As more real estate agents get comfortable with Facebook, we’re seeing plenty of great examples of business-enhancing Facebook profiles. But as with any emerging marketing tool, there are also plenty of ways to veer off track and end up driving potential clients away.
With that in mind, we’ve put together the top five things to avoid if you want to make sure your efforts on Facebook don’t go to waste:
1. Going in without a plan. It need only take 10 minutes, but a sketch of what you’re hoping to achieve with your Facebook presence is crucial. With this set of targets, you can determine whether the time you spend on Facebook is actually worthwhile, and tweak your strategy accordingly.
2. Not offering anything of value. Simply maintaining a Facebook presence as a real estate agent might bring in the odd enquiry, but you will hit a ceiling all too quickly. Reaching a wider community involves offering quality content, be it information on local events, community profiles, or anything else that will hold people’s interest.
3. Ignoring the results. The task of measuring where you are three months after you set up your Facebook profile compared to where you wanted to be might sound arduous, but again this can be done quite quickly. What did you post that people responded to? What did people ignore? It’s as easy as answering those two simple questions, and continuing to put your energy into what works.
4. Too many listings. There’s an argument to be made that if someone connects with a real estate agent on Facebook, they must be interested in listings. But limiting your content to listings means you’re also limiting your audience (an audience that, let’s face it, will probably be checking property portals for listings before they start scouring Facebook). As one of our recent Agent Strategies contributors pointed out, listings simply aren’t enough to hold people’s attention for very long.
5. Not being “human”. We know someone must have posted that latest Facebook update, so why does it sound like it was generated by a machine? People connect on Facebook for more than just the marketing pitch - they want to know something about you too. Even giants like The Corcoran Group manage to make their updates sound like they came from a person, and at the moment they’ve got over 10,000 people showing their appreciation.
Have you noticed any other Facebook missteps? Got ideas on how they could be fixed? Let us know in our comments.
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