Real Estate Marketing Online: Building Your Online Community

When you take a look at your broker website analytics, take a peek at Referring Websites. You are likely to find that one of the top referrers to your website is facebook.com. Your broker marketing efforts should include a presence in the world of social media.

Now take a look at your company Facebook page. If you don’t have one, create one today. It only takes a few minutes. With a little effort, you should be able to get 500 people or more to “like” your page. As a result, this will help you generate about 5% of the overall traffic to your real estate website. If you do more, your percentage of referring traffic will be even bigger.

The strategy here is to stay connected to your agents and your customers. Many brands fail at this because they take a corporate approach rather than an individual or entrepreneurial approach. The advantage that individuals and entrepreneurs have is significant. They know people personally and connecting to them on Facebook is a natural extension.

To grow your page, start small. Require all of your agents to connect to your page. From there, extend to your professional relationships. If you are a franchise, connect to other franchises around the country. In doing this, you help them and they help you. This is also a safe place to begin creating content. Try to do a post a day to your page. Put it on your calendar. Ask your managers to do the same. Post short statements about real estate just as you would tell people in person. (Note: A powerful source of information about local real estate trends is our SmartBroker report available on this site.)

Once you get comfortable, begin to invite your family and friends. They are interested in understanding the types of things that you do as a professional. They are also very likely to be a good source of business and referrals.

The last stage is connecting to your past clients and current prospects. If you have their email addresses, invite them. You will need to do this at a rate of about 50 to 100 per week. Anymore than that and Facebook will slow you down. After that, be consistent and persistent. Every time you get a new email address, be sure to invite them to your Facebook page in concert with adding them to your address book or contact data base. A great real estate CRM or lead management system makes this easy.

Market your Facebook page everywhere you market your website. Put it in your email signature, on your website, on your business cards, on your flyers, everywhere. The reality is that consumers like Facebook. They may not be interested in your website, but they want to stay current on what happening in the real estate industry. With Facebook, you keep showing-up on their radar as they are surfing, searching, and researching. Facebook can become a powerful real estate marketing tool.

If you want to read a good book about Facebook strategies for business that work, take a look at The Thank You Economy by Gary Vaynerchuck, Harper Collins. (No relation.)

The impact from this strategy comes slowly, but it comes. You will find your Facebook customers will come to trust your brand, and you will be top of mind for them when they need real estate services.

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