Let’s face it, a lot of people have a Facebook business page, and even more real estate agents and brokers are getting one too. I think this is fantastic, but are you one of those people who set up a page, posted a few times, and asked yourself, “ok, now what?”

Here are 3 simple things you can do TODAY to get more fans and get your page rocking!

1. Promote your page! You need to make it a part of your plan to promote your page. You can’t just build a page and then – VOILA success! You need to be a promoting machine. How?

• Add a Facebook “like” badge to the homepage of your website site and blog
• Add a link to your page into your email signature – one of my favorite services for doing this is WiseStamp
• Ask your Facebook friends to support you. Only do this periodically so not to annoy them! (once a quarter is more than enough!)
• Promote it on Twitter 3-5 times a week.
• Promote it on LinkedIn 1-2 times a week.
• Send out a special email invite to your clients, vendors, colleagues and sphere once a quarter. Also, in every email have a Facebook link so they can go right to your page.
• Talk about it on your listing appointments, open houses and networking events.

2. Post often! You need to post 2-3 times a day – every day. There is no “secret sauce” – you just need to do it. Ask questions to start a conversation, post interesting news stories, post market reports, post funny stories. Whatever is interesting to you may be interesting to your fans. Make it a point to post multiple times a day. The great thing is you can use TweetDeck or HootSuite to plan out your posts so you don’t have to be on Facebook every moment of the day!

3. Post a variety of content! Post links to news articles from Google News, post cool videos from YouTube, ask questions, post videos of your neighborhood or homes you see on tour – change it up and have fun with it. Don’t over think what you need to post! Get creative and start googling content that is interesting to you. Keep a punch list of all the things you could talk about or promote on your page. What do your clients ask you all the time? You should constantly be looking at your local news sites or downtown associations and post some of their “feel good local content’ on  your page.

Here is a great example of a real estate Facebook page – I met Chuck and Christina Ethridge at Agent Reboot Seattle last week and they are doing some great things on their Facebook page: screen-capture video, yummy recipes, asking and answering questions, posting cool new listings, and so much more! The included “Ask the Seasoned Agent” video blogs into their page too which I absolutely love. Nice job guys!

So, now that you know what to do – the only thing left to do is TO DO IT!! No time to start like the present!

Or, are you already doing this? Either way, I’d love your comments and feedback – leave me your thoughts below!

P.S. A huge THANK YOU for “liking” the FOREM Facebook page – as of last night we surpassed the 5,000 mark!! I truly believe we have the best fans in the industry. Thank you for making FOREM what it is today!

Written by: Katie Lance, Senior Marketing Manager, Inman News, @katielance

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It seems like just about every day there are new updates to Facebook pages!

Just yesterday there were 3 new changes that were announced that I am super excited about:

1. You can navigate and interact with other areas of Facebook as your Page. This means you can choose to receive notifications about fan activity, Like and comment on other Pages as your Page, and get your own News Feed where you can engage with the latest and most important news from other Pages you like.
2. There are new opportunities for Pages to share. You can feature photos of your Page’s most recent experiences at the top of your Page. You can highlight other Pages you are connected with as well as the people who are managing your Page.
3. Make your Page even more engaging for users. The “Everyone” filter on the Wall provides a new way for people to see the most interesting posts first. There is also a place for people to discover the friends and interests they have common with your Page.

You can read about the announcement here and view the new Page Manual here!

I upgraded all of our our pages yesterday and was very pleased with how easy it was. I really like the new features – especially the option to interact with other pages as YOUR page. I love this new feature – because I use Social Mention to monitor when people are mentioning our brand name or sharing our content (excellent tool – it’s similar to Google Alerts, but for social media.)

Previously, if I wanted to communicate with them or thank them – I would have to do so on their page with my personal profile – now I can do it as a page admin (i.e. I can leave a comment as “Inman News” or as “The Future of Real Estate Marketing Blog.”)

ALSO… and this is HUGE – you can NOW change the category of your page – WHOOO HOO!!! So if you prefer to not have a real estate page but more of a community page you can now do this with your page.

Last thoughts…

Every time Facebook has a change there is always the “scary” factor – the simple fact that they can change or edit anything at any given time. My advice has and always will be – don’t let ALL your content live on Facebook – if Facebook were to go away tomorrow where would your content live? This is why I highly recommend posting most or all of your content on your blog – preferably a WordPress blog.

Would love your thoughts on these new changes – leave me your feedback below!

Written by: Katie Lance, Senior Marketing Manager, Inman News @katielance

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Hopefully this headline will grab your attention and you’ll read it right away because there is something really, really important that needs to be “revealed” about Facebook pages.

I recently did a blog post which ended up with 60+ comments, and I left a ton of feedback for people regarding their Facebook pages. What I realized as I was clicking through each page, is that there was one fundamental element that made the difference between a successful and not as successful business page.

If you are at the point of setting up a page, posting some content, and now you are feeling like “now what” – then you need to read this.

The secret sauce to ROCKING a Facebook page is this…

Less about you. More about them.

Sounds so simple right? But most people (and I group myself in to this group) do this once they have a business Facebook page: they post links to article, their listings, interesting event or local info, market trends, etc. But the BIGGEST thing they don’t do is ask questions, ask for a response or generate feedback.

Read that last sentence again. They don’t ask questions!

Why is this so important? 2 reasons:

1. Social media is not a one-way street. No one wants to just hear stuff pushed out to them. We like to comment, but many times we don’t respond to a post on Facebook, because no one ASKS us too.

For example, if you are going to post a market update you could say:

“Check out my latest market report for _____ area. Home sales are up by 20% from last year.”

OR you could say this:

“Check out my latest market report for _____ area. Home sales are up by 20% from last year. What do you think about that?”

Simple tweak, but by asking questions and asking for feedback, people are more likely to leave comments which means they are more likely to pay attention to what you are posting.  And then in a perfect world, the likelihood that they do business with you or refer you to someone they know, increases!

2. Your page will be viewed more – the more comments and likes you have. It’s a secret of Facebook that only a few people have seemed to figure out. Not all pages show up in your members feeds.

Why? A few reasons:

• When you go onto Facebook you can click ‘Top News” or “Most Recent” – Top News is a filtered feed that Facebook provides based on your activity.
• Most people are watching THIS feed. Even if they are watching their “Most Recent” feed their settings may be set to only receive updates from pages they interact with.
• Most people don’t know that they can change this. Scroll to the very bottom of your home page on Facebook and click “edit options” – once you click “edit options” you will see this pop up, make sure “all friends and pages” are checked so you are seeing all your friends and pages (not just a filtered view).

Simple fact: the more comments and likes you have, the more people will see your page.

Over the last few weeks, I posted a number of questions on our Facebook pages just to test this theory – and sure enough, the posts that were simple questions received more likes and and comments then just about anything else we posted. AND (and this is the really cool part), the other posts we were posting received more impressions too! Here is just a super simple example of a post from yesterday AM to our Inman News Facebook page – which generated 38 “likes”

Another example that generated 2 likes and 5 comments:

Now, of course you can’t have a page with just questions – but what I recommend is to start asking for feedback and comments. Ask at least one question a day on your page, and you will start to see more people interacting with you, you will start to build a commmunity, and you will start to see more people join your page.

What are some ideas for questions? Here are a few to start with:

• Which school district are kids in?
• I’d love your feedback on this home I have listed. Can you take a peek at this link and let me know your 1st reaction to the home?
• If you had to choose would you pick a bigger backyard or a bigger house?
• How long have you lived in your home?
• What’s the best part about your neighborhood?
• Working or relaxing this weekend?
• Do you go to open homes on the weekend?
• Check out this article about hot real estate markets in the U.S. – what do you think about this article?
• Have you ever remodeled your kitchen or bath?
• Would you prefer to move into a home that is “move in ready” or do you like the challenge of working on it yourself?
• Check out this awesome event downtown tonight. Click “like” if you plan on going!

Keep a running list of questions to ask your members AND remember to chime in too! Always go back and answer questions and thank people for commenting.

I’d love to hear your feedback on this, please leave me a comment below!

Written by: Katie Lance, Senior Marketing Manager, Inman News @katielance

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Pretty exciting news!

Just announced this Friday on Facebook, there will be a news and improved “flow” for how someone creates a business page on Facebook.

I really like this improvement and think it will encourage more and more people to make pages (instead of using their personal profile for business)

Here are a couple screen shots of the new process (see below)

• Once someone clicks, “Create a Page” they are re-directed to this page:

• Once you click on your category, you are presented with a drop-down menu. For a real estate agent, you would click “Local Business or Place of Interest”

One of the biggest changes for lists is the amount of options – I don’t ever rememeber seeing a “real estate” option! In my opinion, this is one more way Facebook is really encouraging people to create pages but create them in a smart and organized way.

Do you have a Facebook page? Leave me a comment below and include a link to your page!

Stay tuned, more about Facebook this week! (If you missed my post last week about Facebook lists and page tips, click here)

Written by: Katie Lance, Senior Marketing Manager, Inman News @katielance

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One of my favorite sessions at Real Estate Connect SF was a panel answering the question: “Is Facebook bigger than Google?”

What do you think? With Facebook approaching 500 million fans – they are certainly in the right position!

The panelists who spoke during this session were:

• Drew Burks, Broker, Web Real Estate Tools, @sdrealtors
• Nicole Nicolay, Founder & CCO, Agent Evolution, @nik_nik
• Dale Chumbley, Realtor with Prudential NW Properties, @DaleChumbley

Drew Burks spoke about recent changes in Facebook and their new ‘open graph’ platform.

He emphasized that everyone should add the ‘like’ plugin to their blog (something I need to do ASAP!)  It’s one of the easiest ways for people to share you info on Facebook. Also ‘liking’ a post or page helps to index you in the world of search. This stat was staggering:

“Facebook indexes 25 BILLION pieces of information a month!”

Drew’s shirt says it best: “Google Me” – this is his business card. I love it!

Nicole talked about Facebook ads and gave some excellent advice:

• Set your goals. What do you want to accomplish?
• Establish your target criteria. There is a tremendous amount of targeting you can do when creating your ads – including demographic, gender, age, likes, interests, and so much more.
• Have compelling content. She spoke a lot about the ‘nature of the network’ – we aren’t likely to click on ads unless they are eye-catching, interesting, funny, or are very relevant to us.

Also, Nicole said to make sure that the link on your ad is the your most productive link – whether that is a link back to your page or back to your website. Historically the links that work best are link back to your Facebook page. It’s easier for someone to ‘like’ a page and then get to know you and your brand before they transact with you.

Dale Chumbley, famous for his 365 Things to Do in Vancouver page (which now has over 11K fans), spoke about Facebook pages – do/don’t and the tremendous opportunity.

One of the biggest opportunities agents have is that they know their communities and the ins and outs of neighborhoods better than anyone. On Dale’s page there is no mention of him as a real estate agent. All of his content resides on his blog – so he will always ‘own’ the content – in case anything happens to Facebook. He blogs everyday and links to his blog posts once daily. He said he started his blog 146 days ago and his Facebook page is now #4 on Google when someone searches for his county and #2 on Google when someone searches for his city.

He does caution about starting a ‘365′ page – it’s a lot of work and a big commitment! But whether your community is large or small, any community could benefit from having a community page created from someone who knows it best – a real estate agent!

Overall I thought this was an excellent panel because they talked about each facet of Facebook and how a real estate agent can maximize this huge opportunity. Thanks Drew, Nicole and Dale for doing a fantastic job!

Would you love your opinions on this – leave me your feedback and comments below!

By they way, a video of this session, (along with all conference videos) will be available soon to Inman Premium Members. Sign up now for only $99 and get a 1 year Inman Premium Membership which includes ALL post-conference video.

Written by: Katie Lance, Marketing Manager, Inman News

@inmannews @katielance

Facebook – Inman News | Facebook – FOREM

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Facebook’s latest release added all kinds of new functionality for advertisers who wish to use their platform – some of which is starting to trickle out. On the day of the release I asked the question, Where Are The Real Estate Fan-sumers? and today it’s time to throw down the gauntlet and try and get to that answer.

Putting your brand on Facebook is actually a pretty easy process, better yet it’s free (for now). Just click on the Advertisers link in Facebook’s footer and then Create a Page .

First step is choosing a category for your business. Brokers might want probably want to choose Real Estate under the Local drop down menu. Bloggers might want to choose Communications under the Brand or Product drop down; technology providers or Real Estate 2.0 web sites may want to choose Technology Providers or Service. Add the name of your company or product and then hit Create Page.

Once you’ve create your page you can fill it out much the same with basic profile info. On the surface, a product page is very similar to Facebook’s Groups, though slightly reorganized; you got your wall, discussion forum, events – in fact, the only visible difference that I could see was that it looks like Members have been renamed Fans.

Where it starts to get interesting however, is how the Pages interact with your individual profiles.

Take a moment to click over to my page, for the Future of Real Estate Marketing Blog. If you have a Facebook profile you’ll be given the option to identify yourself as a Fan of this site. Go on, go do it now. I’ll wait…

As you saw, the first question Facebook asks you is if you want to allow this page/brand to send you email updates. This is big, it’s clearly a step towards enabling permission based marketing.

So as the page owner – you have the ability to send communications to your Fans. This is potentially a very powerful way to reach out to your customer base, especially if it’s used judiciously. For real estate brokers, for example, it could be a very nice keep-in-touch program. Imagine if, after every transaction, you asked all your clients to identify themselves as a Fan of your company?

This is doubly powerful, because in addition to opting-in to receive future communications from you, your Facebook Fans acts as a further conduit to reach other future Fans – as they narrowcast their choices to their friends through their mini-feed.

And, even better, they also wear those affiliations proudly on their profile pages too.

Despite all of this, there’s a couple things missing from this right now. There’s no directory of Pages yet, so it’s up to the page owner to promote their brand directly. (Need that link again? Become a fan of the Future of Real Estate Marketing Blog)

Pages are also fairly static right now, it would be great to be able to add custom facebook apps or an RSS feed to page to liven them up a bit.

Finally, I’d love to be able to check out a leader board for each of the Page categories; most popular brands, fastest moving brands etc. That would be an incredibly powerful research aide. If we had that, we might be able to see who is the ultimate real estate brand. No more spitting matches over traffic… let’s just see who has more fans. Trulia or Zillow? ActiveRain or Move? Coldwell Banker or Prudential?

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