Qazzoo Complaints Regarding Social Media Part I

We are constantly asked what made us create Qazzoo. The following is meant to set the record straight and allow the users, members, detractors and the mildly curious to understand more about Qazzoo and why it exists and why we are so determined to continue to change the landscape of social media.

The social media phenomenon was in full swing in 2009 when the team at Qazzoo decided to take on the concept of providing a more commercial and direct connection model to the concept of social media. We started with asking real estate professionals how they used social media and what they found to be their likes and dislikes about the available platforms. What we found out was interesting as most agents did not use social media at all. This was 2009, but the same holds true today regarding business. Real estate professionals tend not to use social media, at least not for commercial reasons. Complaints about the time required to continually post valuable information to a Facebook page with 25 followers is not inspiring. Tweeting that they are showing a home seems to be contrary to good sense if they are tweeting a client that is waiting to hear back on their loan being approved. The safe zone for social media interaction for real estate professionals would be ActiveRain.

On ActiveRain however, there are no consumers. Like LinkedIn, ActiveRain is designed so that professionals have a place to kick up their feet, have a cup of coffee and discuss their feelings on topics that are important to them. As an added bonus the more one interacts with ActiveRain the greater the chances that the professional interacting the most is found on search engines.

The complaints that Qazzoo heard from agents in 2009 and today are based on the difficulty in creating business, conduct business, and generate more business using social media. The interactivity was great but the interaction with potential clients was not working out for anyone we spoke with. Today if a real estate agent wants to create more business on Facebook it is seen as a misuse of the platform. Agents are told never to post listings on Facebook, never ask if anyone is looking for a home and so forth.

It seems that the only way to do business on Facebook is if a professional is able to spend countless hours collecting likes and followers and being in their social stream on a continual basis. This is a lot to ask from a person that has a full-time job.

We then reviewed Twitter and the complaints that surround that social platform as it relates to real estate and doing more business using a Twitter feed. Twitter was used by fewer people in general (2009 figures) than Facebook and was less understood than Facebook by most real estate agents. We looked at Twitter and saw a great way to get out a message, so long as you had something to say and that you didn’t care about the geography of the people who heard what the real estate professional was communicating. After reviewing all of the complaints, questions, concerns and misunderstandings we were led back to the same conclusion.

Social media had a gap. We saw the gap to be an incredibly large one, one that made generating new business and/or doing more business a virtual non-starter for most real estate professionals on the platforms that were available. The gap got larger when really useful social platforms had no geographic framework to communicate to the right people and no mechanism to connect with them without alienating them or the professional. That was when we decided to tackle the largest project of our careers and attempted to bring some of the missing pieces together in order to allow real estate professionals a platform that allowed for the generation of new business as well as the nurturing of existing business using social media. Qazzoo launched in May of 2012 and to date has had millions of users. As we continue to grow our user base and expand the features and functions we feel confident that the user base continues to grow as well.