Social Networks for Real Estate: Facebook

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, which would make selling real estate pretty difficult anyway, you’ve heard of Facebook and Twitter. But, are you taking full advantage of social networks and applying them correctly to generate new and repeat clients?
Not all social networks are created equal.

In this series, we’ll go over social network sites and how to better use them as tools for your real estate business. Each is a different type and has specific uses, and hopefully you’ll be able to include all of them in your real estate internet marketing portfolio as well. Let’s start with probably the most popular one…
Facebook for Real Estate
Facebook for Realtors

Your friends are on Facebook, your kids are on Facebook, your moms, brothers, uncles, cousins are on Facebook. In fact, there are over 500 million active users on Facebook – each with an average of 130 friends. True story! The reach you can achieve with Facebook is comparable to no other social network out there today. But, you may not be leveraging this system in the best way possible.

How many of you have clients as Facebook friends? And how many of you post personal status updates on your profile? Big no-no.

Clients (past, present and potential) should be kept up to date on market related news, open houses, new listings, etc. Not what you think of a politician, neighbor’s dog, your boss, or a friend’s baby. If you want to use Facebook as a personal diary, just keep it to the people that you don’t have a professional relationship with.

Think about it – your Facebook friend refers your profile to a friend of theirs (or all 130!), those potential real estate leads look at your profile and see whatever you decided to post that day, they disagree or think it’s inappropriate. Do you think they will do business with you? Maybe… but probably not. To them, that was your first impression and you just bombed it without even knowing.

So how do you use Facebook for personal items such as family photos, funny videos, off the wall humor, and diary type posts like those oh so liberating potty-mouth rants and my-life’s-better-than-yours raves, and still use it as a tool for real estate while maintaining the level of professionalism most clients and real estate leads will expect from a REALTOR®?
Business Page

Perhaps the easiest and most effective way to keep business and personal life separate on Facebook is to create a business page specifically for your real estate business. It’s easy, and you can manage it using your current Facebook profile.

If you haven’t already set up a business page for yourself, create a Facebook Business Page here.

Create a “Local Business or Place” and choose Real Estate from the category dropdown menu. Fill in the rest of the info with your office as the location – you don’t want people knowing your home address, do you?? Take your time and walk through the set up process.

Use apps to enhance your page and help your marketing efforts. We like See My Listings from REALTOR.com but there are a few other good ones out there. For help with the See My Listings and other apps that REALTOR.com has available, go to their Social Media Training page.

Now all that’s left is to get people to “Like” your page. You can send a page suggestion to the friends you have on your Facebook Profile, but be careful not to do this too often as it may appear “spammy.” Once you get at least 25 page “Likes” you can change your page name to something shorter and more memorable. That way, you can add your Facebook Page address to your business cards and other marketing material.
Like the Showing Suite Facebook Page

Always remember to integrate your Facebook Page into your marketing. If you spend time creating your Facebook Page and updating it with good information for clients, make sure to include a text or image link to your page on your website, blog, email signatures, and in any other real estate internet marketing you use.

Also, include the full Facebook Page address on printed marketing materials. It’s not uncommon to see printed material with “Like my Facebook Page” yet no address. Most people are not going to take the time to do a search for your page, so spell it out for them.

Finally, I want to again stress: always post relevant, market-related information on your page – a few times a week is probably plenty for a single agent. It doesn’t all have to be about you, your listings, and what you can do. Being known and trusted as an expert in the real estate business as a whole means more than being an expert on just yourself and your own business. It’s like that person at the party that always talks about themselves… fine for a while, but it has no useful substance for anyone else and very quickly becomes boring and annoying. That’s about the time I start checking my imaginary watch and looking for more wine.