Facebook is an essential component of any business. When you consider that Papa John’s Facebook Strategy was directly responsible for improving sales by 28% in 2009 and Levi’s reported a 50% increase in traffic to their website they traced directly back to their “Like” button and the integration of Facebook Connect and OpenGraph, you start to recognize its power. For real estate, a business page is critical, but the fact is, most real estate professionals do not utilize the features and functionality of the page to the best of their ability. So, here is my definitive guide to building a successful real estate business page that does NOT require tons of your time. I like automation and conversion, so that’s what this guide will focus on. Building a page with features and content that are designed to impress visitors, create fans and push them back to your website and lead generators where they can convert to contacts, leads and clients.
What most Realtors fail at is landing page optimization. A Facebook Fan Page is nothing more than a landing page that is designed to call visitors to action to both “like” the page so you can message them later and drive traffic back to the lead generators on your website. NOTE: nowhere here did I say, make yourself a fan page and extol all your virtues and talk about yourself!!!! Sadly, that is what real estate professionals do. They take a great opportunity to reach the 450 million people on Facebook and turn it into an “About Me” fest.
If you are like me, you have probably noticed that in the past 8-10 months you have been bombarded with requests to “like” the pages of hundreds of Realtors. If you are also like me, you probably didn’t “like” these pages! Why? Because they were irrelevant to you, they were boring, or worse yet, YOU ARE A REALTOR IN THE SAME MARKET and it would make very little sense to support your competition’s page! Needless to say, I didn’t.
What makes you want to “Like” a page?
1.   Relevance (it needs to be relevant to people that would use your services). So you need to provide status updates not just about real estate but also about the community!
2.   It needs to have tools that allow people ready to value their home or search for a new home. So, make sure you have conversion tools like a property search, contact form and home valuation tool on the page as well as your recent listings.
3.   Visual Appeal! The page needs to be pretty and capture the attention of the audience.
Think you can’t do that in Facebook?
Check out these 2 pages
Kevin Tomlinson
Kevin Tomlinson is a celebrity real estate agent selling condos in the Miami Beach area and uses a custom FBML page to visually appeal to his audience and solid call to actions to drive people seeking information through his mini site on Facebook then through to his website to begin robust property searches.
See Kevin’s Custom Facebook Page
Arbour Realty
Arbour Realty had a very unique and developed green eco-conscious brand with lots of tools including property search, an ajaxed home valuation tool and a community gallery. They sought to preserve the brand and tools on Facebook and developed a page that mimicked their website as closely as possible with a multiple tab layout. The result is breathtaking – you almost forget you are inside Facebook while navigating the page.
See Arbour Realty’s Custom Facebook Page
The secret sauce is creating a call to action welcome page and a Listing Search page then supplementing the functionality with applications like LinkedIn, Realtor.com’s MyListings and Slideshare. Creating a multimedia experience along with the delivery of quality content all within an interactive user experience is the key to creating the most valuable experience possible for visitors.
Here are 5 Tips that will help you build one of your own.
1.   The custom welcome page and/or custom IDX search page
Landing on a Facebook wall is just boring. It is a wall of information that really doesn’t give people the full picture of your real estate business. And let’s face it, most of the real estate content there is somewhat boring, so create a custom Welcome page that uses proven conversion psychology to call visitors to action to fan your page and push over to your website and lead generators. Make sure you include a brief bio, all your contact information and call to actions to your lead generation tools like property search, market reports, contact form and even community profiles. Resources for buyers and sellers would also be helpful.
Examples: Kevin Tomlinson Leigh Brown Sotheby’s Sam Miller
Bonus Tips: Be sure to use the FBML application to customize your landing page and set the new page as your default landing page for new visitors. Also, remember that calls to action that push visitors back over to your website are the most crucial thing you can include on a custom welcome page! Any decent web designer can help you create a page of your own or if you are interested in trying your hand at FBML, then you can purchase templates for real estate fan pages here.
2.   The things people forget!
Fully fill out your fan page profile – make sure you include your name, a profile picture of you or your logo, contact information, brief bio and
Promote your new Facebook Fan Page to your friends by suggesting it to them through Facebook and list it as a link on your personal profile alongside your website and/or blog.
3.   Promoting your fan page.
Make sure people know about your fan page so, be sure to write a new blog post about your page and ask people reading to fan it and use the Fan Page Widget to promote your new page on your website or blog. You can also buy the Facebook ads to it, if you want to spend a little money to build your presence. But, truly the best way to gain traction is to just suggest it to your friends.
Bonus Tip: Most people forget that your largest Facebook presence is on your profile, so remember to list your Facebook Fan page as one of your websites on your Facebook profile.
4.   The essential applications
Creating the right content for a Facebook Page is essential, but also making sure you use the right application and streamline that process is important to keeping a page fresh. Here are a 5 tools to help get you started in providing a richer more useful experience for visitors and an efficient experience for you.
Realtor.com’s See My Listings if you currently use Realtor.com, you should definitely have this application on your page. It will automatically pull in all your Realtor.com listings onto your fan page.
Social RSS Got a blog? Then make sure all that content is pushing back over to your page with this handy application.
My LinkedIn Profile allows you to install a LinkedIn widget to your fan page so you can connect oyoru Facebook and LinkedIn networks.
I Endorse. I Endorse is a Facebook application that allows you to collect endorsements for the purpose of building your reputation whether you provide a product, service, or just want to have fun.
Slideshare. SlideShare is the world’s largest community for sharing presentations. Upload your presentations, documents, PDFs, add mp3 audio to make webinars or embed Youtube videos into them. You can also import your SlideShare.net presentations into Facebook. Every Realtor should be using Slideshare on their profile and page!!!! It allows you to share listing presentations with potential clients and instantly makes you an expert!
Bonus Tip: Use Friendfeed.com. If you aggregate and push your entire lifestream of social media content through Friendfeed, you can easily populate your page content from your Digg, Twitter, Stumbleupon, Youtube, etc accounts.
5.   Use the custom url/username feature
Once you have over 100 fans, you can apply for a keyword rich custom username by going to www.facebook.com/username. This keyword rich url is public and is searchable by Google so you can build SEO value to your page which pushes some of that value back to your primary website (of course, this assumes you LINKED to your website in your profile!).
