• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, March 21, 2014

Century 21 has rolled out a new marketing suite called C21 Social Xchange for agents and brokers with help from Google and Videolicious.

"This simplifies tasks like creating paid-search campaigns or a Facebook page," said Bev Thorne, Century 21 Real Estate CMO. "It also allows agents and brokers to use content that we create at corporate, greatly reducing their need to generate their own content."

The C21 Social Xchange combines social media marketing, communications and advertising tool suite for Century 21 professionals. A co-marketing agreement with Google gives Century 21 agents and brokers special pricing, templates and tools for Google AdWords and Google Wildfire social media tools that will let users post and schedule text and video content on Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

Google recently said its social company, Wildfire, would stop building new features and signing up new customers, but Thorne said the company will continue to support existing clients. "The Wildfire tools will be available for about 18 months, but we don't expect to use them for that long," she said. "We will use them at launch. It's appropriate for our agents to use now."

A similar licensing agreement with the Videolicious platform provides access to video creation tools for listings and social channels.

Agents and brokers accessing the tools will go through the Century 21 intranet. The deal, exclusive to Century 21's 50,000 agents and brokers, will use Google's and Videolicious's tools. Thorne said Century 21 worked with Google to customize AdWords templates to fit the needs of those in the real estate industry. Testing began in January.

Thorne estimates that between 10% and 15% of agents use AdWords today, but expects that will rise "significantly" with the co-marketing agreement.