How to Optimize your Facebook Fan Page for Real Estate

For most agents, the Facebook Fan Page is something they set up once and never really did anything with. In this video we’ll break down everything you need to know about optimizing your fan page for real estate purposes, including establishing a central focus, incorporating other online efforts, customizing your page, the viability of using Facebook advertising, and more!

Here is the link mentioning a bunch of 3rd party fan page services: http://facebook-fan-page-creation-tools.toptenreviews.com/

Video Transcription:

Hey guys, Nelson Quest here with Agentfire.com and today we’re going to be talking about Optimizing Facebook for Real Estate, so let’s just get right into it. The first thing you want to do is establish a central focus for your fan page. Your focus should be your Local Market because of this ultimately the stuff that is the most interesting to the people that are going to be liking your page. When we say local market what are we talking about? We’re not just talking about the specific geographic region that you do business in, we’re talking about the people in that region. Every single person in that target area is at some point going to buy a home, sell a home, invest in a home, retire, and so you want to make sure you’re serving content that suits their interests. You don’t’ want to focus on your self. So if you get a new listing or have an open house this weekend, definitely post that to your Fan page, but if your kid had a Bar Mitzvah or you just bought a cat, don’t post it there. That stuff that doesn’t provide value to the people liking or following your page. Also make sure that when you post content – what’s cool about Facebook is that it’s primarily a sharing platform, so unlike a website, where you have to write blog posts which can be very time consuming, as an agent or broker or whatever you are, chances are that you are constantly exposed to cool, useful information. Maybe a cool buyer’s guide, a concert this weekend, how hard is it to just post a quick link to your Facebook Fan Page? You should aim to post at least one item a day, again something that is useful and provides value to your audience.

Make sure that you combine your Facebook Fan Page with any other marketing that you’re doing, so you don’t want to treat your fan page as a completely separate entity. When I say that, if you have a website, if you have a YouTube channel, if you have Flickr, these are all things that you want to make sure are integrated into your fan page. You should have links there somewhere, or you can create custom tabs, which we’ll talk about in a second. Basically, whatever online efforts you’re involved in, whether it be a website, newsletter, Twitter, YouTube, whatever it is, make sure that there’s a connection between all of them.

Let’s start talking more about the customization options for your Facebook fan page. So the first thing I want to talk about is creating a custom username. Make sure you go to facebook.com/username and set yourself up with a nice custom URL. You definitely don’t want your Facebook URL to be facebook.com/axbr35000000, you want it to be something like facebook.com/susiejonesrealtor or, something that represents your page or ultimately your brand. 

Custom timeline photo – so a lot of agents I see really struggle with this, in fact, most agent pages I see don’t even have a custom timeline photo. A really good idea for a custom timeline photo is a new listing that you just got, or, if you have a web development guy or graphics development friend, something I highly recommend is to have them check out graphicriver.net. I use this site personally myself all the time for various needs, but you can search for ‘Facebook Real Estate’ and you’ll get a bunch of really cool, custom backgrounds that you can give to a graphics developer and that you can take a customize and look really cool. You can also do a really general search for ‘Facebook Timeline Background’ and you’ll see a lot of stuff that has image collages, so you could potentially make a collage of all of your sold listings. If you were to hand this off to someone that has experience with photoshop, you could probably create something really cool within 15-20 minutes and you’re talking about $6 or $7 dollars plus whatever the cost would be to have your graphic designer friend customize it, so real quick, really easy, and it’s going to give you a real custom professional look. 

The next thing  and the other item you can customize on your fan page are the tabs, so you’ll notice below the timeline photo you’re going to have 4 tabs horizontally, one of them you can’t adjust, but these are a great place to feature some of the other marketing efforts that you may be involved in. So we spoke earlier about combining marketing if you have a YouTube channel, or if you have a newsletter, you can add a newsletter signup form to a tab. If you have some sort of home buyer guide you can feature that in a tab. There are two different ways to set up tabs, the first way is to try to find a service that will let you do this yourself easily. Again you may need a web developer guy for this, but you can use, and this is something that we use on our fan page, Static HTML: iframe tabs. This will allow you to create a custom tab and then insert a block of HTML, so you can insert a signup form, there are a bunch of different things you can insert. If you have web development experience there’s a lot you can do. If you’re using a newsletter like MailChimp or Constant Contact, a lot of these companies have Facebook integration, which you can Google how to do, that will let you create a custom tab for your newsletter signup or whatever it is.

Something else we highly recommend for creating custom tabs are 3rd party services. Not only can you create custom tabs for your YouTube or for your Newsletter signup but a lot of these services will allow you to do some pretty cool stuff, where you can actually offer promotions or get people to like your page in order to view specific content or receive an eBook, or sign up for a cash give away. Again you should check out each one of these services to see what they have to offer. We’re going to put a bunch of links to these services in the description below this video, and if you’re viewing this from our website, we’ll make sure we have links there as well. Definitely a good viable option.

Another thing you should consider is Facebook Advertising. Let’s start with what I don’t like – I don’t like that they charge per impression, so if you’re an Adwords user or someone who has paid for marketing before, you’re not going to be rewarded per click, so you need to create really engaging ads to make sure that the value proposition is there. That being said, one of the really cool things about Facebook is that you can target a very specific demographic which allows you to get very creative with your advertising. So when I say ‘target a specific demographic’ you can target by age group, gender, interests, so, you could potentially create an ad to target new home buyers, which targets ages 21-27 in a specific geographic region, so you can target people in a specific city, i.e. your target market. You can create an ad where the target is retirement, where you target 55+, again in your specific region. These are all ideas but again, if you haven’t, definitely check out Facebook advertising. Facebook Ads also has a lot of cool stuff to get people to like your page so, just check it out!

The last thing I want to talk about, and this is probably something we should have talked about earlier but I didn’t feel like erasing anything at the top of the whiteboard, is posting at weird hours. So if you’re posting content you want to make sure that you’re not posting at 2 am or 5 am, you want to post during the hours that are going to get you the most traction, which is traditionally the hours between 6 to 11 pm.

So that’s it for this video today, so make sure to subscribe to our youtube channel, sign up for our newsletter. Again, we’re going to be reviewing a whole bunch of 3rd party services that you can utilize on your Facebook fan page in the coming weeks, so continue to follow us and thanks for watching!