As the world is becoming more comfortable in the era of social media, Facebook has stood out as being the most important platform for networking and is second nature for many people who organically use the platform as an extension that is weaved through their social lives. This, of course, means it is incredibly important that you are both deliberate and natural in your use of Facebook to engage people with your real estate practice.

Once again, I seek some wisdom from broker Melanie Piche of the BREL team at Sage Real Estate; a creative and effective mastermind in digital strategy.

She breaks down the value of Facebook for us:

“You can connect with your sphere of influence and past clients, you can be seen by friends of your sphere / past clients (referrals!), you can have a business page you can promote and be regularly interacting with your target market, you can promote original content on Facebook to gain new readers for as little as $.03 per click and you can participate in community groups and connect with your farm area.”

In a way, Facebook almost brings us back to the classic style of networking seen in small towns and slower times. You can stay engaged with what is going on with everyone, you can see social dynamics within your community and you can engage with new people easily because you share friends, interests and spaces.

However, as Melanie points out, many realtors are notorious for using Facebook to pull away from this community-based engagement.

“They put the word ‘REALTOR’ in their name, they only post their listings, they brag about how busy they are and how many sales they are closing, they don’t interact with people and they spam community groups. These are huge Facebook no-no’s that can hurt their brand significantly.”

To use Facebook successfully, we should be striving to get closer to the intimacy and personal nature of old-school, community-based networking, not getting farther from it. This means we should use Facebook to engage in dynamic conversations, give more to the communities we are a part of, gather insight and treat people as individuals rather than using the convenience of Facebook to treat them as numbers.

Next week: Content and Conversion