As a real estate agent, you probably use Facebook for many purposes: from promoting your properties to enchanting visitors into becoming your committed followers. However, are you sure your real estate Facebook page is not doing a poor job communicating what you have to say? Facebook offers huge opportunities for better marketing if you know how to exploit them. One of these opportunities is a Facebook app which you can use for running your social media marketing campaigns. In this post, we’ll see how exactly it works.
Social media, and especially Facebook, is at the forefront of every real estate agent’s mind. This statement isn’t surprising: 95% of people use Facebook to get themselves familiar with an agent’s services.
What’s the No.1 thing all agents do when it comes to Facebook? They set up their Facebook business page, post their contact details and promote their listings, occasionally chatting with people and answering their questions. That’s a wonderful way to get started with Facebook and establish your social media presence.
However, being a smart real estate agent, you’d like to double your impact on Facebook, right? Just setting up a real estate Facebook page is not enough and there are plenty of other opportunities still unexploited.
While it can be tempting to limit yourself to building a real estate Facebook page at its simplest, this tactic won’t probably work out in your favor in the long run. Here’s a tool that helps you easily add powerful functionality to your Facebook page so you can generate more leads.
A Real estate Facebook app is a prime opportunity for agents
As you’ve probably already figured out, the tool that does this stellar job on promoting your services via social media is a Facebook app. Here’s how it works.
Oftentimes, Facebook apps are called custom apps, or tabs. They are fully customizable: it’s only up to you to decide what exactly you want to promote via your Facebook tabs and how they should look like. (We’ll take a closer look at promotions in the next section.)
You install these custom tabs on your Facebook page. They show up right under the cover photo. If the page has more than 4 tabs, you can click on the down arrow in the right bottom of the cover photo to view them all.
Facebook currently offers 4 default apps available for every business page: Photos, Events, Likes and Videos. It’s quite limited, and you’ve probably felt you lack some other tools to strengthen your Facebook marketing. However, whatever custom app you’d like to add needs to be created on your own.
Important: your custom apps must be created with a certified third-party developer.
What are third-party developers and why should you care about them?
Facebook has its own policies which you have to follow so your page is not shut down. You can’t just add a tab inviting people to take part in one of your competitions and show it up in your news feed. Facebook wants this to be done with a certified third-party app and, basically, that’s all you need to know to get started.
The best option to run spectacular Facebook campaigns is to start with a third-party developer. This takes all the headache with policy compliance out of your mind. Once you signed up, just focus on creating the app.
So that’s it – the most important prerequisite to enhancing your real estate Facebook marketing is done. Now that you know what upfront work is needed, let’s take a closer look at how exactly to promote your business via the custom tabs.
What kind of promotions can you do with real estate Facebook apps?
A lot of them, actually. Not only you’ll find real estate Facebook apps a vibrant means to deeply engage with your audience, but you will also be able to choose from a wide variety of tools. You can always try and test what promotions resonate with your audience best of all and adjust accordingly.
Here’s the ultimate list of promotions to do via your Facebook app:
- cross-promote your agency with your Twitter feed – the tab will show your Twitter feed on your Facebook page, including “Follow” and “@reply” buttons;
- cross-promote your agency with your Pinterest feed – your Pinterest pins will be displayed with easy options to share, like, add +1 and tweet them;
- cross-promote your agency with your Instagram feed – all your branded images from Instagram or users’ images under a specific hashtag are shown on your Facebook page;
- embed your YouTube channel feed on your Facebook page;
- promote your blog with the RSS app – automatically updated posts from your blog will be promoted on your Facebook page. It’s easy and incredibly time-saving;
- grow your email list – display your opt-in form on your Facebook page to capture more leads;
- embed your landing pages on Facebook – easily promote your latest content downloads, featured properties, events, etc.
- get to know your audience better, or invite them to participate in any event you’re organizing with fully customizable, easy to create forms;
- run sweepstakes and coupons to encourage people to join you in a fun, entertaining way;
- resize your website – perfect for placing your website on Facebook;
- run photo & video, essay & reviews contests;
- create a photo gallery and show it directly on your Facebook page, with easy options to like and share across the other social media.
That’s quite a list, right? All of these promotions are incredibly powerful. The fact that you can customize all of them to your exact liking, and tailor the apps your audience will love, makes them even better.
Some other really nice things Facebook apps offer every real estate agent
Help your promotions go viral
Whatever campaign you’re running, you need to maximize its impact. You want as many people to learn about your promotions as possible. With Facebook apps, it’s really easy. Each of them provides options for liking and sharing across various social media: Twitter, Google+, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. If people are interested, they will gladly share with their friends.
Generate more likes and create extra excitement around your offers
Real estate Facebook apps go with one awesome feature: you can gate your content. How does it work?
Very simple actually: you just ask a visitor to like your Facebook page, or share the post, etc. to get the most important information revealed. This is a great way to gently nudge people to join your community and spread the word about your services. It’s also adding greater value to your promotions.
No coding, thankfully
Agents have so many things to do throughout the day. Adding an extra one to their plate is not going to work out well. Real estate Facebook apps help you deliberately target your audiences with the offers they’d love without making you gain any special coding knowledge. You can do everything in just a few clicks, no coding skills required.
Fully branded & customizable
From colors and logos to language and timing – you can easily edit your Facebook apps to your exact liking. You can preview how the app looks like before actually publishing it and make timely edits just when you need.
Mobile-friendly and perfectly viewable across all devices
Some tabs may not show up fine on mobile devices. Good third-party apps enable you to create a separate URL to direct mobile users to your custom tabs and this completely solves the issue.
Being perfectly visible on mobile is extremely important. Real estate is all about local search, and the overwhelming majority of local searches are entered via mobile devices. So taking care of your mobile users also means strengthening your local search results.
Here’s also a full post highlighting everything you need to know about local real estate SEO.
What’s next?
As a real estate agent, you use Facebook in the hopes of – reaching out to people, showcasing your properties, offering your audience yet another opportunity to contact you, and much more. Facebook is a great tool for your sales and marketing goals all in one shot.
The key is to know which of the most powerful opportunities are still unexploited. Real estate Facebook apps are definitely one of them and you’d be surprised with how few agents are using them. In the meantime, this is a wonderful lead generation tool, which is also invaluable when it comes to enriching your customers’ online experience. In a world of social media, Facebook apps have long ago became a must, rather than a fun tool to use in marketing campaigns occasionally.
