Featured Download: The Facebook Page Setup Checklist. The step-by-step guide you need to get your Facebook page up and running and bringing in real estate leads. (Download Now)
Quick Links
Could it? What you don’t know can (and will) hurt you!
With so many “experts” teaching real estate agents how to use Facebook, and every single “expert” telling them something different…
…is it any wonder that real estate agents are confused and befuddled about how to use Facebook to generate real estate leads?
How do you know who to listen to?
Here’s a hint…
If your resident “expert” jumps right to “run this ad” or “find a page that is doing it right and emulate it” then your “expert” isn’t an expert. Run, don’t walk, away from them.
They are teaching you to decorate the inside of your house and you don’t even have a house plan to build the house from yet.
It’s one thing to accumulate ideas for how you’d like to decorate, and quite another to buy pictures and pillows before you even have your house plans picked out.
When something as simple as your Facebook business page name can make or break your success on Facebook, it’s insanely important to name your page a name that benefits you, benefits the consumer, and falls well within Facebook’s terms of use.
[Tweet “Your #Facebook business page name could kill your #realestate lead generation”]
When my Leads and Leverage members go through my Facebook Page Setup Strategy Workshop (If you aren’t a member and want to go through the Workshop, you are welcome to), they immediately come to the LNL forums and say…
Before I joined LNL and went through the workshop, I setup my Facebook page and I gathered page likes… but now that I’ve been through your Facebook Page Setup Strategy Workshop, I realized that I’ve named my page all wrong! Now what do I do? I’ve tried finding names similar to what you suggest, but other people are using the names that I like… and what about my custom URL, what should I do about that, and my website URL, shouldn’t my website name and my page name be the same?
Therefore, I’m writing this to help each one of you process through naming your Facebook business page.
Facebook Business Page Struggles
I’m going to dive into each aspect of your Facebook business page naming struggle…
Ok. First and foremost, take a big, deep, breath! We will get through this.
Your Facebook Business Page Name
Yes, your Facebook business page name DOES affect your ability to generate leads, but, you’ve had it named like it is for awhile, it’s not like it’s suddenly going to kill you now.
But, you now understand how it seriously affects your lead generation efforts so let’s get it taken care of!
Don’t worry about what other people have named their Facebook business pages. It doesn’t matter if you duplicate their name or not.
The one and only time you should never, under any circumstances, duplicate a name is if the name is a registered trademark… and since the way I teach you to name your page isn’t to use trademarked names, you shouldn’t fall under this issue.
How do you know if a name is trademarked?
Typically, it’s the name of a brand, product or business. It’s pretty simple really.
You are going for a lifestyle focused name here, the likelihood of you running into a trademark issue is pretty infinitesimal.
The other aspect to consider… if the name you want is being used by another page and it is a high activity page… in other words, it has hundreds or thousands of page likes and it posts several times daily, you may want to think of another variation of the page name you like.
Remember, Facebook business pages come and go.
[Tweet “#Facebook business pages come & go. Will yours outlast the rest? #realestate””]
Thousands upon thousands are created and then abandoned because people don’t know how to use them.
Don’t let an inactive and/or abandoned Facebook business page dictate how you create and run yours. You clearly aren’t copying them – they aren’t doing anything TO copy!!
Facebook Custom URL
If you already HAVE your custom URL, then as long as you don’t have your brokerage name in the URL, you are probably good to go.
You can’t change it so you’ll need to live with it, whatever it is. Unless of course, you start fresh with a new page name.
In the beginning (when Facebook business pages were first introduced by Facebook) it was thought that having a keyword rich custom URL would help with page rankings.
The reality?
They have zero effect. What really matters when it comes to SEO is the content on the page itself… within the About section of the page and the page posts. Those two items matter when it comes to SEO. A custom URL does not.
You Aren’t Going For Branding
Here’s the deal, despite what so many people are trying to teach you about “branding”… you aren’t going for “branding” here… you simply aren’t.
No, people are not going to remember you more and jump to use your services because you have the exact same name everywhere.
Though many will work hard at convincing you this is the case, it is absolutely NOT the case.
Despite the fact that they use “consumer survey’s” to help support their point, every single piece of psychological research out there points directly to the fact that observational behavior is drastically different than stated behavior.
In other words, we don’t do what we say we do. We do something different (and often don’t even realize it). This is commonly where the term “buyers are liars” comes from. Consumers aren’t intentionally lying, they just don’t do what they say they do.
When it comes to coordinating your website URL with your Facebook business page… don’t. It’s not even a blip on the radar for you.
[Tweet “When it comes to coordinating your #realestate website URL with your #Facebook business page… don’t.”]
Most real estate agent website URLs are focused specifically on real estate keywords… they often include the words “selling, buying, homes, etc.”
Since you’ve already been through my Facebook Page Setup Strategy Workshop, you KNOW about naming your page with industry terminology.
Now, this doesn’t mean that you are creating a “stealth” Facebook business page.
That isn’t what you are doing and in fact, it’s bad for business (not to mention in direct violation of most, if not all, of state real estate commission rules).
You’ll put the full details of who you are, where you work, and all of the other commission requirements right in your “About” section on your Facebook business page.
Focus on Lifestyle
But when it comes to the name of the page, that’s different.
When I say “focus on lifestyle” in the Facebook Page Setup Strategy Workshop, I mean just that.
I don’t mean focus on using the word lifestyle, I mean focus on the lifestyle that your ideal client wants to live. What does it look like? What geographic area does it encompass? What activities do they love?
Even better… if you have local terminology you use for doing certain things, naming your page using that terminology is fabulous.
The quirky ways locals use to describe things
The client you want to work with.
So there you have it… if you are still struggling with this, share your struggles with your fellow Leads and Leverage members. Believe me, they’ve all gone through this too! We are all here to help!
If you are not a Leads and Leverage member, you might want to become one.
Featured Download
The Facebook Page Setup Checklist. The step-by-step guide you need to get your Facebook page up and running and bringing in real estate leads. (Download Now)
Roger Abiza says
Hello Christina,
Of course, i will go through the Facebook page setup checklist, but for the moment i’m a little bit confusing.
In this article http://urlz.fr/3OC1 you wrote that we are not a local business. Despite this, you adviced in this article to name our business page with something that resonante local with our client.
What did i missed, i’m a little bit confusing. Merci
Cordialement, Roger
Christina Ethridge says
Hi Roger – you are not physically a local business as you are a real estate agent who works around the area. However, you work locally so using local words (location specific) is valuable.