Now this is a hot subject in real estate marketing, luxury or otherwise. How to generate traffic to your website by using social networking sites. There appear to be more social networking sites than fleas on a dog, so the first thing to do is determine which social networking sites you are going to use and how to best use those sites to generate traffic and links to your own website or blog.

After deciding which sites are appropriate for you, the next thing to do is be active on those sites. And I don’t mean spend 12 hours a day on the ‘net, just some activity. To all those I hear muttering, “But I don’t have time,” - Find some time. There is no rule that says you must have a website, or that you must spend time social networking on these sites, but if you have decided you are going to have a web presence - then have a web presence.

I am constantly amazed at the amount of people I interact with on these sites, and what a waste of time most of this interaction is. I will give a for instance. I am a member of facebook and this is a link to my profile there - Mark Knowles on facebook.

At facebook, I joined a real estate bloggers group, thinking I would find a great group of real estate bloggers to network with After a little wandering through this group’s activities, I slowly came to the conclusuion that there were no bloggers there - the thing is chock-a-block full of advertisements for property for sale and “investment opportunities in Pakistan.”

In frustration, I posted a message to their wall which basically said:

Hellooooooo ! (echo, echo, echo) Are there any actual real estate bloggers here because I want to do some networking with you? I’m a really cool guy and I run a very high quality luxury real estate blog and can send some great links your way. (I am nothing if not modest)

751 members. Guess how many responses?

One!

That is correct - one single, solitary response.

The person who responded is Suzanne Grace, of Grace & Associates, a real estate agent in Thousand Oaks who sells real estate in California. This the welcome message on her website:

We are Grace & Associates, YOUR Real Estate Agents for REAL Life, and we LOVE helping YOU with all of YOUR Real Estate needs… the opportunity to help the first-time buyer buy that first home, the family relocating to their next home or helping a seller get the most money, the quickest sale, all with relative ease, gives us a great deal of satisfaction!

So, if you are wondering how to use social networking sites to drive traffic and links to your real estate blog or website, this is a good example. Just by responding to a simple question and saying hello in a friendly fashion, Suzanne now has a high quality backlink using fantastic anchor text from a high page-rank, authority real estate blog to her website

It may not pay off today, or even tomorrow, but some when in the future, this link will either send a visitor or cause the search engines to rank her page just a little higher when some one is looking for real estate in California and bingo ! Worth the time?

A luxury home in the Costa Del Sol’s exclusive “El Paraiso” development was trashed this last weekend by 400 teenagers after the sixteen-year-old daughter of the owners used facebook and Bebo (another social networking site) to invite kids from all over the Costa Del Sol to come and “drink a lot of alcohol.”

The property, which has been on the market for 5.6m euros, “looked like a war zone” with £6,000 worth of jewelery and clothes looted by some of the guests, and televisions thrown in the swimming pool. Apparently, invites were posted on the Bebo and Facebook sites and rumors were spread that Jodie Hudson’s parents did not mind the seven-bedroom house being trashed because they were getting divorced.

According to The Times Online, Miss Hudson organised the party through invites logged on both her Bebo and Facebook profiles. Describing it as the “party of the year” she wrote on the sites: “Theres gone be a lot of alcohol an amazing DJ.” Guaranteed destruction I would have thought

As the party escalated, Jodie’s mother, Amanda Hudson, a real estate agent who is estranged from her husband and has lived in Marbella for 10 years, called the police. Officers arrived at the house shortly after midnight.

One partygoer said: “People scarpered in all directions, but the police managed to pull people over and search their bags and pockets, but it was already too late and a lot was gone.

“Somebody said that we were allowed to wreck the house because the birthday girl’s parents were getting divorced and there were kids behaving like gangsters from a rap video, throwing stuff around and smashing things. There were chairs, tables, even a TV in the pool.”

Following the party, Miss Hudson wrote: “There’s so much damage and clothes stolen. A lot of broken doors. people caught having sex.”

So, if you are considering giving your teenager unlimited access to the internet and the keys to your luxury holiday home- think again.

As a professional blogger, I have spent more time than I care to think about interacting on the so-called Web 2.0 social networking platforms. Some one, somewhere coined the term “Web 2.0” and turned it into something it could never live up to. I hate the term Web 2.0 and can’t wait until we move onto 3.0. I hate the term almost as much as I hate the terms “canny investor” or “web-savvy.”

Why on earth would I hate those terms you may ask yourselves? It’s a bit like the affectionate term coined for American servicemen based in England during the second world war. “Over-paid, over-sexed, and over-here.” In this case, it’s “Over-used, over-hyped and over-done.” I hate them like I hate the song that used to be my favorite song until I listened to it 300 times.

How many times have you heard the advice that to be successful, you need to submit your content to a “Web 2.0 social networking site.”Well, guess what? Every one has submitted their content to one and now the places are full of nothing but garbage. "Nobody wants to advertise next to crap," says Andrew Keen, author of "The Cult of the Amateur," a jeremiad against the ills of the unregulated Web.Part of the problem is their very openness – the regulators and moderators spend 100% of their time trying to keep out the spammers and the scammers.

Facebook

Facebook has even gone to the trouble of now making it clear that real estate agents are no longer welcome to submit their listings on the market place. Why? Because every real estate agent on the planet submitted their listing at once and they had 3 million listings. Actually, I am guessing on the numbers, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

Mahalo

Mahalo has been touted as a user powered search engine that will outperform google. But when you take a look at today’s Mahalo’s “Today’s Top Ten Pages,” this is what you get:

1. Super Smash Bros Brawl Unlockable Characters
2. Super Smash Bros Brawl Walkthrough
3. Lost Odyssey Walkthrough
4. Army of Two Walkthrough
5. Lindsay Lohan New York Magazine
6. How to Play Guitar for Newbies
7. Super Smash Bros Brawl Sonic
8. God of War Chains of Olympus Walkthrough
9. Crazypicssite.com
10. Big Brother 9 Spoilers

It’s great if all you are looking for is computer game cheats and celebrity upskirt photos.

YouTube

A few days ago, I wrote a post entitled “Five questions to ask yourself before you upload your luxury property to youtube.” At the time of writing that post, there were 25,300 videos on youtube tagged with “Real Estate.” Today, writing this, there are 27,500. This is something I will continue to watch.

These places are largely populated by teenagers with time on their hands, professional bloggers trying to get their work noticed and teams of Indians whose job it is to leave comments and “submit their content to web 2.0 social networking sites.”

So what is the alternative? Newsweek suggests it is time for “The revenge of the experts.” And I agree. Where should you submit your content – to an expert, not to a site populated by amateurs, teenagers and spammers with an agenda. For goodness’ sake – use a professional.

Bye-bye Web 2.0 - And good riddance as far as I’m concerned.

If you want an alternative viewpoint, Dion Hinchcliffe will give you one. Not content with just the web he can offer you media 2.0 all the way through to democracy 2.0. Although I wasn’t aware we had moved on from 1.0

And thanks to blogoscoped for the image at the top, who suggest you better start working on 4.0 about now.