Let’s face it… it seems as if every Real Estate Agent in town has jumped on the Facebook bandwagon. “Social Networking is the wave of the future,” “Real Estate transactions will be made on Facebook,” “If you don’t use Facebook, you’ll lose a lot of business.” Messages like these are deceiving and are leading agents to waste a lot of time that would be much better spent on other avenues to grow their business, like PROSPECTING. I wanted to share with you what I think are the top 3 mistakes Real Estate Agents are making using Facebook.
Mistake #1: Adding Too Many Friends
It’s no surprise that people generally have the idea that “more” is better. When you were younger, the coolest person in school was the person who had the most friends, right? Also, kids who had few friends were categorized as losers or “un-cool”. Naturally this concept has transferred to the virtual word. Unfortunately, it’s a myth that will take up time, rather than save you some.
Have you ever heard of the expression, “you need to dig through the dirt to find the gold”? By adding everyone and anyone in your Facebook network, you are basically adding more dirt that you will need to dig through. Think about it like this… If you add a lot of people to your network and other people add a lot of people to their network, and then those people add a bunch of people to their networking… where does it end? What that means is that your audience is filled with unqualified people. The bottom line is that expanding your “friend” base this way really isn’t effective. It’s probably as effective as sending out 10,000 mailers. Quality is much better than quantity.
Mistake #2: Separating Business from Pleasure
A challenge with a Facebook profile is that everything you post ends up becoming public. Your appearance online has an extremely powerful impact on how people perceive you. Ultimately, your profile can decide whether or not someone does business with you.
Expressing how much fun you had this weekend is great, but talking about how drunk you were is obviously not professional. Pictures of you and your friends are perfectly fine, but a picture of you being rowdy and obnoxious, simply doesn’t cut it.
Imagine if you were selling your home and you found a picture of a real estate agent you were interviewing partying or heavily drinking, would you feel comfortable with choosing them? Your Facebook profile has evolved into a visual resume.
You have two options to separate business from pleasure. You can either create 2 profiles, one for business and another for pleasure or you can simply stop posting things online which jeopardize your professionalism. Since maintaining two profiles can be a bit challenging and more than likely a waste of time, I suggest you choose the second option.
Mistake #3: All business
Do some of the friends you have on Facebook constantly market themselves and their listings? For example, someone posts, “I have a listing on 123 Primrose Lane, the price is just right and the property is great shape, anyone interested?” Imagine if every Real Estate Agent did that. No one wants to add someone to their network who solely promotes their own listings and sales. Most of your clients don’t want to see a bunch of self-advertisement on their Facebook home page either. The second they get annoyed, all they need to do is simply click the “Hide” button and they won’t see any of your updates again. If you become “that Real Estate Agent,” your profile will become meaningless and when you actually have useful or relevant information to post, no one’s going to see it.
To those of you who have a large list of friends, have you ever considered how many of your so-called “Friends” pressed the “hide” button?
The purpose of your Facebook isn’t to add a lot of friends, exploit your personal life, or market yourself, your Facebook should be used to make connections with prospects who may do business with you, people who can help you develop and grow and agents in other areas whom you may be able to refer business to.
Have you made any of the mistakes I listed above? What are you doing with your Facebook profile that you have found effective and powerful? How might you change what you’re doing on Facebook to make it a more effective tool for you?
The timing of this post for me Neil was great…Thank you so much. If not sooner, see you at the One-on-One Retreat in San Diego in January. I certainly dont wanna be that guy…youre describing. And while I am good at not posting too many personal notes of the weekends, I wanna make sure I dont post to many business posts either. Thanks again. jb
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Neil Schwartz Reply:
October 24th, 2009 at 3:07 PM
I am so glad you got something from the blog
I don't know if you heard from the staff..
We were notified last week by Century 21 that our office year to date is number 2 in the nation…
we have a great group of agents, I am looking forward to you soon being one of us too
Neil
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Neil Schwartz Reply:
October 30th, 2009 at 10:04 PM
It's all about moderation. You want to focus on posting stuff that you audience or “friends” find useful
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Remember what you publish online even if you have a professional and a personnal account created is attached to you and your online presence you are creating. As a Realtor you are the Brand and everything personnal and private you post is what you want your customers and future customers are going to know about you. Not to mention you professional peers too are listening and watching! Truth be known there are just some things that should remain private. So when creating/selling your brand (YOU) online be sure to consider what you want to be known about your brand (YOU). Consider this, why did you choose Century 21 Masters? What did you know? What does your target customer know? Maybe the answers to the above questions should be the next posts you share online! Be Productive in your Networking!!!
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Good post. 20% of your Facebook friends will give you 85% of the business. So being selective about who you associate with is important. The other 80% are “dirt”. So it's important to pick out the “hub leaders” on the social networking sites and establish a relationship with them.
Angella @ http://www.AngellaRaisian.com
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thanks for the share: i read this. I agree with points two and three, but not one–sortof.
I think you should friend up with anyone in your real estate market that either wants to own a home, already owns real estate or knows people who either want to own or already owns real estate (i.e everyone). I think also you should friend up anyone who connects directly with the people within your market (meat guy at the deli, joe the plumber, sam the appraiser …). Facebook provides the unique opportunity to connect with people who are vital to your business but that you never see on a day to day. Sharing both dinner party and water cool conversations on facebook provides a way to connect on a social level that can't be done on such a broad scale any other way.
so yah, maybe you don't want just anybody (even though I'd bet everyone in southern california, AZ and vegas has a friend or three who are considering retiring in thre NW where I sell retirement real estate. I think I could reach my 5k quota pretty fast if I got serious about it and then started focusing on working that audience and unfriending those that aren't providing me with warm referrals or happen to be incapable of witty banter.
And the more friends you have, the more of them that are currently appreciating your insider tips on real estate and your savvy personality, the more they will add to your conversations and you will find opps to gain referrals from them through conversion activities (webinars, landing page shares, dm responses).
10K flyers is always better than 5K — especially when you have zero-cost distribution and you're talking real estate.
(feel free to trash my perspective … I double dog dare you 😉
brett allen – Social Media Consultant for Realtors
www [dot] facebook [dot] com/allenopia
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Neil Schwartz Reply:
August 13th, 2010 at 4:39 PM
I think what you’re saying makes sense, however the problem is that real estate agents end up adding fellow real estate agents. You can definitely strategically add a good group of friends by targeting locally, but 99.9% of agents won’t do that.
If your trying to play the whole “referral game” by adding agents all over the country… it won’t work. Think of the tens of thousands of agents doing the same thing.
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The truth is you can't Twitter your way to success, have you seen anyone with any great accomplishments twittering, if you spend your time on productive activities instead of wasting time online you will have teriffic results. The problem is most agents don't know effective prospecting methods. And I don't mean just cold calling.
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Neil Schwartz Reply:
August 13th, 2010 at 5:00 PM
Agents are led to believe that by twittering… you’ll get business. Unfortunately it isn’t the case and probably never will be. Stick to the phones or door knocking.
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Neil, great information as usual…
To keep it simple, I explain Facebook like this: Facebook is like a big party, you make comments, you show the family photos (I like videos better), you mention what you do for a living or that you know of a “killer” real estate deal. The simple rule of thumb 80% non-business stuff and 20% business.
I have found that the less you talk about business, and focus more personal interaction, the more “attractive” you become.
I recently did a talk at a Keller-Williams office on the subject that Facebook and YouTube are filtering systems in building 1st your
A) Suspect List which turns into the
B) Prospect List with the goal of having the all important
C) Client List
With your B & C list is where us agents (I’m an insurance agent) drop the ball.
As they say, “The fortune is in the follow up”
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Neil Schwartz Reply:
August 11th, 2010 at 1:47 AM
I couldn’t agree with you more Robert. Most people end up following short on the “follow up”. That’s exactly why it’s important to call FSBO’s and Expireds because most agents talk to the prospect once or twice and then by the 3rd follow up you’re competing against maybe 1 or 2 other agents. The more you follow up, the better your odds.
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One more side note on Facebook…
There are more than 500,000,000 active users, 50% of those users log on in any given day. With those numbers, Facebook is a great way to have your potential clients get to know you.
After all, people like to do business with people they know, like and trust. That’s why I put pictures (or videos) of my family, my activities, hobbies, those thing create “CPI” or common points of interest.
For example, I have and ride a Harley, so I’ll post a few pictures of my riding adventures. Now if you’re a Harley rider, I’ve just created a CPI with you!
So where’s this going? Use Facebook!
Here the real tip, buy and forward a domain name to your Facebook profile. In conversations with suspect/prospects/clients I ask them are you on FaceBook? If so, I tell them, so am I check out my profile at:
FacebookRobert.com
Good thing FaceBookNeil.com is available (because I bought it for you!)…
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Neil Schwartz Reply:
August 11th, 2010 at 1:42 AM
That’s great Robert! Very good idea. You can also personalize your facebook page by getting something like facebook.com/(your name).
Either way, keep up the good work. Have you taken a look at https://answers.www.neilschwartz.net yet?
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Having fresh content with a call to action will generate interest in your FFP…That’s the easy part. What you do with them once you get them to “like” you is where it gets more difficult. Hopefully the call to action leads potential clients to provide you their contact information so you can follow-up and eventually gain a client. A good way to mix it up a little is to have a client post a testimonial on your FFP. This helps show you are credible and can close the deal.
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These are great basic rules and I’d like to add that the same principle should be applied to Twitter too. Here are the similar questions to ask:
1 – do you just “announce” things and never have a dialogue with others?
2 – are all of your posts links?
3 – are all of your posts retweets?
4- are all of your posts about your business? area you constantly selling?
Both FB and Twitter need to be a mix of various types of sharing – and that means not constantly having a one-way conversation. This is not a school PA system!
The idea that so many people automate all their posts and tweets is a testament that they do not understand that this new media is interactive – or should be!
If all you do is shout out your announcements, guess what? YOU ARE BORING. You need to engage. Read other people’s tweets. Share. Comment. Post a photo and make your stream diverse.
Love your article – wish more people would apply these basic thoughts to other forms of social media too.
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