What social networks are agents marketing on?

I've been curious which social networking sites agents have been marketing their listings on now that newspapers a starting to disappear. More and more sellers are accepting the internet as the primary marketing avenue to promote their homes. And fewer and fewer sellers are demanding their agents take out ineffective ads in newspapers or magazines as readership has been plummeting.

It's hard to get accurate data because most sources are trying to promote their own services or have their own agenda. So I thought it was interesting when Top Producer (makers of the most widely used real estate database systems for real estate agents) did their own internal poll. These are a wide range of agents over all geographical and demographic markets. So I think it is probably pretty random sampling.

Here's some of the results they published on their site.

By far the most popular place to promote listings was Facebook (at 34%), followed by LinkedIn (17%) and Twitter (15%). All other sites ranked in low single digits and only 12% of agents indicated they were not using social media sites at all. Furthermore, only slightly over 3% indicated they did not know what a social networking site was. I bet that is dramatically lower than even six months ago. The poll was taken from around the beginning of April 2009 and these results account for 853 votes to date.

Image by cambodia4kidsorg via Flickr

I think it's worth noting that Top Producer didn't bother to consider YouTube or Flickr as a social media websites, which they clearly are. Nor did they consider other internet promotional sites widely used by agents like Craigslist or Zillow. Still, I think this poll speaks volumes about how we agents have changed our marketing in such a short time.