Are you confused about using Facebook to grow your Real Estate business? This is a great starting point on how to use it for free!
No doubt you have noticed that Facebook for Real Estate is all the rage right now. Everyone in the industry is talking about how effective it can be to help your Real Estate or Mortgage business get more leads, close more sales.
You may have considered it but one thing probably keeps you from diving in head first: AD COSTS. Yes, Facebook is for the most part a “pay to play” platform now. You want to market your business, you gotta pay for ads.. for the most part.
There is however an effective way to use your personal profile on Facebook to help you with your marketing efforts, help you connect with your prospects and deepen those relationships you form with potential buyers and sellers. If you are in the loan business, prospective borrowers. And you can do this at NO COST TO YOU!
This may be a bit controversial since Facebook guidelines are clear that your personal profile should not be used as a business page. I agree, it should not be used as a business page but that does not mean that you can’t “friend” your customers.
Selling homes and doing loans is a business that allows you to know your customer at a deeper level than say, selling people a new car or bedroom set. We get to know a lot about them personally, so we can serve them better. As Real Estate agents we get to know the client’s lifestyle so we can help them find the right home in the neighborhood that is just ideal for them. As we get to know them, we often find that we have common interests. When two people find something they share in common, in deepens that working relationship, there is a sense of affinity.
For Real Estate agents, it is important to cement a relationship with a potential buyer or seller, and there is no better way than connecting on Social Media. It is a way to get closer, but not too close.
Becoming a “Facebook Friend”, Real Estate agents can share more of who they are as people, not just the business persona. It is proven time and again that when your prospects see you more than just “Mike the REALTOR”, but rather the guy who coaches little league at the school their son goes to, it humanizes you more in their eyes.
By connecting with your prospects on Facebook, you have an opportunity to stay in front of them through your posts and updates, in a less aggressive way than calling them every other day to see if they are ready to list or go out to look at houses. It is less “salesy” than doing the “pop by’s” and other tactics that we have all used at some point, just so we can stay in front of that prospect.
However, I find that Real Estate agents either are reluctant to connect with customers online because they feel they don’t want to invite someone who is not a close friend or family into their “online living room” – a fair point and something I agree with. We will solve that in a moment.
What I also find, is that those very few that do friend their prospects, current and future clients, they often do so inappropriately. Here is what I mean by inappropriate; posting content on their profile that is not suitable for a prospective client to see. Nobody needs to know ALL your very personal habits and attitudes towards sensitive subjects like politics and religion.
Take for instance, pictures of that beer pong party you went to, or that rally you participated in that supported or opposed a controversial person or cause. And believe me, I see more of those posts than I care to see. It is easy to be offended by posts of friends who have diametrically opposed political views on politics or religion than someone else does.
But there is a solution that can allow you to have the best of both worlds.
You can avoid creating controversy or having your private views with those you choose to only share certain posts/content. This is very easily done by creating “Lists” in your friends area, and adding friends or prospects to different lists. So now those beer pong party pics you took can be shared with ONLY your party friends by creating a list in your profile for “Party Friends”. Now you can share away and your customers, who are not on the “Party Friends” list, don’t have to re-think whether or not not you are the right REALTOR or Lender for them and their family.
Conversely, if you find a great neighborhood home in the Maybury Tract that seems to be a popular area for your prospective buyers, you can post away to those buyers whom you have added to your list: “Active Buyers”. Now those on your “party friends” and “family” lists don’t have to constantly be scrolling past your business posts, in which they have little interest. They will not be seeing your business posts.
Of course, occasionally you want to write posts that everyone can see, and it would be reasonably safe for you that everyone on your list can see those posts. This is a great way to stay in front of everyone in one platform: Facebook.
The biggest benefit of using your personal profile to connect with your customers, is the fact that if they interact with you and your posts, you can essentially market yourself to them for free – something that is for the most part dead on business pages. Long gone are the days of yesteryear when you could garner a few thousand “likes” on your page, and you could promote your business to your heart’s content – for free. Every time you posted an update on your business page, 70%+ of those who liked your page would see your post on their news feed. Facebook put an end to that in the last couple years.
This is not to say that you shouldn’t have a business page on Facebook. If you want to grow your Real Estate and Mortgage business… you basically have to have a business page, it is not optional. There are things that you can do with a business page that you can’t do with your personal profile; namely- run paid ads. Facebook ads are probably the single best deal for Real Estate and Mortgage customer acquisition right now, but the window will close probably within the next 24 months. But this is a topic for another conversation.
For now, let’s get those personal profiles working for us by allowing us to connect with our current and future customers. First step for you to take is to add lists to your profile so you can start segmenting your current and future friends and family, and prepare to add your “Buyers”, “Sellers”, “Borrowers”, “Closed Clients” etc. to different lists. Here is the link where Facebook gives you direction on how to segment your friends into lists: Mange Facebook Friends Lists.
And last but not least: So as to not offend anyone that might see your friends lists on your profile, which is the default privacy setting. Make sure you hide those lists! Imagine you have two lists, one called “close friends” and another “casual friends” and someone who thought was a “close friend” finds themselves on the “casual friends” list- no good can come out of that, make sure that does not happen to you. Hide those lists from public view – here Facebook tells you how.
Final thoughts- by being social with your prospects and customers, you will effectively stay in front of them more often in a non-intrusive way. You will form a closer bond, have better rapport and this will inevitably help you close more deals. It is a proven strategy that is used by VERY FEW in the business, and they are not exactly eager to share this with you, but I just did. Go out there and put this to use, you should close at least an extra 2-5 deals this coming year if you start now. That is a great ROI on time invested since this will cost you ZERO dollars.