Internet marketing these days means Social Media! Where else can you instantly get the word out to thousands of targeted people about your real estate services? The key to social media is building up followers that would most likely be interested in your service. These people are said to be your “targeted audience.”
Facebook is the mecca of social media (although twitter is coming on quickly). If you haven’t already done so you should jump on the band wagon and create a Profile Page: All Facebook members get their own profile page when they sign up. Use this as your canvas to upload pictures, logos and other information about your company. Sure you can setup a personal profile page to communicate with all your friends, but what you really want to do is create one for your company.
After researching ways to use Facebook as a marketing tool I was shocked at how many different ways you could take advantage of it. Along with Profile Pages, Facebook offers you a ton of other ways to get the word out about your we buy houses service.
Groups: Use the site’s Groups feature to network with your target audience. You can join existing groups or create one just for your business to amp up the buzz about its services.
Some additional information about the difference between Fan(Profile) Pages and Groups…
- Unlike groups, fan pages are visible to unregistered people and are thus indexed (important for google ranking);
- Unlike pages, groups allow to send out “bulk invites” (you can easily invite all your friends to join the group while with pages you will be forced to drop some invites manually). Groups are thus better for viral marketing, meaning that any group member can also send bulk invites to the friends of his.
- groups support “Ugly Urls”, fan pages do not. (ugly url=http://youtube.com/watch?v=pQHX-SjgQvQ; not ugly = http://strugglinginvestor.com/articles/facebook-marketing)
- Fan pages allow for extra applications added, groups do not
- Fan pages have Visitor Statistics (Page insights), groups do not
- Fan pages have Related event creation and invitation, groups do not
- Fan pages allow promotion with social ads, groups do not
Facebook Marketplace: College kids use the site’s Marketplace to scout out used couches and find roommates, but a savvy business owner can advertise services and product sales, as well as search for new employees.
The old marketplace was owned and operated by Facebook but the new one is a much more elegant platform by oodle which opens it up to over 200 local and national sites affiliated with oodle. The Marketplace is truly different than other popular sites like eBay or Craigslist since it is integrated into the fabric of Facebook allowing you to search by your friends listings, your network listings, and your location settings. All designed to give your own unique views on the Marketplace that you don’t get with eBay or Craigslist. Additionally there are features like Sell for a Cause, or Giving it Away that you don’t see on a site like eBay that needs to charge for listings so unlike eBay every listing on the Facebook Marketplace is free of charge!
I can think of quite a few uses for the marketplace like selling ebooks, or giving away information in pdf format people in need. You could also advertise your for rents or if you are selling a house or even looking for motivated sellers. use your imagination.
Networks: Ignoring the Networks question when you create your company’s profile could lose it a lot of business. List your business’s city, industry, neighborhood and any other relevant information to let potential customers and business partners know where they can find you.
Facebook Badge: Facebook describes its Badge feature as “a customizable way to share your Facebook information on other Web sites.” Creating your own Badge will link Facebook friends to your company’s Web site. The default badge is your profile picture and your name. For email signatures, I prefer the signature badge. It has your photo, name and various contact information. The photo badge is entertaining, but unless you have “business related” photographs in your albums, I’d steer clear of it.
Events: Instead of printing out flyers and mailers the next time you want to advertise an event, use the free Facebook Events app to get the word out. You could advertise a seminar for realtors to learn about short sales or working with investors.
FunWall: If you want to keep in close contact with your Facebook friends, use the FunWall to create a message or send a greeting to everyone at once. Keep people up to date on the current market or announce articles you have written that will lead people to your squeeze pages.
Top Friends Network: As a marketing tool, the Top Friends network serves is another way to group your contacts, keep an eye on your target demographic, and quickly and effectively reach out to your company’s best customers. Great place to put your top buyers.
Inbox: Send secure, private messages to your clients on Facebook with the Inbox app. You can still send out mass messages, but only to the contacts you select.
Notes: This is basically a blogging feature because of the way users post links, messages, photos and other information that they want to share with friends. Even if you maintain a blog elsewhere, give your Facebook friends an exclusive peek into your company’s news and behind-the-scenes schedule by posting here.
Contact Importer: The contact importer helps you “find your friends on Facebook.” If you want to find out if your clients or other work-related contacts use Facebook, upload your contacts from AIM, Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail and more to find out if they’re online.
Share Partners: When you publish updates to your company blog or Web site, add the link or a link and a photo to your Facebook profile using the Share Partners app.
Buy Advertising Space: I didn’t know this but you can buy an ad on Facebook. It’s called Facebook Flyers Basic so you can create banner-like advertising on networks. This is a great way to target advertising to a specific demographic. Facebook also has Flyers Pro — a cost-per-click advertising program that’s triggered by keyword searches (like Google AdWords). The article has more in-depth tips on how to do this and I’d be interested if anyone reading this has tried either advertising method
Facebook Social Ads: Whether you’ve purchased Facebook Social Ads or have in some way interacted with these ads, you may be underestimating the power of this Facebook feature. First, as an advertiser, you can select very targeted demographics for your ad campaign, much as you can with Google Adwords. Second, as a business owner utilizing Facebook to grow your brand and network, engaging with ads is a powerful way to increase your visibility. Here is a great review of the Six Types of Facebook Ads which are:
- Event Ad
- Video Ad
- Gifts Ad
- Page Ad
- Website Ad
- House Ad
Facebook Connect: For now, Facebook Connect remains a developer program for partner sites to allow visitors to sign in using their Facebook ID and voluntarily exchange data about their activity on those sites back to their Facebook friends via their activity feeds. But targeting ads to Facebook members on partner sites through Facebook Connect could become a potentially powerful revenue generator. At the very least, it would multiply Facebook’s available advertising inventory beyond its own site. At most, it would create better returns by letting Facebook place highly targeted ads in different contexts where people may be more receptive to them.
One of the reasons ads perform so poorly on social networks is because they are the worst place to show someone an ad. People on social networks tend to be in a socializing mode instead of a shopping or information-gathering mode. But if you show the same people an ad on another type of site (say, a clothing ad on a fashion blog), and you can target that ad based on their social profile (you know their age, gender, and where they live), that in theory should be a formula for better response rates. Facebook started down this road before with Beacon, before that effort blew up in its face because of privacy concerns. So it has to tread carefully. But it learned from Beacon, and FB Connect is completely opt-in. So far, it is a success.
Facebook Lexicon (count the number of occurrences of terms across profile, group and event Walls every day. )
Facebook Share: one of the untold stories about sharing on Facebook is the simple power of the Facebook Share button. With the latest Facebook home page redesign, the Facebook Share button just became a lot more powerful: now, every shared item is guaranteed to show up on users’ friends’ home pages.
For a great article about setting up Facebook Share Button look here
How to Increase Your Site’s Traffic Through Facebook Share
Facebook Polls: Want to know what people who are active online influencers are thinking about your brand or company? Or about anything else related to your newest product or service? Facebook polls are a simple and easy way to reach your target demographic and get their opinions in real time. Check out the Facebook Advertising page for more information.
Mini Feed and News Feed: While all the channels I’ve described above are useful for grassroots marketing on Facebook, the wind that blows your marketing seeds is Facebook’s News Feed. While you’re not able to publish directly to the feeds (unless you’re willing to pay or build an application), Facebook’s Mini Feed and News Feed archive your users’ engagement with your brand and syndicate it to their friends, networks, and beyond, amplifying the reach of your campaign by orders of magnitude.
When Facebook users join your group, RSVP to your event, become fans of your page, share your photos, or further engage with your brand in any of these channels, Facebook automatically adds a feed item to their Mini Feed. That feed item exists for all to see, and is often in a prominent location on Facebook profile pages. Facebook’s News Feed, which occupies most of the login landing page, then amalgamates each user’s friends’ Mini Feeds into one unified stream of “recent news”. It’s possible that one Mini Feed item generated by a Facebook user could be seen in hundreds of their friends’ News Feeds.
The News Feed has revolutionized the way information is shared between friends on Facebook. This can mean great things for your campaign and your brand.
These are all the facebook features I have found that could be used in combination or alone to increase your exposure to your target market. If you know of any others leave a comment.
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Very good article. I knew facebook could be a useful tool but I hadn’t jumped into it for its potential just yet.
.-= Anthony´s last blog ..I got a lead! =-.
Thanks Anthony. I’m currently in the process of building a Fan Page for my local business and trying to figure out the best way to ad content to attract people. I think local market news would work best. gonna have to start reading the news paper
Very good article. I knew facebook could be a useful tool but I hadn’t jumped into it for its potential just yet.
.-= Anthony´s last blog ..I got a lead! =-.
Author
Thanks Anthony. I’m currently in the process of building a Fan Page for my local business and trying to figure out the best way to ad content to attract people. I think local market news would work best. gonna have to start reading the news paper