Tips for Successful Facebook Marketing

When it comes to leveraging your real estate marketing efforts, Facebook is invaluable. Unfortunately, oftentimes what could be the greatest leverage becomes a disappointment and even liability. Here are a few tips that will help real estate professionals get the most out of their Facebook marketing efforts.

1. Real estate is a relationships business. This is true both offline and online.

What does it mean? It means your Facebook friends and/or fans need to be constantly reminded that there’s a live person behind all the posts. Every 5^th post or so must be about you as a person, not you as a Realtor or real estate company. In order to turn fans into customers, they need to get a sense of ‘knowing’ you personally. A great Facebook marketer is able to convey this sense of friendliness and familiarity without oversharing.

Do’s: Do share your hobbies, even if you engage in activities such as traveling, hiking or ziplining together with your family. Tasteful pictures of your family activities indicate that you’re human and relatable.

Don’ts: That raunchy party that you attended last week… make sure photos from the party never make it to social media.

2. Educate, entertain, inspire.

Every post on your Facbebook page should have a purpose. Remember, you’re not running your business page because you want to engage in a fun banter with your friends about sweet nothings. You’re investing your labor and—very often—money in your Facebook page and you should expect a return on your investment. As far as types of Facebook posts are concerned, no one has come up with anything better than the powerful trio: Educate, Entertain, Inspire. Each of your posts should aim to achieve one of the above goals.

3. Follow Facebook algorithm and policy changes, but don’t get distracted by new gimmicks.

This is a tough one. Facebook constantly tweaks its powerful algorithm in order to increase user engagement. These changes happen all the time, together with advertising policy changes, sometimes at the request of Mark Zuckerberg himself. Keeping up with these changes is important, so you don’t end up wasting time on marketing that doesn’t work. Not that long ago, all you had to do in order to get likes was come up with a statement that most people would agree with, embed it in a funny picture, add something like “Click ‘like’ if you agree” and watch likes pile up (e.g. “Click ‘like’ if you agree that Mondays suck”). Unfortunately, Facebook has changed their policy and now your posts are not going to reach even measly 2% of your fans if you repeatedly engage in similar techniques. On the other hand, trying to implement every suggestion and follow every new feature won’t get you where you want to be either. Ideally, you should follow and heed warnings in regards to practices that could get you in trouble, but stick to basics when it comes to actual strategies that you employ.

4. Find what works and repeat it like crazy.

This is the simples of all rules and at the same time the most difficult to abide by. It is a human nature to seek changes and innovate. However, turning your fans into customers requires repetition as much as innovation.

Do’s: Experiment with various types of Facebook posts, different target audiences, try out different times to post, etc.

Don’ts: Don’t try fixing something unless it’s broken. Once you find that posting an inspiring meme on Monday at 10am attracts shares consistently (you have solid evidence that it works like a charm and it’s not a fluke), don’t cease doing it because you think you should change things up a little. Rinse and repeat until it stops working! Remember, finding what works may take weeks, so milk it and enjoy it while it lasts.