If you want to leverage Facebook, you have to play by Facebook’s rules, which means an active & engaged audience on your Facebook business page.

How do you keep your Facebook page engaged?

Today I am going to work with you and show you 7 quick and easy ways that you as a real estate agent can use to get more engagement on your Facebook business page.  

You guys have been asking me “how do I get people to actually talk to me?” “how do I get people to engage with me?’ “how do I get people to respond to my post?”

There are a lot of different things you can do, but today we are going to talk about 7 very specific ones that work pretty much all the time.

Alight, so there are 7 quick and easy things you can do as a real estate agent that will get you more engagement on your Facebook business page.

SOUND IS OFF IN THE VIDEO FOR THE FIRST 35 SECONDS. SORRY!!

SEVEN quick and easy ways!

When you have an active and thriving Facebook business page, you’re going to have an active and thriving real estate business.

It’s going to take time for that to happen, but let’s face it with the way everything is going with social media, you have to be not just ON social media, you have to be social on social media.

So I am going to give you some hacks, 7 ways you can use different things so you don’t have to constantly be creative and constantly coming up with things. Let’s start with the first one.

Caption This

Here is the first one, and this one works all the time, it works all the time. You need to find, and I will explain “find” in just a moment, or “take” or “snap” a funny picture and post it with the words “Caption This”.

See what people put on their, engage them as they respond to it, as everyone who captions or comments something make sure you respond to each one of them.

When I say “find” or “snap” a funny picture, take a picture, take a picture of your cat or your dog doing something funny, take a funny picture of a position your kid is in.  One of my kids even now, I find him in positions as he is a various reader and he was always reading upside down, in a pretzel, in weird shapes, when he was reading.

I would take his picture and post it to my personal profile, but you can actually do this on your business page and ask, “does anyone else have a kid that does this?” or “does anyone else have a cat that does this?” or “does anyone have a dog that does this?” or “anybody else seen this?” etc. That’s where the viral comes from.

When you share things like that. Say “Caption this” or “Can anyone else relate?”  

So “find” or “take” a funny picture.

Now, when I say “find”, if you “find” a picture on Facebook or anywhere else it doesn’t matter where, if you didn’t take it – it is not your picture!

You would need to share that picture by using the share button or by copying and pasting the link from where you found it.

You CANNOT upload it yourself. So go out and take pictures, in fact our Leads and Leverage members, one of the big challenges we’re doing in our 21 day challenge is gathering a bunch of local photos so we can use them on our Facebook business page and our Instagram page.

Tagging Business Pages

Number two, get yourself in front of a new audience by tagging other business pages.

Now, there are parameters in all of this. One of the things you need to do if you’re going to tag another business page, make sure you have a legitimate reason to tag them.

Otherwise, you will be marked as a spam page and shut down by Facebook.

What do I mean by this? If you’re going to be taking pictures, like number one, at a business or around businesses or you go for coffee and there are other businesses around you that have Facebook business pages, tag them.

Just say, “I was here, I went to this store and this store and I did that!” Make sure when you are tagging it is legitimate. These aren’t people, these are business pages.

Every time you go somewhere, for example today is the first day of a large three-day street fair, Taste of Coeur d’Alene and Art on the Green, it’s huge here every single year.

As a real estate agent, if I currently had a local business page I was running for my business, I would absolutely be tagging as I was meeting new and different vendors on the street. I would be posting, tagging and sharing all the different activity on my business page.

I would be live streaming from this event on my business page. Get yourself in front of their audience by tagging their pages, whatever you’re doing, if you’re running to the bank, tag the bank page. If you are having coffee or at a restaurant tag those pages and be out there.

Tell Your Fans You Love & Appreciate Them

Number three, once in a while tell your fans you love and appreciate them.

In fact don’t just tell them, show them by getting gifts of appreciation when you hit new milestones on your page.

Do different things for them like livestreams, give them things that are helpful. You can do livestreams with other businesses.

You could do a giveaway, one of the things we always did, we would go to a local frozen yogurt shop and purchase free passes. We did it the coffee shop and other drive thrus and we would give those away.

It was awesome because we would give those away every time something happened or we wanted to show appreciation.

Tell your fans you love them and appreciate them, then show them! 

Give them something, a fro-yo things, a coffee, an event, it could be an inside scoop on something cool and upcoming, share an event with, do something to show them you care!

Engage With Your Audience on a Personal Level

Number four, engage with your audience on a personal level.

This is not the place to separate personal from business, people buy from people. They do not want to buy from a company.

You need share a personal passion of yours, it builds social connection which builds trust, so what are you passionate about?

Are you someone who really like habitat for humanity?

Or the local humane society or the local food bank or are you apart of a church ministry you’d like to share about or you support an orphanage or you’re doing a fun run for MS, share these things.

Show it!

Connect with people on a personal level. It is really important that they know you personally.

A lot of you that we’ve adopted four boys, that we have traveled in our RV for a year and a half, a lot of you know that we like to support orphanages, we have adopted cats and dogs so you know things that are apart of me and they resonate with some of you guys.

You have to share your personal, you have to share especially stuff that is easy for people to get behind and can engage with.

Do Not Use Link Shorteners

Number five, do not use link shorteners anymore like Bitly on your post.

I know experts and gurus are out there telling you to track the stuff and get those in there, but here is the problem in that: People don’t know you, trust you or like you, yet.

You will get a higher, almost 100% higher click-thru rate if you reveal the entire link.

People like to be seen where the’re being taken. They’ve been taken to scam sites, fake news sites, so you need to show them the full link. If you’re going to use a link on a post on Facebook, you need to include the entire link.

DO NOT Bitly it or shorten it, do not TinyUrl it, you are working on building trust so be fully transparent. You can still get stats on the other end, it’s not worth the loss of click-thrus to see what people are doing in Bitly, it is not worth it.

It’s all not worth how Facebook looks at that, people aren’t clicking so they view the site as a page they shouldn’t trust and they don’t like Bitly, so please use your FULL URL!  

Follow and Engage With Influence in Your Niche

Number six, follow and engage with influencers in your niche.

What do I mean? Connect with locals and local pages that are active on Facebook. There are local groups that are active on Facebook, in our area there are a lot of Shop and Swap, Buy and Sell groups. There is a group called Crazy Love where they help people.

There’s a North Idaho foodies group where people share all the different places they’ve eaten, recommend, etc. There are all kinds of groups, there are tons of theater groups, audition groups, there are photography  pages, our chamber of commerce is active, our fire stations and police districts are all active on Facebook, so follow and engage with them in your area.

That means if they have something that is relevant to your people share it and tag them.

If you have something that would be relevant to their people and it’s not a sales pitch, share it to them.

We have a page in our area we have created. It’s all the different things to do in North Idaho and we just share constantly to that page. We have people who are constantly like “We’re doing this fundraiser for this, can you share it?”

Absolutely.

Engage with people. Engage with influencers. Engage with people who are active on Facebook. Use those. Engage with those. Interact with them.

Post Funny Meme, Pictures, Jokes & Videos

Number seven, is kind of easy and really fun, but you have to do it the right way!

Post funny memes, pictures, jokes and videos because sometimes humor gets the most attention. It just does.  Use it. Leverage it.

Here’s how you do it. If you can’t create something of your own then you need to go and find funny sources and pages that have funny things and click that share button and share it to your page.

You’re going to get traction from these. It’s called a viral post, If they’re  funny and engaging people are going to respond to them and you get the benefit from that.

Yes, you are sharing it from another page and yes, they get the benefit from the share, but you get the benefit from the likes, the comments and the shares from your page and you want that.

"Why would you want engagement? Why does it matter? Because that is the key factor Facebook looks at to know whether your page is legit and your ads."

If your page isn’t considered legit and engaging by Facebook, guess what?

Your ads are going to cost you more money. Flat out, plain and simple. It’s harder for you to get out in the algorithm if Facebook thinks your page is not up to snuff.

How many pages are up to snuff? Let me tell you when I look at the pages to watch in my Facebook analytics compared to my pages. I follow 15-20 pages similar to mine that are in my demographic or in my network.  

I am sure my engagement is light years beyond their engagement. Why? Because I get free traffic, cheap ads, free relevant page likes, and so Facebook keeps pushing things out.

You need to be using these things by using funny pictures, tagging other pages, appreciating your fans, engaging on a person level, not using link shorteners, following and engaging with influencers in your local area, posting funny pictures, memes and jokes.

You need to be doing all 7 of these things, not all at once, but set up a schedule that every Monday, I am going to do number one, Tuesday I will do this, set that up.

Then reuse your content, not to soon but every few months because it is new stuff and not everyone sees it.

Plus, it really is a great way to leverage your time, your focus and your energy.