Any real estate agent serious about his work should utilize social media to its maximum potential. If you don't at least have a Facebook profile linked to a page for your agency, you should register as soon as possible to take advantage of the growing popularity of this site. That you can customize your profile to showcase your listings and services is especially helpful as friends and colleagues connected to you can be updated regularly.
One advantage to using Facebook to promote your home listings is that the social service is free: you need only to register and provide what information you choose to give. Once your work information and privacy settings are fixed, you can enhance your page with your content. Along the top of your page is a tabbed menu containing your Wall, which holds status messages you post and messages sent to you by others; this is a great place to post a quick link to a property you are currently pushing. Other tabs for Photos and Notes allow you to upload pictures of homes for sale in your area and to import an RSS feed that constantly updates. If you use a blog, implement it here to help your profile.
Special Real Estate Applications
These days people use Facebook to play interactive games with friends, post activity schedules for groups, and showcase personal facts. Travel maps show where people travel, and virtual bookshelves organize our reading lists. Realtors wishing to add more to their profiles to increase viral marketing can use specialized widgets and applications designed for their line of work, too.
- My Real Estate Listings is an application that pulls your current listings into your profile, provided you have an account with My Agent Desk (a free service for real estate professionals)
- The Realtor Listing Application works with agents' profiles at EListIt to pull data into Facebook
If you are advanced in your development skills, or can enlist the help of a tech who knows Facebook, you can also create your own specialized widget for your agency that uses your data to post home listings to the social network. What's more, you can recruit friends and family on Facebook to display your widget and increase exposure to the homes you show.
Browse your Facebook account and the applications directory for ideas on supplementing your profile with your real estate listings. The more you advertise through your social networks, the better you relay the information to people searching for it.
Kathryn Lively is a freelance writer specializing in articles on homes for sale in Virginia Beach and downtown Norfolk condos.
No comments:
Post a Comment