Does the number of leads you get from Facebook really live up to your expectations? Actually, does your Facebook business page present all the important information that you need to sell more? See, once you have a Facebook business page, you need to showcase it well. Custom Facebook tabs are perfect to do just this. Sounds unfamiliar? Keep reading to learn the best part.
These days social media, and especially Facebook, are a huge platform to market, advertise and sell your properties. Everyone is ignited by the number of active Facebook users (which is 1,5 billion people worldwide!) and rushes to set a Facebook business page to secure a little bit of that valuable traffic for themselves too.
Let’s say you’ve already set up a great Facebook page for your agency. It has a proper cover photo, your business information and you’re frequently sharing all kind of interesting content from your site. It’s crucial that you do all of this. But it’s what everyone’s doing, including your competition. Now, would you like to level up your Facebook page and make it sparkle?
We’re pretty sure you do, and here’s a quick guide on some tried and tested ways to use custom Facebook tabs.
What are custom Facebook tabs, actually?
First things first – here’s a quick recap of what custom a Facebook app is.
A custom Facebook tab, or Facebook app as it’s sometimes called, is a special section of your Facebook business page. You can think of it as a page within your Facebook page. All tabs are stored under the “More” drop-down button below the cover photo.
If you’ve been using Facebook for some time, you’ve probably noticed that the content you can publish on your page is quite limited. In fact, there are 4 default tabs that go for every Facebook page: Photos, Videos, Likes and Events.
But what if you need to promote your featured listings more powerfully? Or have a handy page with customer reviews, so visitors can check them out and see how outstanding your service is? Such messages are easily lost in the hustle and bustle of all the posts on your wall. In fact, chances are huge that the majority of page visitors will never see them at all. Meanwhile, you need this content to be on top of visitors’ minds, easily spotted right at the top of the page.
That’s where custom Facebook tabs come in. They are fully customizable and enable you to choose which content you want to promote. As you can imagine, this is a much more powerful way to invite visitors to join your community and spend more time poking around your page and clicking to your site.
Remember, however, that Facebook allows only custom tabs from certified developers to be published on Facebook pages. That’s why you’ll need third-party apps for this.
Now that you know what custom Facebook tabs are, let’s see how exactly to use them to enhance your Facebook marketing and convert more visitors into leads.
1. Create a “Contact us” tab
Encouraging people to ask questions is what every business needs to start meaningful relationships with their potential customers. This is especially true for real estate agents. People usually have dozens of questions about your properties and with a custom “Contact us” tab, you’re making it very easy to ask those questions.
If you lack feedback and questions from your audience, creating a “Contact us” tab might really help. Typically, you’d want to include a little bit more about your services and embed a contact form to be shown on this tab. Basically, a whole new “Contact us” page is now available within your Facebook page!
2. Grow your email list
A proven option to get more leads from Facebook is to embed your opt-in form within one of your custom Facebook tabs. The great news is you can use the same form as on your website and all new contacts will go directly to your current database, with no need to export and import that data. That’s pretty time-saving, right?
3. Collect customer testimonials
Customer reviews are incredibly important for local businesses. They directly affect both rankings and sales. (Here’s a detailed post on how to collect more real estate agent reviews easily and quickly).
Collecting customer testimonials may not be that easy. Custom Facebook tabs are designed to simplify this process for you. Just create a form and add it via a custom tab to your Facebook page. That’s it – your customers will be able to leave testimonials in minutes, without even having to leave your Facebook page.
4. Promote your blog with an RSS feed
Content is what everyone looks for, right? Chances are good that you promote the latest posts from your blog across various social media to get more traffic to your site and more people engaged in meaningful conversations with you.
With custom Facebook tabs, you can move one step further. You can create a tab featuring the latest info from your blog just by embedding its RSS feed. You can customize how many posts you’d like to display, add your brand colors, etc. Once you’ve added the RSS feed, it’ll automatically update the feed on Facebook with your new posts so you’ll never have to do it manually. Pretty handy, isn’t it?
5. Cross-promote your Twitter
If you’re active not only on Facebook, but also on Twitter, custom Facebook tabs are a prime opportunity to better promote your business. For example, you may notice that Twitter drives you more traffic than the other social media. You’d want to make it easy for your visitors to use social media they like most of all, right?
You can create a custom Facebook tab displaying your latest tweets on your Facebook page. This way you encourage people to interact with your Twitter account while they’re still on your Facebook page. Of course, options like “Follow” and “@reply” are available.
6. Cross-promote your Pinterest
Pinterest is a great way to engage with your potential customers and impress them with quality visual content. You already have stunning photography on your site, why not use it on one of the world’s most popular photo social media platform as well? To promote your Pinterest content, you can create a custom Facebook tab that’ll display your Pinterest feed, with easy options to share, like add+1 and tweet the posts.
7. Cross-promote your Instagram
Instagram is yet another super-popular network to share visual content. If you’re using this channel to enhance your marketing efforts, you can promote Instagram via your Facebook page, just like Twitter and Pinterest. Again, your Instagram feed will display your branded images or users’ images under specific hashtag (which you can choose on your own) on your Facebook page. See how you can intertwine it all nicely?
8. Cross-promote your YouTube
Videos are very engaging; as a real estate agent, you can use them to showcase the most beautiful properties you have to offer. YouTube videos work well for SEO, but you need to reach a certain exposure (at least 100 views) for them to rank higher. If you feel you’re lacking actionable means to promote your videos, a YouTube feed on your Facebook page is a great option to try.
9. Run photo contests
When it comes to engagement, contests work really well. You can engage new people, strengthen your relationship with existing customers and spread the word out about your agency all in one shot.
How do you do it? Let’s say you announce a photo contest, create a landing page and add it via a custom Facebook tab to gain broader exposure for it. The tab will include the all important information: the rules you’ve set, the timeframe, the prize, the number of participants, or even the countdown of the beginning or end of the contest.
One great way to foster engagement through photo contests is by asking people who already bought from you to participate. Here’s just a quick example of what you can do: you can contact your customers and ask them to take a few shots of their new homes (or you can take them on your own) as you’re about to run a contest where people can vote for the most beautiful house in your area. Your customers are most likely already active on Facebook and they’ll ask their friends to vote for them. Because the contest is being run on your Facebook page, guess where all those people will come? That’s right, to you.
You can even make these contests two-stage, allowing 2 or 3 participants to the second stage. This way all the buzz will last for an even longer time.
10. Run video contests
Just as you can run photo contests, you can also invite people to take part in video contests. Everything around photo contests applies here, just this time the content format is different. Technology is no longer a problem – almost everyone can make quick videos with their mobile devices and share them with their friends and peers. And that’s an opportunity for you to engage your customers with video format too. Just make sure the prize is worth it.
11. Run essay contests
Things people post online really matter, especially on a local scale. Oftentimes, they’d like to tell more about their experiences and share them with wider audiences. Well, that’s what you can easily help them with. You can invite people to write something on a given subject and, who knows, win something from you.
Essays are perfect examples of the user-generated content. If they are focused on your business, it can work out even better than testimonials. This is the long-term content and you can use it multiple times: post on your blog, publish on your other social media, include in your newsletter and much more. The key here is to find a subject that resonates well with your audience – something they’d like to write about.
12. Create a photo gallery
If you have some particularly beautiful photography of your properties, you may want to promote them more powerfully. Or, you’d like to showcase the newest listings on the market so more of your fans know about your latest offers.
A photo gallery is a perfect tool to do this. You can create an entire slideshow featuring the best of what you have to offer and post it directly within a custom Facebook tab. Your fans can easily view, share, like, tweet, pin it and more, all within your Facebook page!
13. Run sweepstakes
Sweepstakes is yet another way to engage your audience through a contest. Here, you are only limited with your creativity – you can run any sweepstake you want. You’re in complete charge of everything: the rules, the prize, the language, and literally anything else. Again, you can run the competition via your custom Facebook tabs to make sure all that buzz stays within your reach and you’re on top of your fans’ minds (and newsfeeds).
14. Create a library of your content and get more leads
Let’s say you use homebuyer’s guides to foster lead generation and drive more qualified traffic to your site. The first place to promote them is your blog. But you’d like to reach more people, right? Custom Facebook tabs is a perfect option to use in this particular case.
Add all that content you created to this Facebook tab so it stays clearly visible to your fans and encourages them to download it. Once people click on your offer, they’re redirected to the page asking them to fill out their contact details before downloading the offer. So yet another nice lead generation tool is right within your Facebook page.
And remember that any content you create can do perfectly well, be it a homebuyer’s guides, market updates or local publications.
What’s next?
With Facebook, you can expand your marketing reach in so many ways, but custom Facebook tabs are probably one of the best options to try. With these tabs, you add more personality to your page and make sure your fans learn the best about your real estate agency. Because these tabs are not static, you can make any changes whenever you need, updating them with the most interesting and relevant info to keep your audience engaged. When attempting to refine and perfect your Facebook marketing strategy, this tool is invaluable and definitely deserves your time of the day.
