On Aug. 28, the Arkansas Realtors® Association (ARA) sent out a survey after reviewing a technology survey sent out by the National Association of Realtors® (NAR).

We at the ARA wanted to get an idea of how Realtors® were utilizing technology in this state and how this blog was received by our members. The survey was fairly general and focused a bit on how Arkansas Realtors® were utilizing social networking, keeping up with the news, etc.

In a nutshell, what we learned is that the majority of Realtors® in the state believe having a presence on the Internet is important for marketing purposes, a lot of people still stick with traditional media outlets (newspapers, radio and television), Facebook is popular with our members and we need to do a better job getting the word out about this blog.

We’ve got 7,881 Realtors® in Arkansas and 789 of them — just over 10 percent — took the time to answer our survey. Of course, we’re pleased to see that so many people turned out to answer the survey and do thank them. If you’d like to see a report detailing the responses we received, just click here.

What was impressive about the results is that 670 of the respondents (84.0 percent) answered that it is very important to maintain a presence on the Internet in order to market their businesses and find leads. Also, 597 respondents (74.8 percent) maintain an Internet site through their companies and 473 of them (59.3 percent) maintain accounts on Facebook. Furthermore, 602 respondents (75.4 percent) still keep up with newspapers, radio stations and television stations — proof the notion that the Internet is dominating the way people receive their news isn’t exactly true.

The concern, of course, has to do with this blog. A whopping 677 respondents (84.8 percent) have never visited our blog — the famed Arkansas Realtor®. That’s not too much of a surprise because we’ve only been at this for three months and it takes time to get regular visitors. We are encouraged that we’ve gotten close to 18,000 unique visitors since starting this blog, but rest assured that we’ll be doing more to get the word out to our members. Our traffic counts are strong, but we sure would like to see more members stopping by and checking up on what’s new at the ARA. This is the place to find the latest news from the ARA, after all, and we can’t help but think that we need to find a way to get our members to visit often.

We also asked our members to jot down any further comments they regarding the blog in the survey. We got a lot of interesting comments and will go through them in a future post.