Facebook Marketing for Realtors? and Agents

FACEBOOK FOR REALTORS? AND REAL ESTATE AGENTS

Howdy Realtors?!

Today, let’s chat about Facebook. And, Facebook as a business and social media marketing tool specifically for you and your niche in The Real Estate Community.

Facebook is still a good idea for your online social media marketing efforts. And, we are going to talk all about a number of reasons it is still a good idea to be on Facebook as a Real Estate Agent in 2018.

GET STARTED RIGHT AWAY

I am guessing you probably have a personal Facebook Page already and are familiar with some of the details that go into that end of Facebooking. Yes? If not, I recommend you start there and get yourself going in that direction first. Get a feel for how this social media platform works.

There are a ton of YouTube videos to get you started setting up your pages easily. I have a list at the end of this article to take a look at. So, again, you will need a Facebook Personal Page to start and are able to set up a Business Page after that.... you can't do it the other way around. And, you can't just set up a Business Page alone.

Pin the image above to Pinterest for easy reference for later!!

ONWARD WITH YOUR REALTOR? PRESENCE ON FACEBOOK!

There are a number Facebook topics/sections to think about when you want to have a social media presence on Facebook:

• Your Personal Facebook Profile and Page
• Your Business Facebook Profile and Page
• Some Different Facebook Groups
• Your Facebook Engagement

And

• Facebook Live Video
• Facebook Advertising

We are going to discuss the first 4 topics above today. We will leave Facebook Advertising and Live Video to another time - they can be a bit of a project on their own so we don’t want to overwhelm you right now. Just focus on getting your Personal Page and your Business Page filled out and moving forward with those for now.

NOW, A NOTE ABOUT THAT BUSINESS PAGE

Before you do get started review this important list regarding your social media marketing rules:

1. You need to make sure to confirm your Real Estate rules and regulations/compliance in regards to what you are allowed to put on online and on social media.

2. Also, make note of what Facebook requires - you could run your business from your Personal Page for a while, and some Real Estate Agents do this, but Facebook doesn’t like it. It prefers you keep business posting to your Business Page - so, if you do business from your Personal Page they could close you down if they feel it goes outside their rules.

3. Because Facebook does not want you to post business related stuff from a Personal Page - you need to get a Business Page to post business related stuff. YEP! As I mentioned, So, start off right and create a Business Page.

And, now that Facebook is more of a paying type social media platform in regards to advertising - you can run ads off of your Business Page, which you can not do from your Personal Page. 

Ok, now that we got that out of the way let’s move on and talk about developing your Facebook Marketing.

FIRST, LET’S TALK ABOUT YOUR COMMUNITY

You want to build a community and build engagement with people that are interested in the area you work in. For example: Maybe your niche is Mountain Homes or Second Homes or Beach Homes? Or you live in a certain neighborhood or community that has a Facebook following. This is an example of the types of Facebookers that you want to mingle with, engage with, build relationships with. People that are looking to buy or sell a home in your area of expertise or community.

Why it’s important to have a presence on Facebook. When you maintain a presence it shows that you are:

• An expert in your Real Estate field and your community.
• Someone that is a modern Real Estate Agent and understands this is the place to be - people look for other people here on Social Media.
• And, a Real Estate Professional that is visible and available will get more business - if clients come looking for you online and can’t find you, what do you think they’ll do??.... Look for someone else!
• A Successful Real Estate Agent - unsuccessful agents aren’t marketing or they probably aren’t marketing well.

AND, FACEBOOK GROUPS AS PART OF YOUR MARKETING!

So, while FB Groups are just fun - they can also be helpful for business purposes. If you aren’t yet familiar with Facebook groups - there are groups for just about everything - just to name a handful of topics:

• Real Estate Facebook Groups
• Health Related Facebook Groups
• Animal Facebook Groups
• Environmental Facebook Groups

I belong to a ton of them as well. Just to name few: Real Estate Related, Facebook Marketing Groups, Social Media Groups, and Groups about my Community. They can be really helpful and fun. There are a couple of rules with Groups, you can’t usually advertise unless it’s allowed by the administrator. And, you can only belong from a Personal Page - them is the rules. 

You can still get a lot of business benefits from your Group Involvement:

Be active in the Groups you’ve chosen - maybe choose a handful of Groups and stay consistent in those. Or chose a few Groups to interact with everyday and go through those and engage with members. Of course, you can always bounce around to whichever Groups you like best.

Some suggestions for Chatting it up in those Groups:

• Talk about your Business as you can - obviously you don’t want to just be promoting yourself too much. Even though you are on a mission - remember to provide value to others first!
• Again, be helpful - answer questions, give tips to Group members about real estate, good stuff like that.
• You can search in a Group - normally there is a little search box. So, you can search for people looking for help with areas you are familiar with and answer those questions! The search option is one reason it’s cool enough to be on those Groups!!
• Use the content that is talked about and generated in these groups to build your own content for your website, blog, Facebook ads and posts, just to name a few.

As you can see Groups alone are pretty exciting! No where else can you get those!

REACHING YOU ON FACEBOOK - CLIENT MESSAGES 

After making contact and engaging with the public - people can reach out to you easily with the message feature right in Facebook. So, they see your info or your ad - and they can quickly contact you. (and you can quickly respond with some good engagement!)

STRATEGIES FOR BUILDING COMMUNITY AND VISIBILITY ON FACEBOOK

YOUR FIRST ENGAGEMENT STRATEGY

So, a good Facebook Engagement Strategy to get your started and connecting with your people is to set a time limit or a number of posts you engage with (or both). You don’t want to spend your whole day on here…. Cause you easily could, right?!

So try this:

• Spend an hour on Fb a day - every day.
• Engage with a handful - maybe 25 or 30 different posts - from different people/profiles.
• Check your Notifications at the top of your page - and make sure to respond to the people that reached out to you.
• Engage with people in Groups

A STARTER POSTING STRATEGY

So, what should you talk about when you post on Facebook? Again, it comes back to your subject matter and the content that’s important to your market. Remember what we said in the Groups section above? What are Facebook Group Members talking about or asking questions about?

We also spoke about your keywords in my earlier article on Starting your Marketing, this is a wonderful way to start a list for your posts and keeping in tune with what you are focused on. Revisit that to get a good idea on how to create your own keyword list based on your clients and subject matter.

After you have your list developed - from here you can develop all sorts of posts and content. You can search online for your topic - try to keep your searches to current information.

To give you a little list of topics to get you started:

• Real Estate News
• Community News
• Community Events
• Open Houses
• Interiors and Remodeling Topic

and

• Remember listing your Houses for Sale!

This should help get your wheels turning and start getting some posts together.

OFF YA GO! GET STARTED

This will be the big time suck: The Beginning of Creating your Facebook Presence.

It will take a bunch of time to fill out the important areas of your profile and get started posting.

But, once that is taken care of - managing your Business Page won’t be as extensive. 

Take care of these Business Page steps first:

• Start Your Profile Page and Your Business Page
• Fill out you Business Page Fully: write your about and services pages
• List all your links

From here:

• Start to develop your posts

and

• Start to engage with your community

This beginning might not result in many leads or sales right away but it will start giving you some good exposure. And, that’s great! Facebook without ads is more about building your brand and validity - as well as helping your SEO rankings online. It’s a really good place to start and build your social media marketing from.

And, now you can work it up to something you are proud to show off:

• More posting and engaging on a regular basis.
• Eventually start up some videos.
• After you have this going for a little bit you can consider running some ads!

SHOULD I KEEP DOING MY OWN FACEBOOKING OR HIRE SOMEONE?

It’s really important to be part of your Facebook Marketing for Engaging, Building Relationships and essential Brand Awareness. But, I don’t think you have to do all your own posting. I don’t see why you couldn’t get some help to post for you during the week. 

Plus, you are also able to schedule your Facebook Business Page posts - so don’t think you need to write and post every day. It’s easy to schedule right from Facebook! **Another bonus to having a Facebook Business Page - ya can’t schedule in your Personal Page.**

A BRIEF BIT ON FACEBOOK ADVERTISING

Facebook does require you pay for advertising. But, even though you’ll need to pay for advertising instead of getting the ol’ organic reach that used to be more readily available - it’s advertising and it’s inexpensive advertising. While you are familiar with radio, newspaper and TV paid advertising that hits the general public, Facebook Advertising allows you to target the people that are actually interested in your services! It’s a new breed of advertising. It’s a good thing! 

You can even retarget advertise to potential clients or people that were warm and then for whatever reason, cooled off. Maybe from your website or someone that tuned in to what you had to say on Facebook in the past, but for whatever reason, didn’t move forward. You can go back and remind them about you and how they might want to use your services some day - what you have to offer them when they are ready. How cool is that?! 

Maybe we’ll talk about Facebook Advertising more in the future. For now focus on the topics we talked about today. This will give you plenty to do to get started. :)

Sign Up for Your Facebook Pages: Here is a whole list of channels with videos to sign up your Facebook Business Page: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=setup+facebook+business+page+ hop on over there and pick one or two!

Hope this was super helpful! Now, make it a good & productive day!