Key Takeaways
- HipPocket is changing—HipPocket to become the Social Listing Service™ for real estate agents
- Go social, fast—Post into HipPocket and instantly share professional listing pages into Facebook and Twitter. Even if your HipPocket community is still growing, HipPocket is a really useful tool for getting your listings out there fast to your networks.
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Stay focused and relevant—Personalize your listing feed by Price, Listing Type and by Areas. Tune out the postings you find irrelevant, keeping HipPocket hyper-focused to your needs.
- Connect instantly with agents from their posting—Want to have a one-on-one conversation with an agent about a posting? Simply press the Contact button on the listing to Text or Call them.
- Easy to invite your real estate friends—Invite your agent friends to HipPocket right from the HipFeed screen. We write the invite message for you to send over email or text to make it super simple for you to expand your HipPocket network.
HipPocket—The Social Listing Service™
Since we launched HipPocket, it has become clear that even though the process is time consuming and repetitive, real estate agents are sharing pre-MLS listings through a myriad social networks, private Facebook Groups, and by email and text message. In the short-term, this behavior is very tough to change.
Today I am excited to announce that HipPocket is changing to become a “Social Listing Service” for real estate agents. We are changing from a closed and private network for real estate agents to share pre-MLS listings, to a super-efficient social distribution platform that significantly improves the pre-MLS marketing experience for agents.
In simple terms, real estate agents now get the best of both worlds. Firstly, they can efficiently market themselves professionally across all their social networks, private groups and by email and text during the pre-MLS phase. Secondly, as they share to these networks, they can connect in real-time with their local agent community through a private, mobile-first, agent-only social network that is tailored to the needs of the mobile and connected real estate community.
Importantly, this change in strategy means that even if an agent’s local HipPocket Agent Community is in its earliest stage of growth with only a handful of members, agents can still see tremendous value in HipPocket as a time saving tool for professionally marketing across social media, text and email.
In time as more agents use HipPocket to distribute pre-MLS listings, the number of listings added to HipPocket increases. This in turn increases the value of being a member of the HipPocket Agent Network and helps to attract more agents to participate.
This new Social Listing Service strategy also gives us the scope to work with Realtor Associations directly, delivering HipPocket as asocial layer for their entire community to use as a complement to their MLS service.
Please take a moment to learn about the features of the Social Listing Service™ in the sections below. Should you have any questions or feedback, please do not hesitate to contact us through the Support page in the app.
We’re excited to be launching our new strategy and look forward to developing HipPocket to become the #1 app for real estate agents to efficiently market their homes during the pre-MLS phase. Hopefully you will enjoy the new features and help us spread the word to agent communities nationwide.
James Bohan-Pitt, Co-founder and CEO, HipPocket Inc.
Note: HipPocket is available as an iPhone app in the Apple App Store today to all real estate agents around the United States. HipPocket for the desktop (browser based version) will launch in early 2016, and HipPocket for Android devices will follow later in the year.
HipPocket Social Listing Service Features
Post to HipPocket and instantly share into Facebook and Twitter
We want to make it easier than ever for our users to share their pre-MLS listings and needs with all the communities and networks they are part of. Now, when you post to HipPocket you will have the option to share a post and a professional mobile-optimized listing webpage into Facebook and Twitter (Instagram and others to follow in the future).
Think of HipPocket as being like a Hootsuite for real estate agents. You post once into HipPocket, and we do the social distribution for you, saving valuable time in the process. Even if your HipPocket Agent Community is still growing, HipPocket is a really useful FREE tool for posting professional pre-MLS listing pages to your personal and agents networks.
HipPocket listing shared to Twitter:
HipPocket listing shared to Facebook:
Share your listings into Facebook Groups
Facebook Groups are very popular in the real estate community. Agents often have to copy and paste the same post into multiple groups to ensure they expose it to each community. The whole process is time consuming and laborious.
HipPocket has now made the process of posting into Facebook Groups a cinch. Simply press the Share button on your listing (third button under the listing after Like and Comment button) and up pops a number of sharing options.
When you select to share to Facebook Groups, HipPocket will take you automatically to the screen shown below in your Facebook app. By pressing “Your Timeline” at the top, you will have the option to choose one of your groups.
Simply choose the group you want to post to and press post. Facebook does not allow users (or us) to post the same message to multiple groups at the same time sadly. If you want to post again to another group, simply repeat the process.
We asked HipPocket co-founder and Realtor Advocate Clay Stapp from CLAY STAPP+CO to test this out a few days ago. He said he posted to 7 groups in about 10 minutes. This used to take him well over an hour!
Choose to Share to Facebook Groups:
Share your listing to clients, prospects and other real estate agents by Email and Text
Sharing to clients and other agents by text or email is just as easy. Again press the Share button on your listing and pick either SMS (Text) or email. We pre-populate a message for you. All you need to do is pick your contact or contacts and press send.
We include a weblink to your listing page in each message, and a teaser image in the message itself to encourage the reader to learn more about your listing.
Share to clients and other agents by email:
Contact agents directly from their posts
No need to hunt around the MLS for an agent’s number anymore. If you would like to have a one-on-one conversation with an agent about one of their postings, press the fourth button underneath their post (Envelope Icon) to Call or SMS (Text) them.
Personalize your listing feed by Area, Price and Listing Type
Many real estate agents are specialists. They specialize in homes priced in particular brackets. They might be a Buyers Agent versus a Sellers Agent and therefore only be interested in For Sale listings. They may focus on selling homes in particular areas versus the whole city or region. The HipPocket listings feed (HipFeed) can now be personalized by all these factors.
You can now choose to only receive posts and notifications that are most relevant to you. Simply press the “All Activity” button at the top of the HipFeed and choose to personalize your experience. Choose a Price Range. Choose to see all listings or only For Sale or Buyer Need posts, and for HipPocket Communities where we have defined MLS Areas (in numeric or alphanumeric code), choose your areas too.
Whatever settings your choose, you will only receive posts in your feed and corresponding notifications based on those settings.
Press “All Activity” at the top of the HipFeed:
Private groups for real estate brokerage teams
To improve how teams of agents collaborate, we will be introducing Private Groups for Brokerages in 2016. Agents will be able to share listings and needs through a private distribution group with their colleagues first before pushing more publicly through HipPocket to other agents, and to their social networks. If you would like to sign your brokerage up for our beta and receive a 60% discount on the price when we launch, you can learn more and sign up for Private Groups for Brokerages here.
Invite Friends to meet you in HipPocket
We have added an “Invite your real estate agent friends” button to the HipFeed screen. To invite your real estate agent friends to meet you in HipPocket simply press Invite Friend and choose to send an email or SMS (Text) message to them. We pre-populate a message for you but you are welcome to craft one yourself naturally.
Article courtesy of HipPocket:
http://hippocket.com/hippocket-launches-social-listing-service-for-real-estate-agents/
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