You may have noticed lately a push from our marketing teams, account managers, and myself in trying to get customers to post their educational / product questions here at the forums.
There are some really good (extremely beneficial) reasons we’re doing this.
I wanted to share them with you in the hopes that you as our valued customers will start posting here more often.
#1: Balancing time and effort of responses: The one-to-many benefit.
We all only have so much time in a day. If a customer reaches out via text, email, or chat it’s a 1-1 reach out and so while we want to give the answer to the question (and always will), we do have to be brief and succinct in order to make sure we can get to all of the incoming questions.
If that same question is posted to the forums however, not only are we able to serve you with the answer, but since thousands of others can also read it, we are able to give that same answer to everyone.
Because of this one-to-many benefit, we can justify/afford to increase the amount of time and effort that goes into our responses which means you’ll get a far more robust and detailed response.
We get to educate many people instead of just 1, you get a deeper response.
#2: Collaboration - conversations start conversations that lead to breakthroughs.
Often times you’re asking a question about a specific piece of software, or how to do something in PPC, SEO etc with a specific goal in mind. Usually to increase your business volume, make your agents happier or be more efficient with your time.
When you post in the forums and others are able to see it, it triggers ideas! Other members will riff off of your original question and many times what starts as a basic question can lead to some really amazing breakthroughs.
It’s also a great place to share/compare notes since most of you are on a shared Renaissance platform and REW CRM.
#3: Access to specialists. Some of the world’s best.
We have some amazing leaders, and specialists here at Real Estate Webmasters. People like @hatzopoulos for WPO, @AmyPye for branding, @Aayaam in Engineering, @AidanC for AI, @Kyle for REW CRM, myself for SEO the list goes on and on.
But for the most part, our top experts aren’t 1-1 customer facing. My head of corporate marketing for instance can’t spend 1-1 time coaching customers on how to build a brand or run effective social media campaigns nor can my head of product help you think about the best way to plan / execute costom software development. And while I’d love to personally help everyone out with their SEO quesations / campaigns, that’s just not feasible.
However on the forums it’s different! Here we can do it!
Because of the many benefits we get as REW from the forums, we can actually justify having these top specialists participate in the boards.
Here are some of the benefits WE (as Real Estate Webmasters) get from having our top experts partiicpate in the forums.
#A: One to many! We talked about it before. While it’s not feasiable for our CEO to help one person at at time, if I can reach hundreds (or thousands) of customers, then that investment is definitely worth it.
#B: Improving our product / service (collaboration): These collaborative discussions are not just one way. Those great ideas that happen in forum conversations? We benefit from them too! In fact, it’s one of the best ways for us to source feedback and make improvements to our product.
#C: It helps our SEO. What are we doing when we post on the forums? Creating content! And when we create content we help our SEO. BUT what all SEO’s know is “content” is not enough, it must be the BEST content! And so not only do we make our customers happier by giving more robust answers, we also get more traffic to our site vai SEO so it’s extra incentive for us to put effort into it.
Check out this example:
Some folks talked about EXP Realty on the forums. And “generally” those talking about EXP (positive of negative) are Realtors® (our exact audience) so it helps us build our brand and traffic.
And finally - it helps us showcase to the world, the depth and breadth of our knowledge and gain recognition for our epicly smart and talented people here at Real Estate Webmasters.
So needless to say - we have some pretty big incentives to have you come here and post on the forums, and in return, we want to make it worth your while by going above and beyond in our responses in order to help you make the most of your product and educate you on all things real estate website, lead gen and CRM 
So while I do understand it’s “yet another” medium to post on (you already have Facebook, Linkedin etc)
I PROMISE YOU…
You will not find the level of experience, talent, depth of knowledge or specific effort to your education anywhere else on the web (or on the planet).
And so I do hope you’ll take the time to create your forum account, introduce yourself and begin participating here.
Together, we can help ALL our businesses grow!