In my post Marketing Real Estate on Facebook (and Other Social Networks) I shared 5 ways you could passively market yourself (or your listings) on the popular social networking site.

I say passively because, for the most part, they all depend on you waiting for people to come to your profile and finding you. Personally, I’ve never been very good at just sitting around and waiting for anything (just ask my wife).

So, if you’re looking to market a little more aggressively, Facebook recently added the ability for you to create flyers — which is accessible under the advertise link at the bottom of any Facebook page — that you can target very precisely across their network.

For demonstration purposes, I created a sample flyer (or ad) to promote this blog.

First I checked out Flyers Basic and a CPM (cost per impression) buy. As you can see, it’s pretty slick – you can target Gender and Age in any network and even drill down to specific geographic areas to geo-target your ad… sorry, flyer.

Just like a normal CPM buy, your flyer gets served up in the general inventory for each network you have targeted. The more impressions you purchase the more times it will get served up. In this case, I bought 10,000 flyers in four locations over seven days – meaning my ad will be seen in each city 2,500 a day for a week.

This is a very imprecise, but cheap form of advertising – and like any CPM ads, is probably best used to serve up a general branding campaign. You could advertise your brokerage, web site, even your local real estate blog, doing this for example.

Next I tried Flyers Pro which is a CPC (cost per click) buy. In this example I used the same ad, but Flyers Pro lets you be far more sophisticated in who you are reaching out to.

Once again you can target by Sex or Age – but now you can begin to filter your buy by people’s interests, even political views. In my case I wanted to reach people who had identified ‘Real Estate’ as being one of their core interests.

If you wanted to reach students you can filter by Education status, College, and even what Major they are studying (this is great if you’re recruiting college grads). On the other hand, if you’re trying to reach professionals, you can target exactly where they work.

Just like Google Ads, the CPC buy is determined by how much you are willing to spend per click. The more you bid for such precision targeting the higher the likelihood your ad will be shown to these individuals.

Flyers Pro ads could be incredibly valuable because of the absolute precision in which you can define the recipient of the ad. This could be incredibly powerful tool for marketing an individual property or new real estate development, for example. Personally, I’m blown away by the ability to target employees of local companies with messages – how cool is that?

I haven’t had time to test out the results of either of these campaigns so far, but a few others have begun experimenting with this it too. Check out Charlene Li’s Facebook Flyer test results and Rod Boothby’s traffic spike from his ad on Facebook for more.

Finally, if any of you try these approaches with your blog, brokerage or listings, please let me know your results. I’m curious to see what kind of effect Facebook can deliver.

Share on Facebook

It seems that city level real estate search is so thoroughly saturated now (Trulia, Shackprices, Move.com, Homegain, even Zillow getting in the game) that next great trend for web 2.0 services is a virtual land rush to cover your neighborhood, even your street.

Neighborhood Crossing launched this week (see Bringing neighbors together with NeighborhoodCrossing.com) by offering to help you connect with your neighbors online. The motivation behind the site? Neighborhood Crossing says:

It’s strange: these days, you can know people across the world, and not know who lives two houses down the street. That’s why we made neighborhoodcrossing.com.Our mission is to help you turn your neighborhood into a vibrant, well-connected place.

It’s a good pitch. In my post Niche Networks and Marketing Real Estate, I wrote how home owner associations or condo stratas could build out a social network of home owners. And I still think that may have merit as an interesting marketing gimmick for developer or builder. Especially if it were built on an existing platform (Facebook, Ning) that could be quickly scaled up.

Neighborhood Crossing strikes me as service whose heart is in the right place but I just can’t see it going very far. It didn’t help that I got numerous ‘Error processing your request’ messages across the site either.

Ultimately a successful web site solves a problem. Finding an good aggregated source of real estate listings online was a problem (still is, arguably) and the web gods have responded by giving us umpteen different options to choose from these days.

Personally though, I’ve never had a problem talking to my neighbors. And even if I wanted/needed to connect with them I’m not sure it isn’t something that couldn’t be accomplished with a Yahoo Group or even a shared Gmail calendar.

StreetAdvisor, on the other hand, takes the neighborhood concept even further (see the post on Realty Thoughts) allowing people to rate your neighbors, the nightlife, noise levels, even the quality of mobile reception and internet speeds.

Interesting concept – I’m thinking of moving right now and access to decent broadband is definitely an important criteria in a neighborhood for me. The site is usable and designed nicely enough though it suffers from a definite lack of content. Nothing worse than when you go to a site and find nothing but the crickets chirping.

They were giving away iPods to stimulate street reviews – no sure that will help. They’d do well to seed the site with content, but that’s a pretty big challenge when you’re hoping to compile data on every street in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. It’s a lofty goal that might be better realized if they just focused on one city. How about Portland?

Share on Facebook