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?