facebook strategy

Think Facebook Page Likes Don’t Matter? Think Again. The Ultimate Guide To Facebook Page Likes, Exclusively For Real Estate Agents

Featured Download: The Facebook Page Setup Checklist – specifically for real estate agents – get your Facebook page setup to capture real estate leads.

Are you making this major mistake?

As agents, we tend to think that if we like each other’s Facebook business pages, we will close more deals, but this is false.

Personal profiles should be used to cultivate relationships with people you have met and business pages should be used as funnels for unmet prospects

Did you know?

Disengaged or disinterested followers devalue your Facebook business page.

I see this all the time: real estate agents exchanging Facebook business page likes with one another.

Every time I see it, I just want to scream from the rooftops, “You’re killing your Facebook lead generation.”

I just want to scream from the rooftops,

You’re killing your Facebook lead generation

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But alas, we have this theoretical idea that — somehow, some way, in some form or another — if we go around patting each other’s backs on Facebook, it will bring more closings to the closing table.

When I do say something, I always get responses that seem to make sense — at least on the surface — but if anyone digs just a tiny bit below the surface, they fall apart.

Those responses include:

More exposure is good for my business.

I want to be available for referrals.

But a top agent I asked said to move all agents to my business page.

These are just a few of the plethora of reasons why real estate agents engage in “like” exchanges.

Let’s hit each response, shall we?

I want to be available for referrals

I have never understood why real estate agents spend more time focusing on staying connected with colleagues and hoping to get potential referrals than they do on consistently exposing their services to real prospects.

Why on earth are we spending 80 percent of our energy connecting with sources who will bring in less than 5 percent of our closings in any given year? Why, indeed.

I also question how adding a real estate agent to your real estate business page — a page that you are (hopefully) providing valuable, relevant content on, for your particular target market — is going to make you available for referrals from agents all over.

First of all, the page isn’t relevant to the agent in another market, so they aren’t going to stay involved in your page.

Their disengagement means anything you post won’t be showing up in their Facebook news feed, which ultimately defeats your intended purpose — referrals from said agent.

There are much better ways to stay connected with colleagues around the country — ways that will give you more referrals.

Here’s another thing: The more disengaged your page “likes” are, the more Facebook penalizes you and makes it even harder for you to get your content into the news feeds of your page fans who are real prospects. It’s all part of the algorithm.

FACT

The more disengaged your page likes are, the more Facebook penalizes you.

Last, but not least, when it comes time to “pay to play” — otherwise known as running ads — you are going to be wasting a whole lot of money putting ads in front of people who will never use your services.

Would you add colleagues from around the country to your snail-mail campaigns focused toward homebuyers or sellers in your local market?

If you would, you’re wasting copious amounts of money on something that will never give you a return (and if it does it’s a crazy, ridiculously small return) and need some serious targeting and marketing help.

More exposure is good for my business

Really? How so? Can you track this statement? Can you back it with statistical data?

In my over 20 years in real estate, I have yet to get actual, statistical data from a single agent on this. They’ll spout its truth, but they don’t have any evidence to prove it.

You see, it’s just the old way of thinking that’s always been theoretical because it sounds right on the surface.

But the problem is, the statement is ambiguous. What constitutes exposure? What is the content? Who is the audience? What does “good” mean?

We know it takes seven to 13 touches before our message sinks in, and we’ve translated to mean that more exposure equals more business.

We know it takes seven to 13 touches before our message sinks in — but is all exposure good?

Even if it is true — does that mean all exposure is good?

Here’s where most agents fall by the wayside and tend to be more stubborn than realistic. To get the exposure theory to work for you, you must be exposing the right content to the right audience.

If exposure is good, it must be the right exposure — and the right exposure is a prospect who want to buy or sell. A real estate agent in another market is not that prospect.

Let’s look at this from another perspective — that of Facebook. We’ve all heard that Facebook is now a pay-to-play platform. That means if you are a business and you want to make sales, you are going to have to invest in the platform — both in time and money.

You aren’t going to get a whole lot of focused, free exposure anymore. In other words, all this time you are spending getting your colleagues around the country to like your business page is not helping you at all in any way, shape or form. Period.

You’ve got to have your Facebook business page set up for real estate lead generation — not for exposure — and you’ve got to be engaging in lead generation-focused activities.

In fact, if you’ve been collecting likes that aren’t interested in your content, you’ve devalued your Facebook business page — drastically.

And you’ve locked yourself into a box — a box that you’ll be constantly working to get out of (which is futile), once you realize you could be getting actual leads if you understood how Facebook works.

But a top agent I asked said to move all agents to my business page

This one kills me. Agents go to conferences and conventions and revere the agents who are on these panels. They revere them because they are making the big bucks doing a trillion and one transactions each year.

Although I firmly believe in doing what is working and not reinventing the wheel, you’ve got to make sure that what is being touted as working is truly working.

Without getting into specifics, my team has closed more transactions than 99 percent of the agents on these top agent panels.

One thing I excel at is lead generation and conversion, and I’m a tyrant when it comes to digging deep and doing what actually works. We look at statistical, empirical data — not anecdotal gut feelings.

These agents have no idea how to use Facebook. They don’t know how to generate real estate leads from their Facebook business pages, nor do they understand how to cultivate more referrals from colleagues around the country using Facebook.

If they did, they would know that their business pages are funnels for unmet prospects, and their personal profiles are cultivators for “met” relationships.

Business pages are funnels for unmet prospects; personal profiles are for met relationships.

In other words, connect with colleagues on your personal profile and use lists to keep them organized. Use your Facebook business page to drive leads into your capture points.

So what should you stop doing?

You must (I can’t emphasize must enough) stop exchanging Facebook business page likes with your colleagues.

If you want to grow your business, and you wish to take advantage of the No. 1 lead generation resource available to you today, then you’ve got to take the time to understand how Facebook works for real estate lead generation.

There is more to Facebook lead generation than just stopping this practice, but this is the biggest mistake I see agents making. And I thought it’s about time I started addressing it. I even go as far as to say that asking people to like your page is a big fat no-no.

As I was writing this article, I realized I was making one big assumption about you — that the reason you are using Facebook is because you want to close more transactions.

If that is your goal — then you need to think about and analyze what you are doing on Facebook. Don’t just follow the crowd because, quite frankly, the crowd doesn’t know what it is doing.

Don’t just follow the crowd because, quite frankly, the crowd doesn’t know what it is doing.

My question for you is: Have you been out there exchanging page likes with other agents? Are you going to change that and do something that works to bring more closings to the table? Do you disagree?

If so, please share with me why — and as you now know, I like real data behind statements, not feel-good anecdotal sharing of gut beliefs.

Featured Download:

The Facebook Page Setup Checklist – specifically for real estate agents – get your Facebook page setup to capture real estate leads.

by Christina Ethridge Leave a Comment

If you want to leverage Facebook, discover the 7 quick & easy things real estate agents can do today to get more engagement on their Facebook business page

[SOUND IS OFF FOR FIRST 35 SECONDS] SORRY!!

Featured Download: The Facebook Page Setup Checklist – specifically for real estate agents – get your Facebook page setup to capture real estate leads.

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.

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.

Featured Download:

The Facebook Page Setup Checklist – specifically for real estate agents – get your Facebook page setup to capture real estate leads.

by Christina Ethridge Leave a Comment

Find out today exactly how much you should be allocating for your monthly Facebook ad budget and what kind of Facebook ads you should be running

Featured Download: Download the Facebook ad strategy calendar here! Get your Facebook ad strategy up and running today by downloading the free calendar now!

Today I want to talk about the verbiage “allocating your monthly ad budget”. How much should you spend and what kind of ads should you spend it on?

Who should, well not necessarily who should you be targeting, well yes -Who should you be targeting? We’re going to be talking about it. There is actually a breakdown,

I have a formula for you and I have details for each of those formulas.

How should you be allocating your monthly Facebook ad budget?

Alright, so how should you be allocating your monthly Facebook ad budget? What kind of ads should you be running?”

First of all, when you have your Facebook ad budget, this is going to be unique, this piece is one kind of gray areas that is going to be unique for each person. So that gray area is how much you can budget each month. Okay, so that will be different for each person.

Some of us are bootstrapping this, some of us are starting out with “I can afford $1 a day and that’s stretching it,” okay that’s great!

Some of us are like “Dude, put $500 a day into it” or “I want to spend $500 a day” so one of the things that’s always talked about in my Mastermind, well not always but we talk about it in my Mastermind, is if we want to get this kind of revenue, this kind of money, how much should we be putting into Facebook ads? We are figuring out a formula for us.

Now for real estate agents, we don’t know that formula because most of us don’t track our numbers. We don’t go okay this many ads gets this but what you can do is, you can work backwards.

How much is a typical transaction gross to you, minus your expenses, how much does it cost to get leads, all of these things. What is your conversion rates? You need to know your conversion rates so you can go backwards and see what those numbers are.

So today we are actually going to talk about, let’s just say you have a budget, and I am going to use a budget of $100 a month as an example, because it makes it really easy for me to do the math like that in my head.. I am going to give you percentages you can use that will work the same.

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60% of your budget needs to go out to cold traffic

First of all, allocating your monthly ad budget, 60% of your budget needs to go out to cold traffic, okay? Cold traffic, people who have not liked your page, they’ve never engaged on your page, they’re not on your email list, they are completely unmixed, you have zero connection with them.

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30% of your ad budget to warm traffic

30% of your ad budget to warm traffic and that is your page like, people who’ve already viewed stuff, audiences, website audiences, your email audiences, that’s warm traffic. They’ve had a little bit of a connection with you.

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10% of your ad budget needs to go into retargeting

Accordingly, 10% of your ad budget needs to go into re-targeting. Very specific re-targeting, if someone landed on a search page on your website, then you would re-target them with seller specific stuff or buyers specific stuff. If they landed on the CMA page of your website, you would re-target them with seller specific stuff. That is re-targeting.

Put the bulk of your budget into cold traffic

So you need to put the bulk of your budget into cold traffic and let me explain this again.

60% of budget, it’s local, ideally it’s a homeowner and they are unconnected to you in anyway. That 60% is cold traffic.

The next one is warm traffic, 30% to a warm audience, that’s your engagement audience, your website, your email, your videos, your likes, things like that.

Then like I said, 10% retargeting, specific pages on your web, like they visited specific pages on your website and you’re doing follow up or they’ve responded to a specific opt in and you’re doing follow up.

So most of us will be focusing on that 60% and 30%, the 10% is for really more advanced stuff as you get going, as you get your whole system going.

Right now, let’s focus on that 60% cold traffic and that’s where you’re going to be running your post engagements that I talk about, that’s where you’re going to be posting page like ads.

You will be running some opt-in ads, but really those opt-in ads should be going to your warm traffic, so that’s where you should be going.

One of the big things is you want to have at least,is to know if your ads are doing well, if your page is doing well, you need to have a page reach over the last 7 days of at least 3x your page likes.

If you have 0 page likes you need to have at least a 10,000 reach through your post and your ads. I know some of this is beyond what a lot of you know, we go into this inside of Leads and Leverage. It’s like impossible for me to go through them right now, but those are some numbers if you have an inkling of what’s going on those are some numbers.

Again, number one- cold traffic 60%, number two- warm traffic 30%, and number three- retargeting traffic 10%.

Alright, so this is a super short post.

I gave you those numbers, and I walked through what they mean.

If you have questions, when you have questions, ask them in the comments below.

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