Don’t Put Status Widgets on Your Blog Until You’re Seasoned

When you’re a blogger and you read about the wonders of social media, your first instinct as a business person (who loves free stuff) is to jump on board and follow instructions that look like this: 1. go to twitter.com, 2. register a name, 3. say “this is my first tweet,” 4. put a twitter widget in your sidebar so your readers can see the wonder of how cool you are because you’re on twitter. Obviously, there are a lot of steps missed ranging from “upload a profile picture” to “tweet more than once.”

I’m seeing more and more on real estate blogs these empty widgets as pictured here, showing that someone quickly picked a twitter name a hundred days ago and then sat by the phone waiting for the resulting sale.

It’s time to take an inventory of your widgets, real estate people… if there is something in your sidebar that makes you look like you don’t follow through, your clients might think the same of you. If there is something like a Facebook fan page that shows you have two fans (you and your mom), remove it until it is more fleshed out.

When people don’t take the time to fill out a complete profile, upload a profile picture and actually use a tech service, but they take the time to embed a widget, it can make consumers believe you lack follow through in all things, not just a half-a**ed twitter widget.