There is no shortage of services that try to meld classified advertising listings with social media. Canada?s CityBlast is just one of the many, but the company?s value proposition caught our interest.
The starting point is nothing new. The product is aimed at real estate agents specifically: if you have a property to sell, you list it as you would on other sites, with a description and picture. The trick is that CityBlast then syndicates your listing through its network of 1,300 Canadian real estate agents who have Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. The listing appears as a status update on these social media services with a link back to the listing?s CityBlast page. Friends of friends (Facebook) or those following an agent (Twitter) will also see the listing. CityBlast says that it reaches over 730,000 social media users a day this way.
CityBlast also offers a ClientFinder tool, which helps an agent add real estate content to their social media sites (this one is Facebook specific). CityBlast creates the content itself (status updates and links on real estate trends, local updates and the like) and posts it to the Realtor?s Facebook page. Once a Realtor has signed up, the posts appear automatically, so the agent has a regular stream of new articles and links without having to do anything proactive. (As with all social media, to maximize the service?s value, agents should monitor their streams and add their own comments.) There?s a 30 day free trial, after that it?s $25/month for agents.
CityBlast has a model that?s easily emulated and it could (and should) be easily rolled out to other classified verticals. The company was launched earlier this year and it?s still a two-man operation, so let?s give them a bit more time to prove the model before classified ad sites consider jumping in themselves.
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Written by Brian Blum
Brian Blum covers Canada and Israel for Classified Intelligence Report, and contributes to our special reports and research projects. With the AIM Group since 2004, he previously held the real estate and automotive beats. He is the president of Blum Interactive Media, specializing in writing and multimedia content development for online, print, video and audio. His clients include newspapers, universities and non-profits. He moved to Israel from the San Francisco Bay Area in 1994 and lives in Jerusalem, where he writes a popular blog about ?normal? life in the Holy Land, appropriately titled ?This Normal Life.?
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