Roseville, Rocklin, Lincoln, Loomis, Granite Bay - Placer County, California - Real Estate Blog - Souza Realty

New! Add Your Twitter Account To LinkedIn

I received this message in my email inbox this morning from LinkedIn:

We're delighted to announce that LinkedIn now works with Twitter. Try these new features on for size:

1. Make your Twitter account visible on your profile
   
2. Use #in or #li to share posts from Twitter to your LinkedIn status
   
3. Add the Tweets app to share your Twitter activity on your profile

That's great news to me, as I love automatic status updates across related social media sites...it's such a timesaver! Also, you can add multiple Twitter accounts and you can either share all tweets or just the tweets that contain #in.

Twitter - New! Retweet To Share Tweets (BETA)

I am not a committed Twitter user. In fact, I am a lazy Twitterer who mostly uses the auto-tweet feature. I only have 254 tweets on @LeilaniSouza, my main Twitter account and 127 tweets on my @SouzaRealty account. However, for some reason my @LeilaniSouza account seems to be one of the lucky ones chosen to try new features for beta testing...like the Twitter Lists feature that was launched last month:

NEW Twitter "Lists" (BETA) Is Released To 5% Of Twitterers

Anyway, I signed on to my @LeilaniSouza account and saw an announcement of Twitter's new "Retweet" feature:

"Hi there, you're part of a beta group receiving this feature, which means you may start seeing retweets in a new way. People who don't have this yet will see your retweets prefaced by 'RT'."

How To Embed A Picasa Photo Slideshow Into Your Blog

Thanks to another inspirational comment by Jane Peters on my blog post "Coconut Grove - Milpitas, CA (Santa Clara County, California)" I decided to write this tutorial on how to embed a Picasa Photo Slideshow into your (ActiveRain) blog:

Once you login or sign up for Picasa, create or select a photo album that will contain all of the photos you wish to display on the slideshow, then upload all of your photos into that photo album.

1. After you click on the photo album from the "My Photos" page (or click on "View All" if you're looking at a photo), this is the page that will appear, where you see all photos in the photo album. Click on "Link to this album" in the right column to display the drop-down links.

2. Click on "Embed Slideshow" and the pop-up window shown below will appear. Select your slideshow size (note: Extra large 600px works good for AR blogs) and decide whether you want to show or hide the photo captions during the slideshow, as well as if you want the slideshow to autoplay or if you would rather viewers click play to view it. Now, copy the code you see in the yellow box and paste it into the "Entry" section of your ActiveRain blog...just be sure you are in HTML mode and not WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) mode.

Naymz...Yet Another Online Profile Site...When Does It End?

I was invited to join yet another online profile site called Naymz and I did. A part of me wants to swoop every possible site to get the username "leilanisouza" since I recently discovered that there is another Leilani Souza in this world...but another part of me thinks when does it end?

I've got a Google Profile and I'm on LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, flickr, Picasa, Panoramio, Blogger, Urbanspoon, Playlist, FriendFeed, MyBlogLog, Retaggr, and the list goes on...but they are free to join and they do offer one more stream of internet exposure and provide more linkbacks to your sites, which all should lead to your main website...so I guess I'll just keep joining! :)

Do You Panoramio?

If you don't...and love to take local photographs...and want to have yet another stream of web exposure...then you should!

Panoramio is powered by Google and their tag line is "Show your favorite places." When people do Google searches for a place, any photos you upload to Panoramio that are *geo-tagged to that specific location will show up next to the Google map. Here is my page on Panoramio (note that my username is LeilaniSouza.com, just another shameless plug!):

*Geotagging is the process of adding geographical identification metadata to various media such as photographs, video, websites, or RSS feeds and is a form of geospatial metadata. These data usually consist of latitude and longitude coordinates, though they can also include altitude, bearing, accuracy data, and place names. (Source: Wikipedia)

NEW Twitter "Lists" (BETA) Is Released To 5% Of Twitterers

I just logged on to my Twitter account (@LeilaniSouza) after hearing the news about Tweets being a part of Google and Bing Search Results (Tweets and updates and search, oh my!) and discovered that I was one of the lucky 5% of Twitterers selected to beta-test their new "Lists" feature. Of course, now I'm pretty excited to blog about this and share the news with my fellow AR members! :)

Here is additional information about the new "Lists" feature from the Twitter Blog:

"My name is Nick Kallen (@nk) and I'm the project lead on Lists, a new feature we're testing with a small subset of users. The idea is to allow people to curate lists of Twitter accounts. For example, you could create a list of the funniest Twitter accounts of all time, athletes, local businesses, friends, or any compilation that makes sense.

Lists are public by default (but can be made private) and the lists you've created are linked from your profile. Other Twitter users can then subscribe to your lists. This means lists have the potential to be an important new discovery mechanism for great tweets and accounts.

We started working on this feature because of the frequent requests we received from people who were looking for a better way to organize information on Twitter. Of course, that means not just twitter.com—the Platform team will follow up in a few days with information on the Lists API. This will allow developers to add support for Lists into your favorite Twitter apps.

We're just doing limited testing for now. But once we've tested the feature out a bit, we'll launch it for all accounts!"

This is what my Twitter home page looked like when I logged in:

"Lists. A great way to organize the people you follow and discover new and interesting accounts. (BETA) Lists are timelines you build yourself, consisting of friends, family, co-workers, sports teams, you name it. You're part of a small group receiving this feature, so don't tweet about it yet!"

When I clicked on "Create a new list" this is the pop-up window that appeared (my List URL will be: twitter.com/LeilaniSouza/realestate since I used the List name "realestate") and you can make the list "Public" or "Private."

Now that I've created a "realestate" list, I can add people to my list so that their tweets appear here. The best way to add people is just go to your "Following" page.

I clicked on my "Following" page and then I clicked on the "list" icon next to the person I want to follow. In this example, I added VinoMuscardini to my "wine" list:

After I went through and added people to my 3 lists (realestate, food and wine), this is what my "Lists" page looks like:

Now when I go to my "realestate" list, all of the tweets from people on that list appear:

Time to brainstorm...how can YOU use Twitter's new "Lists" feature to help you organize and grow your business? How about creating "ShortSale" and "REO" and "(MyCityName)" lists, to name a few ideas?

Want to be on my RealEstate List? Follow me on Twitter (http://twitter.com/LeilaniSouza) and I'll add you! :)

How To Embed A Google Map Into Your Blog or Website

1. Type in an address or just a city and state in Google Maps and hit "Enter" or click on "Search Maps" and you will see a red tag pinpointed at the location you entered.

2. Click on "Link" in the upper right corner and a box will appear like you see below.

3. Click on "Customize and preview embedded map."

4. Now you are ready to customize the map size. I suggest doing a "Custom" size if you'd like to appear uniform with the photos on your blog or website...for example, my photos here are 600 pixels wide, so I set my custom map size at 600 pixels wide also. In the "Preview" area, you can move the map around and zoom in or out. When it looks good to you, just copy and paste the code into your blog or website!

Getting Listed On Google Maps Is As Easy As 1-2-3

Are you listed on Google Maps? If not, did you know that a Google Maps listing typically appears at the top of Google search results...and that adding your listing is as easy as 1-2-3? Here's how:

1. Go to Google Maps and click on "Put your business on Google Maps."

2. You are now at the Google Local Business Center. Click on "Add new business."

3. Fill out the form with your appropriate information; you will be able to upload photos, videos and more when you click on "Next."

Free Video For Your Facebook Business (Fan) Page!

I just saw this on Facebook and thought it would be a great share as a blog post topic. This company "TurnHere" is offering to shoot and produce a 60-second profile video of your business and host it for one year...for FREE.

They're simply counting on the fact that you will want to have them host it on your own personal web site, which is an additional service they provide for a monthly subscription fee. Even if you don't, at least you will still get the video hosted on your Facebook Fan Page for one year. Sounds like a no-brainer...what do you think?

P.S. I am in NO way affiliated with TurnHere or Facebook. I simply saw the post on Facebook's "Facebook Pages / Public Profiles" page and wanted to share it here on AR. :)

Get your free & easy Facebook Page video :: TurnHere Free Video Offer

MySpace just announced that you can now sync your Twitter account with MySpace...here's how to do it:

1. Sign in to your MySpace account and click on "My Account."

2. Click on "Sync."

3. Click on "Get Synced."

4. A new window will open that looks like this...enter your twitter username and password, then click "Allow."

Done! :)

Note: I'm not sure how many of you have a MySpace page for real estate, but I don't...I simply have a personal MySpace page and personal hobby-related ones.