity.
May 16th, 2008 at 11:41 am
Good in theory, but very few actually are practicing it. Why? Because they can get “credit” for additional answers.
No one cares about thumbs up, thumbs down. It’s not a deterrent. It has no real bearing on someone’s future actions.
Lose the answer counts, see who’s still willing to help just for the sake of trying to assist the consumer and hopefully build a relationship.
May 27th, 2008 at 7:01 pm
Very good post. 100% correct. You should be prepared before you go answering questions. I’m going to save this blog!