Thursday 1 October 2009

3 Internet milestones; online estate agents must take note.


The internet has hit three big milestones. The first was in the newspapers today; internet market expenditure has outgrown television spend for the first ever time. Whereas television has been leading the marketing spend for over half a century now, the internet took just over 10 years.

Stats were collated by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) shows that internet spend was a record £1.75 billion budget was spent on online advertising whereas only £1.6 billion was spent on TV advertising. This means that the internet now accounts for 23.5% of all advertising spend in the UK, while TV ad accounts for 21.9% of marketing budgets.

Could this be a sign of things to come? Will families gather round a LAN connection to communicate online after Sunday dinner? The suggestion bit extreme but the stats do suggest that the internet is increasingly becoming part of our daily lives. Take this next milestone for example:

In the U.S. alone, over the month of August, there were 25 Billion online videos viewed, which means that the average internet user watched 157 videos each over the month. The data supplied by ComScore, also mentioned that Google had a share of 39.6% of these views (remember estate agents, this will mainly be YouTube).

A staggering statistic, but what does this mean for estate agents? It means that estate agents can take advantage of this phenomenon by having video content on their estate agent website. Virtual tours of individual properties and marketing videos of the local area can be uploaded onto the estate agent website to promote either the area or the property particulars.

The last internet milestone is a social one involving a three-fold of social networks in London; the London network of Facebook has the largest number of members, Twitter's chief executive said that London is the "top Twitter-using-city" and lastly a Digg Spokesman said that 10% of Digg's (A social network where users share content) traffic comes from London alone.

Don't believe the old adage that 'you can't teach an old dog new tricks', estate agents that haven't need to start embracing the online world and taking advantage of the opportunities on there. When considering a new web site, always demand a specialist. Troy Stanley, CTO of Resource Techniques 'we provide IT services just for estate agents. Services include web design for estate agents, SEO for estate agents, SEO services, web sites for estate agents and software for estate agents, but we also provide domain name registration for estate agents. To see what we can do for your estate agency, visit our portfolio page or contact us.'

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