Reader Mailbag: Facebook Pages for Real Estate Investors

I‘ve had a couple questions around using Facebook for real estate investing businesses, and particularly there seems to be some confusion over the difference between profiles, groups, and (fan) pages.

Facebook makes this as clear as mud, so let me try to explain the difference:

• Profiles – You have to have a profile to use Facebook. This is your personal page, and is a good way to make personal contact with other Facebook users if you so desire.
• Groups – Groups can be set up for anything by anybody, and you can restrict access. The advantage is that you can send email to your group members, which could be used for a buyers list. The disadvantages are that they aren’t super flexible and functionality is limited.
• Pages – Until recently, these were known as Fan Pages, but Facebook decided that “fan” isn’t always the best description of somebody who likes your company or you, and they changed the act of becoming a fan to “liking” instead. Along with this change, these are more generically now known as Pages. The advantage is that they are very flexible and act as a Facebook profile (web page) for a business (Facebook doesn’t allow businesses to have profiles, only people). One disadvantage compared to a group is that you can’t send email to your fans/likers like you can with groups (there is a way to message them, but your messages end up somewhere that they won’t find or check).

So, here’s what you should do to add Facebook marketing to your real estate investing business:

1. You need a Profile to use Facebook. You don’t have to use it or share all your personal information on it. Set one up if you don’t currently have one. It will allow you to create Pages, for which you’ll be the administrator.
2. Once you have a profile, you can set up Pages. You can customize the Pages to include content from other places you publish, you can publish to your Page (including the “wall”), and you can even insert custom FBML (like HTML for websites, this is Facebook Markup Language). Use Pages to both share content, AND get visitors to opt in to your list like you do with squeeze pages.

Facebook hides Page creation for some reason (it’s under Advertising), but here’s a shortcut for you: http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php

Why should real estate investors bother?

1. There are half a BILLION regular users of Facebook. This is too big a community to not be a part of.
2. Pages (as opposed to Profiles and Groups) are indexed by the search engines like Google, and Facebook is an ultimate authority site, which means you can show up in the search engine when possible buyers and sellers are looking for a solution.

One last important tip: Once you get your Page created, grab a custom username for it. Facebook offers these at: http://www.facebook.com/username/. This gives you a custom web address like www.facebook.com/username. Consider using keywords like ’sellyourchicagohome’ rather than your business name so you show up in the search engines when people are looking to sell their Chicago home. They likely won’t be searching your business name, so this is a key strategy.

Want to see an example? Check out http://www.facebook.com/Starbucks – they have well over 7 million fans/likers. The difference for us is that we want to incorporate an opt-in rather than simply branding, grabbing leads off our page.

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