Facebook has long been and continues to be the leading social media platform. Over the years we have seen a strong migration of real estate professionals joining the social network in search of a new, never-ending lead source. Unfortunately for most, generating leads from Facebook has been extremely difficult, if not impossible. As a result, many users continue to struggle or have given up entirely. Fortunately, I’m here to help! Below are 3 simple steps that you can take to help improve your business.

Use Your Personal Account
Facebook insists that business do not create profiles but rather use business specific pages. The issue is that these pages have limitations to their ability to interact with others on the network. As a real estate professional you are able to use your profile to promote yourself and your business provided that it’s done in a tactful manner.

This isn’t always a popular approach amongst people who use Facebook for business but Realtors® have a distinct advantage over many other businesses in that they are their business. Often times you will see people create a second profile specifically for their business. I would avoid this as there are several issues with using multiple profiles.

For starters, when people search for you on Facebook you will appear twice. This can lead to confusion or people “friend requesting” the “wrong” profile. When this happens you are unlikely to reach out to that person and ask them to use your other one. The other large issue is that if you have two profiles, Mary Smith and Mary Smith – Professional REALTOR, most people will avoid the latter as it suggests that this particular profile will be all business as opposed to people getting to know the real you.

Post and Interact
As you can imagine there is a tremendous amount of information that passes through Facebook every second of every day. In order to make the network manageable for its users Facebook incorporates many levels of filters. These filters use complex mathematical algorithms to determine what is most interesting to its users. What this means to you is that if Facebook feels that you and your messages are largely irrelevant to others it will start dropping you from other people’s feeds even though you continue to post. Likewise, people’s posts will no longer appear in your feed. One great way to test this is to look at someone on your “Friend’s List” that you have not seen post anything for a while and click on their profile. You will be amazed at how many things they have posted that you simply did not see in your news feed. Once you do this they will once again resume appearing in your feed.

The best way to avoid Facebook obscurity is by constantly posting interesting things and interacting with as many people and posts as possible. Liking, commenting and sharing are all great ways to keep yourself relevant. The more you interact and people reciprocate, the more you and your messages will appear in other people’s feeds.

Keep Your Posts Interesting
When posting it will be tempted to load your feed with business and promotional type elements and this makes sense. Having said that, it must be in balance. If all you do is continuously post business related messages you are essentially going onto Facebook to advertise. How many people do you know go on Facebook to look at ads all day? If your posts are ads only, then they will receive little to no interaction and soon your messages will fall off.

I would recommends sticking to about 10 percent business. If you notice, when Facebook adds in advertisement to your news feed it is about every 10th message or so or roughly 10 percent of the time.

In addition to this, do not make your business related postings boring ads. Instead take advantage of the network and how people use it and make your messages more personal or appealing. Did you just get a couple into their first home? Be sure to post a picture of the couple and tag them in it (with their permission of course). By doing this your message will appear in both your news feed as well as theirs. If they interact with it, which they will likely do, then even more people will see it. From there, one of their friends may interact in a way that suggests they need assistance and now you have an in with them or perhaps they may reach out to you directly.

There are many ways to generate business from Facebook. These are some quick tips that will help you get your message out to more people more quickly. You must remember to be patient and to stick with it. Despite Facebook’s size and instant nature, building a referral network through the social media giant does take time.

Michael Darmanin is the Chief Operating Officer with Sellstate Realty Systems Network, Inc.

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