RISMEDIA, September 25, 2010—Facebook provides an incredible opportunity for today’s real estate professionals. If you are looking for simple ways to improve your exposure on Facebook, Lindberg offers the following concepts from his new book The Advanced Facebook Manual for Real Estate.
1. Daily Interaction – Your normal newsfeed provides plenty of information being posted by your friends to get your mind going. There’s the fun banter, the uploaded pictures, the people on vacation and much more. Start your Facebook day on your newsfeed scanning over the posts to see if there is anything you are interested in interacting with. Your benefit – ‘Top of Mind.’ Every time you interact with your “friends” on Facebook, they say to themselves: “Oh yeah, real estate. ”It’s part of the “selective perception” concept—“when the student is ready, the teacher appears.” They won’t “notice” you until real estate becomes important to them and then suddenly, when your next post or comment pops up they will contact you. I recently had a student come up to me at a convention and tell me that exact thing happened. So get online and start interacting.
2. Semi-Private Discussions – Facebook email is a powerful way to discuss things with people one-on-one, but it also allows for up to 20 people to be included in a “semi-private” discussion where interesting things can come up—depending on who you include. Simply select “compose message” and then select up to 20 people from your friends list—you could select people from the same neighborhood and send a message about a recent neighborhood issue. Everyone that replies will be included in a string for everyone to see—which will spark even more comments.
3. Blogging to establish your expertise – Facebook’s interface is easy to access and easy to use and, unlike other blogging systems, ties into your Facebook audience very easily. It uses “tagging” and “including” with your friends to grab their interest in a more subtle way than just emailing them a notice about your new blog (that usually ends up in a spam folder anyway). Combined with your ability to target people with groups, you could easily become an expert for a neighborhood using this feature.
4. Interacting with your specialty groups – Once you’ve “friended” people as described in the search by name, company, etc. sections of this book and worked them into a specialty group, you can interact with them using the tools in the groups section as well as the normal tools you use to communicate with friends. The beauty with groups is that you get a targeted audience which makes your efforts easier because you have insights into what interests them. In my original “Facebook Manual for Real Estate,” I show how to use groups to create an online “neighborhood farm.”
If you focus on these 4 areas within your personal profile and friends, you’ll see plenty of business come from Facebook. Combine all 4 of these activities on a neighborhood and you’ll own it.
Jack Lindberg is President of AgentsPlanet and Jack Lindberg Seminars. He has a long history of creating technology solutions for the real estate industry and most recently authored 5 books on social media, 4 of which are offered for sale by the National Association of Realtors®.
For more information, visit www.jacklindberg.com.
