YOUR FACEBOOK CONTENT

Go to your page, scroll through the past 20 posts and ask yourself: Do I only post listings? Do I only make real estate postings? Do I only give market data based on sales? Do I only share a closing picture? If you said yes, yes, yes, yes, you're doing your page all wrong.

So often, agents get confused by how a business page should be run. It is NOT to be treated as a bulletin board full of spammy updates. Social media, and yes, even your business page, is to be a social and engaging platform between you and your audience. It's to build relationships, make friends, make acquaintances, and turn those people into clients. Now how do you build a relationship with someone? With a common connection. You want to make your business page have a back end that's focus is to capture leads, but you want your relationship with your followers to be the forefront. And that common connection is either the community/city you are focusing on, or the niche you are focusing on. 

Ever hear of the 80/20 rule? It can fit a lot of topics, but when it comes to marketing it means you give your audience fun content that will create large engagement 80% of the time, business 20% of the time. And I personally run my social media pages 90/10. 

Put aside your business thoughts for a moment, and go through and find the pages that you are the most engaged on. I guarantee you, the pages you come back to over and over again, aren't the ones constantly trying to sell you something. It's the ones that give you something you can relate to. Whether they build that connection through education, humor, or other emotional connection, the successful pages will have one common denominator, and it's the non-business stuff they use to engage their audience. And in that, they grow their following, and when they make a business post 10-20% of the time, do you know what happens? It actually gets them business! But not only does it get them business, it slowly starts to give them organic business, until it rolls into a snowball effect of tons of leads coming through, then those turn into referral opportunities. And it's upward growth from there.

The best advice I have learned and given, is not to focus on finding buyers and sellers, but focus on how to grow your brand with the type of people who can eventually turn into buyers and sellers. Meaning, when I make a post, I make one that is going to connect with my audience on an emotional level, have them engage on the posts, come to my page to check it out and become a follower; then when they are ready to buy or sell, or know someone who is, they will come back to me, because I bridged that connection gap. So if I want to focus on people living in Nashville, I share stuff about Nashville. Local events coming up, top restaurants to eat at, best places to shop at, etc. If I want it niche focused, say for animal lovers, I showcase local shelters or gift the adoption fee to get a new pet when they buy or sell with me. 

However, even in those posts, I insert myself into it. I don't just steal some link from a random blog someone else posted and put it on my page, I make sure to put the effort in obtaining the information on my own, taking a picture or writing a blog about it on my personal website, then sharing it that way. You NEED to put more effort into the content you are posting. Don't just share listings for sale, don't just share random blogs that lead site visitors to OTHER people's websites that probably are trying to sell their own product. 

Consumers have a very short attention span, but you make them remember you through the relationship you build. And you aren't building a relationship if you are sending them to other people who are trying to do the same thing. You just become some random agent they clicked on a post from. You get thrown in the back burner. Now say you were showcasing a new restaurant that opened in town; if you went in, took a snap shot of your meal, then came back and published it with a fun little post and what your favorite thing was about it, that will do so much more for your business than sharing some random link where someone else mentioned it.

A successful business takes effort. Your business takes effort. Social media takes effort. YOUR social media business takes effort. And that means you need to get out there, be a part of your community, really become the expert in your community, and then showcase that. Look, people don't truly care how many homes you sell. They don't. Some may say they do, but more often than not, they'll choose an agent if they had a connection with them, over the agent who sold a few houses more. People don't like to be sold to, so boasting your sales will do nothing for them. But people love to buy. And if you build that personal connection, they'll buy into you. 

Remember, it is your business page, and built around a niche you connect to, but all in all, you're building your page for others. You're building it for people who can fit into your ideal client mold, and you build a page for them to come and connect with others of similar interests. Give them topics that interest them, give them a platform they can feel connected to on a personal level. One that makes them think, "Oo, I'm going to follow this page because this is so me," or, "Oh, I really need to keep up with stuff about our community, this page has all of that, I'm going to follow it." Which then eventually leads to, "Oh this is the lady who always has the fun stuff on her page about what's coming up, and I see she sells real estate, let me reach out to her about buying a home."

And really, that is the simplicity of it. Build your sphere, and business will come from it. And if you're new to a city, don't know anyone, etc. then you go and build that sphere on social media. Create a community of people who have the same interests and passions as you, share in it, and then it will blossom your business. Stop thinking of your business page on Facebook as business and stop thinking about it as the SOCIAL page for your real estate company. Socialize, personalize, grow that sphere. Then when you post business info 20% of the time, you're then following up with your sphere, and reminding them that you are there to also help with buying and selling a home.

Social media isn't complicated. We try to complicate it. I want to give you a homework assignment. I want you to go and find 10 business pages on Facebook that are for entrepreneurs. They have to have a huge following, have great engagement, and can't be in the real estate industry. When you find those 10, I want you to carefully study the way they do their postings, and draw inspiration from it. When I grew my real estate business, I didn't go and see what other real estate agents were doing. Couldn't find anyone who was doing the right things on social media. So I went and hunted down beauty bloggers from YouTube that had a massive amount of followers. I went to their Facebook pages and studied what they did, and how hard they worked to build a personal connection with their audience. And I implemented their techniques into my business, flipped the script to make it about real estate or my niche, and my business bloomed after that. 

DON'T spam your audience with real estate stuff. Make it about your city, your neighborhoods, your niche. And most importantly, make it about them. And how you connect with them on a personal level. Make the effort, because the effort will pay off ten-fold.