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So you know what as I'm going around I'm asking people if you're on Facebook
and everyone here is on Facebook.
I always ask a question afterwards, are you getting business from it?
Are you actually getting business from it? And usually what ends up happening is,
like,
a deal here or there from someone you kinda know,
but if you think about that, in terms of how much time you are currently spending
on Facebook,
right? Weather it's 15 minutes a day,
or an hour a day,
you know, when you login to your mobile devices.
we have to begin ask ourselves why aren't we seeing more results?
Right? Why are we getting the results that we're expecting, if we're using this tool
that people say we're supposed to use, right?
So why I'm excited about this session
is that if you look at Facebook right now, they've gone from basically
a college networking site
to one billion users as of September this year.
We have so many people here on this platform,
and what's really exciting about that, if you look at the time spent on site, you have all
the social networking sites, Twitter Linkedin Pinterest, Google Plus.
Facebook is the absolute dominant social networking site.
90 percent of the time, 90 percent of the 70,000,000,000 minutes spent on social
networking sites
is being spent on Facebook.
Yet despite these things, despite everyone you probably know, or most of the people
you know
being on this platform
we're still not seeing results.
And for today's session
I really want to kind of
uncover why that is.
And to help you develop a strategy to actually have success with Facebook,
based off of real case studies,
real examples and real tactics that are actually practical
for you and your business. Because the reality is I know you don't have an hour
a day, or 2 hours a day to be on Facebook marketing your business.
You may only have 15 minutes. Or 20 minutes.
How do you make the most of that time?
So we have to first look at
the traditional lead generation model. And this is very important.
You look at the lead generation model. Its website visitors,
right? You draw a bunch of visitors to your website,
you generate some leads,
and that results in some customers.
Well with social media,
and specifically Facebook
what happens here
between the lead
and the customer
There's a conversation, a conversation with the real human being, a person.
So what social media allows us to do,
and Facebook specifically allows us to do,
it allows us to have conversations with people.
It's people
talking to people. And it's really really important you understand its basic concept.
Because
we've become really obsessed with likes, and followers, and fans, right?
We want everyone to be following us,everyone to be looking at us, because we think there's
some magic number.
We get a thousand fans, a thousand connections
and all of a sudden something great happens. But that's not the case, right?
What you really need to begin obsessing over
is having conversations with people
weather they're in your sphere or not in your sphere,
on Facebook. And will talk a little bit about how to do that.
First though, I want to talk about why we fail.
One of the things that I think is really front and center,
is our inability
to understand the technology.
You can't market yourself on Facebook if you don't know how to use Facebook,
right?
So the general perception is that you sorta have to be a nerd to be on Facebook.
Or you
have to be a nerd or geek to understand technology. You have to get over that
learning curve.
You can't get to the market, you can't get to the conversations unless you
understand
how to use the platform.
There's an interesting statistic that I shared in the morning session, which is
that there are more kids under 5 years old that know how to use a smartphone
than know how to tie their shoes, right?
So you have the next generation, not even the 5 year olds,
the next generation is very very very savvy. They've grown up with this.
Even the people who are in the older generations, right?
They still know how to use technology. Consumers are much further ahead than
where we are right now in real estate.
So we have to learn how to use these tools.
There's a really great resource, I want you to check out. It's called Lynda.com.
That's L - Y - N - D - A dot com.
And it's a wonderful service. It gives you tutorials and training on how to use Facebook.
And it goes, basically if you know nothing, right?
If you don't even know how to setup your password, or how to login 2 really advanced training.
So the next reason why we fail,
is we're obsessed with ourselves.
And this is, I want everyone here to do a gut check test here.
Looking at your last 10 posts on Facebook,
right? That were either on your business page or your personal profile,
and ask yourself,
when you're looking at these results,
how many of those were actually about
providing relevant, valuable information, or were they about you,
right? And when I look at the typical Realtors Facebook profile or their page,
the thing I see more often than
anything else is
their listings.
"Here's a listing. Here's why I'm so great. Here's why you should follow me."
"Check me out."
That's the general pitch, right? And people are tuning that out. Because
the news feed,
is so cluttered with so much information,
that they're not going to be looking at these self promotional things.
So we need to get away from talking about ourselves, and think about
actually connecting in building real relationships.
And it has a lot more to do with
what other people are actually interested in,
and how we react to that.
The third reason why we fail is that we are a bit of a mad scientist, and what I mean by that
is the last few years we've been very experimental, right? We have this thing
called Frankenstein marketing.
We try a bunch of things, right?
And we do a bunch of things, but we don't actually have a plan.
We don't have a strategy. We don't have any goals.
In this year coming up, in 2013,
if you're going to choose any social networking site, and hopefully its Facebook,
if you're going to use any platform,
you have to be strategic, not experimental.
You have to have the end game in mind.
And what I mean by that, is if you have, you know, if your goal is to connect with 10
local consumers in your area,
or strengthen the relationship with people you know, well,
you need to think about that in advance.
And then you need to say well this is going to be my strategy to achieve that goal.
So when you go into this next month, into 2013,
you gotta really analyze and look at that.
Because you are already ready all spending a lot of time on Facebook,
right? You are already there.
And what I'm hoping we can talk about today, is how to actually make
the most of that time.
So where do we start?
How do we go from where we are right now, which is from the general consensus
here, is
not a lot of results,
right? Not a lot of activity.
How do we get to a place where we're actually generating business. So the first
tip I want to give you today
is the idea of mastering lists.
So if you look at your Facebook News Feed right now,
you have every person,
every profile, every group you belong to, that's all pouring into
every profile,
every group you belong to is all pouring into your news feed.
And let's be honest,
it's mostly kind of crap, right?
That's the general consensus. It's a lot of information.
it's overwhelming.
And your customers
are seeing the exact same thing.
So with a list what you're able to do,
and we're going to provide the notes here afterward, so you guys don't need to
write this URL down,but it's Facebook.com/bookmark/list.
What you're able to do here
is you're able to, say OK
I have 15 really important clients.
Right now I'm not really staying in touch with them. I'm I'm sending them a monthly
automated email.
It's not really working.
What you can do on Facebook,
is you can label this list and you can call it you're a clients, or I call it my MBC's:
my "Most Valuable Connections."
You create this list.
You add those people to this list.
And what happens next
is when you login to Facebook you're going to have an option here on the left hand side
that's going to say your MBC's, or whatever you name the list.
You click on that and you're going to see a news feed.
And that news feed isn't going to be everything that's happening on social media,
it's going to be only updates
from the people who matter most to your business,
right? The things that Shannon's sharing I'm going to seein my news feed.
The things that Pai Lin is sharing I'm going to see in my news feed, right? These are the important updates
that I'm able to organize
into one simple stream.
So what do you do next? Once you have the conversations organized
what's the next step?
Well the next step is to actually see what they're sharing
and use that information
to actually
create some of event, weather it's picking up the phone and calling them or
emailing them directly.
If Shannon's son just graduated from college
I can certainly come in and say hey congratulations
or I can pick up the phone
in sort of a non creepy way, I'm not stalking you on facebook . Pick up the phone and say,
"hey I just saw on Facebook your son graduated from college."
"Hope all is well, do you want to do lunch next week?"
Right, so we're taking basically an online relationship
that we are monitoring through social media.
We're seeing these things happen. The things that are important to them in their
life there's sharing this stuff,
and we're creating real relationships with people,
right? I'm going to emphasize this point again, and again, and again.
It's people
connecting with people, OK?
People connecting with people. You've really gotta
focus on that.
One thing Facebook does that's really great, they actually kinda help
you build lists already.
So we're all familiar with farming. I think a lot of us here do farming, sending out the mailer
campaigns.
Facebook actually analyzes a few different things for you.
They'll look at
who's working with you.
They look at
who attended school with you and the look at who lives with in your local area.
And the 1 I want to focus on here, is who lives in your local area. And with a smart list
Facebook's actually going to analyze,
of all the connections you have, and as that number keeps increasing they're going to keep
analyzing it, all those connections you have,
how many people,
of those connections actually live within a certain radius of you. And you
can filter this.
So I live in, anybody hear from New Hampshire by any chance?
Vermont? Maine? Massachusetts?
Okay, a few, okay.
So you know Barrington, New Hampshire is a pretty remote place. Like I'm number 5
on Facebook in the area,
so I have to expand my radius here
to include a much larger territory.
to include a much larger territory. You have the ability to say, I only want to show people who live
in this very central location to me
or outside of that.
And ideally, you do the area in which you service.
And what's Facebook's going to do for you, automatically, is there going to filter that
newsfeed.
Again, only updates from the people who live with in your local area.
So think of this as digital farming.
But more importantly, think of this as you getting organized in order to put
yourself in the best position
to make a personal connection with somebody in your local area. So you want to utilize
both these tools.
A Facebook list and also a smart list, which they create for you.
So the problem we are solving here, is we are staying in touch with your sphere,
you're helping build more relationships with people
in your local area.
So the next idea and topic I want to talk about here is this idea of thoughtfull
content curation.
I talked about our vanity online. Everyone suffers from that. Where you share
and talk about yourself because
that's what's most important to you.
But the content we share is how we are going to perceive us.
So if you're always posting
advertising. If we're always promoting ourselves,
people are going to see us as that type of person.
So what we need to begin to do and if you look at the people you follow online,
you probably see that they are already doing this strategy,
you begin to share relevant and valuable information
that helps of people's problems, right?
And again I want you to do a gut check test after you leave here.
Look at your last 10 posts and ask yourself
how much is the content I'm sharing
is actually solving people's problems.
So going out of your way to give first and give awesome
is very very important online, because Online is filled with so much noise, right?
So here's a tool I want you to check out, it's called the site Zite, Z - I - T - E
and it's an iPad application. Works on Windows works on blackberry, works
on
Android.
And what it does actually helps you find stories that are worth sharing. And you can
setup your filter, so whether its real estate, whether it's local whether it's
whatever you want to highlight here.
And why I'm
highlighting this specific application
is it actually get smarter the more you use it. And what I mean by that
is if you are actually reading an article right now
on the right hand side it will say was this article helpful to you? Do you want to see
more of this type of content? Do you want to see more from this author? And as you provide
that real feedback,
that content
becomes more relevant for you.
Okay, and I'm going to tie this together and talk about how this
plays into your strategy. But that's the first tool I want you to look into, called
Zite
Second one is called Facebook interest list.
Now the Facebook SmartList
and the Facebook lists
of people,
was organizing people.
The Facebook Interest List organizes topics.
So I speak a lot about Facebook around the country.
I have a facebook list. And all it is is update about Facebook from people I follow.
You can organize this from like a local patch.
Local restaurants. Local businesses. Local news stations. You can organize all
that local content that you really want to get into a Facebook interest list.
every single local business thats online right now
probably has a Facebook business page.
Virtually every news organization has a Facebook business page,
so the solution I'm trying help you guys on cover here is I
understand
that it's very difficult to think of
things to share everyday, right?
Social media is about being consistent, being out there front and center,
but at the end of the day
when you have a million things going on in your real estate business,
But if you set up content curation tools, like
interest lists,
like Zite,
like Google Reader,
what you're able to do is you're able to put systems in place where you can find
interesting, relevant and helpful content, that you can begin to share.
It's really, really important, because again I'm going to iterate this again,
what you share online is how people are going to perceive you as a professional,
as an expert,
It's how you build trust.
Ultimately, that's how you build trust. Your willingness to go out of your way
to help people solve their problems and provide value. So if you think about that
for a moment
why do people do business with us?
Trust, right? They like us, they know us, they trust us.
they don't do business with us because we have the most Facebook friends.
So again, we have to shift our focus away from these vanity metrics,
to something that actually matters, okay?
Next here I want to talk about smart engagement strategies.
So you have all these great content curation. You're going out of your way to build these tools,
to share relevant information. But you're doing that,
and nobody's commenting, right? No one's liking. No one's sharing. it's actually
a bit lonely, honestly, that none of that stuffs happening.
So how do you get people to come out of their shells. Now we know
that the vast majority of people are lurkers online. They're going to look,
you know 90 percent of the people here
do not comment, like, or share.
They're not doing anything. They're just seeing the content.
And if they don't engage with you,
right? And I had to come up with a reason to use this guy's photo.
if they don't engage with you,
then there's no opportunity for you to create a conversation, right?
There's no opportunity for you to actually
engage with that individual and begin to build some type of relationship.
So what we know is that this is just a fact.
This is the reality we live in.
So we have to think of creative ways how to get people to get out of their shells
and want to engage with us. I want to share a couple of strategies with you.
The first one is adding direct call to action to the content you're sharing on Facebook.
So for example, if I'm going to write something like,
if I want someone to like a post,
I'll say like this if you agree,
or comment below if you agree calm a comment below if you disagree,
or share this please, or, you know,
these are the direct call to actions. The bottom line is that you want to say
if you want someone to do something
you have to ask.
You have to be direct,
right? They're going to see this on their mobile device coming through their feed, and if there's no
call to action, then there's going to be no reason for them to engage,
and when they doing engage this gives you an opportunity,
right? To reach out to them
and actually begin to have a conversation.
I'll give you a few examples of this.
So Homes.com actually did this recently. They should a photo and it says,
"Folding laundry with a toddler is like trying to straighten a desk full of papers
while a fan blows on it."
"Like if you can relate to this."
"Share if it made you chuckle." And you can see here
one thousand people liked it.
330 people shared that post.
Because they added strong call to actions and visuals to them.
Okay? So this is very important. Once you establish your content
strategy
and you have interesting things you're sharing,
you want to actually begin thinking about, how to add direct call to actions to that
content.
Another idea I have for you here is thinking about posting during
weekends. One of the big things that we see right now is a lot of activity on
weekends, right?
If you're struggling to get people to engage with you
are you posting at 3 p.m. on Monday morning, or Monday
afternoon?
You know people are probably at work, they probably are not, well they shouldn't be on Facebook,
but they probably are on Facebook,
but you know they're not going to be in a position to actually engage with you.
So you want to look at the weekends, because people are very very active on weekends,
but, and this is a big but,
most brands,
the people who manage their social media profiles aren't.
So you have all these people
with a lot less competition for their attention.
So you can take advantage of the weekends.
Again, non business hours. Really simple guys.
Weather it's after 8 p.m. for 7 p.m. , or in the early morning,
people are just getting up.
How many people here just by show of hands,
and you don't need
to raise your hand if you're afraid to answer this question,
is the first thing you check in the morning Facebook?
When you roll out of bed, anybody?
Email? Is it mostly email? Okay.
Then facebook after that?
So what we find is that people are very much creatures of habit, right?
You kind of get up in the morning you check your email, you check your Facebook profile,
see if anyone has tag you in a photo.
And that's it. Consumers are doing the exact same thing guys.
Exact same thing. So we have an opportunity right now
to post during non-business hours
To post during the weekends. To add strong call to actions.
All of these things,
all of these things serve a very specific purpose, of getting people to stop
working
and getting them to engage with us.
Because they start opening up,
we can start a conversation and that conversation can actually
build into something meaningful and a real relationship.
And real relationships
lead to business.
One thing you can do right now is you actually can use Facebook to schedule
posts in advance.
So most people don't take advantage of this feature, but if you want to post,
and plan your posts in advance for a week or so, you can do that.
So if you have an hour or 2 hours on a Sunday afternoon, or a Sunday night, and you
want to get your content already
put in position,
you can do just that, using
the schedule post feature.
Okay? And this is just another example of someone using and engagement strategy. True or false, is it easier to run
a small business today than ever before?
And you know what this company is doing, American Express OPEN?
(American Express is actually somewhere behind us here.)
What they do is they have a thing called a "theme day", as I call it,
which is every Friday they ask the same type of question, right?
They post the same type of true or false, some business related question.
So you as a Realtor could go in there and say, (you know one that I really like is)
which property do you like better A or B ? And you have to photos of 2 properties side
by side.
And what you're doing, with a smart engagement strategy, is starting a conversation about
real estate, right?
Getting people to say, oh I like a better, I like be better.
You see this a lot. A lot of companies are doing this. You definitely want to take advantage
of that.
So the problem we're solving here is where engaging the people who are lurking around on Facebook,
and actually beginning to start conversations.
So you have a content curation strategy, you are sharing relevant information,
you are providing value, you're engaging with people.
How do you reach a new network of people?
How do you go beyond the people you already know, you know your close friends and
contacts, to actually engaging with people that you don't know?
And one of the things that Facebook offers, actually quite a lot of the things they
offer, right now,
is they have this whole sweet of applications,
of ads, excuse me.
You can advertise in the news feed on the right hand side,
on the homepage,
on their mobile devices.
Just by a show of hands, how many people here, actually look at and click on
Facebook Ads, right?
Who doesn't, by show of hands, right?
We ignore them. See the reason we're ignoring them a lot of these ads is it there showing up
here on the right hand side,
on the banner. So we're looking in the stream
and the ads are on the right hand side.
But what Facebook enables you to do now,
is they allow you to use something called sponsored posts.
And everyone here wants to look into this
it's called sponsored posts.
So for example, if I share something on Facebook,
and Shannon comments on it, right?
What I'm able to do as a marketer,
is I'm able to take that conversation,
and I'm able to promote it
to all of your friends.
And when her friends then see that in the stream,
they're going to say ocean in just commented on Jimmy Mack in status update,
who's Jimmy Mack in? I'm going to click through, I'm going to read the conversation
and I'm actually going to
potentially participate in it.
So you're able to actually,
through advertisement,
directly connect
with your own sorta followers,
their friends. So where do most of all referrals come from?
The people we know,
and their friends and. And that's how the advertisement platform works. Using a sponsored
story
allows you to highlight and promote
specific events that are happening on Facebook.
So this is a quick example of this, of me actually implementing with 1 of my clients a
strategy.
So what this agent, her name is Judy Weiniger, wanted to do
She wanted to build a community forum on Facebook,
(and I'm going to talk about that in my crash course on Facebook features)
at 3 o'clock today.
But what she wanted to do is she wanted to promote this group,
so what we decided to do,
is create a post on Facebook,
and we decided to target
only
the people who live with in her local area, and people who fit within this
demographic of 25 and older. You can target people, guys,
you can target them on their interests,
what they like,
whether they went to school,what degree did they graduate with.
You can target them
based off of their marital status, right? How many kids do they have? It's really
to a certain degree kinda scary but
you can have these amazing targeting options that you never had before. And what
you see here
is this particular promotion,
we ran it. She spent 300 dollars to promote this forum.
She generated over 1000 clicks.
And her forum, right now, within 7 days
has 1000 local people who are part of the forum,
sharing, engaging
interacting with her.
And as a result of that, within a 7 day really quick campaign,
she was able actually to make real connections with people
and schedule appointments,
go out to people's houses,
meet with them face to face,
hold an actual meet up at a Starbucks were people from the local forum
came, you know offline, to actually meet face to face.
so keep our job is realistic agents are realtors
is to
talk to as many consumers as possible, right? That's a fundamental thing we're
trying to do.
If we're trying to grow our network,
and build real relationships with people,
we have to think about how we can use the ad platform
to specifically target the people that we want to be in contact with.
Right? The targeting options are really really amazing. So we want to take advantage of
that.
so the who, what, and why is: WHO you want to target,
WHAT you actually want to share,
and WHY:
What do you want that person to actually do once they see the advertisement? Do you want them to
click through? Do you want them to call you? Do you want them to email you?
You want to answer these questions before you run any kind of promotional campaign. A question I get
all the time is: "How much money do I have to spend on Facebook ads?
You can setup your budget to be whatever you want. It can be 5 dollars a day it could be
100 dollars a day.
You have complete flexibility with that. So you want to take advantage of it.
Experiment a little bit with it,
but again, be strategic. Have some goal in mind.
So the problem that were solving here, guys, is that working increasing the opportunities to
grow our network.
We are reaching new people.
We have a tendency on Facebook right now
to only talk to the people that we kind of know,
and we get very quick on Facebook. And is Realtors we gotta break that.
We gotta get out of that like we gotta meet new people, right?
That's really really important.
You could be organizing the contacts in the list,
engaging those people, but if you're not meeting new people, you know,
your business is not going to grow.
So you want to be using this tool, the ad platform
to reach out and connect with you people.
So here's a recap guys for you.
List building.
First thing,
the first thing I want everyone to do when they go home tonight,
or on Monday, whenever you get back, is go back, make a list of all the people that
matter most to your business,
put them into a Facebook list, and begin to actually engage with them.
See what they're sharing.
Go out of your way to use a traditional means of picking up the phone and calling,
meeting face to face in person,
but you gotta put them in a list first. The second here tip is thoughtful curation.
Look at the last 10 post you shared.
Are any of them
of value to anyone who's following you, right?
You can use thoughtful curation to actually provide value, and build trust.
And smart in gagement here
is just giving you more opportunities to have conversations.
Again: people connecting with people.
So like this post, sure this post, non business hours, posting on the weekend,
you know, all of these tips I'm giving you,
use these to spark more conversations with people.
And it gives you more opportunities.
The strategic promotion
just allows you
to break the mold of your current network, right?
Get outside.
There are one
billion people on Facebook
Every demographic. Every age.
Every gender.
They're all on Facebook.
And strategic promotion allows us to target these people with incredible
precision.
So if you do all these things guys,
it's going to give you results, right?
That's all we're trying to do here. Were not trying to get fans and followers, we're trying to
get results.
So really quickly guys, a couple of homes products I want to cover with you.
Reputation manager. I think one of the guys I want you to write down
something called the
Zero Moment of Truth. Google wrote this guide. And what was really interesting about this,
is that they looked at,
when someone sees
your advertisement,
or you give them your business card,
what happens between that moment,
of that interaction,
and then actually
deciding to go with you as a realtor?
And Google calls it Zero Moment of Truth. And what they do
is there a actually Google your information. They Google you . And they see?
What do they find?
In a lot of cases
it's either something bad, or nothing, which is even worse right?
There's nothing there. So our reputation of line is incredibly important.
A reputation online is absolutely essential to actually get the most out of our current
marketing, we have to build our online reputation. Getting reviews. Making sure that our
voices there. Making sure that our informations accurate on all the sites where
information can appear. So reputation management actually allows you to do that.
They have this great dashboard that actually analyzes all this information for you. Centralizes it for you, so it's
really really simple. The next tool here is Social Broadcaster. One of the big
things I see a lot right now, is people don't know, or don't have the time to post
to multiple social networking sites. It's 1 of the big big concerns.
So what social broadcaster does is actually it's a mobile application.
And I'll give you a really practical tip here. It's a mobile application you can
actually share something, and whether it's a listing or a photo, share it to your social
networking sites. Now don't just blast this out
with disregard to who's going to be reading it. What an agent does, what's really
smart, her name is Suzie Anna Murphy, she's in my area of Massachusetts, she takes a picture
of the client at closing. Right?
When there at their happiest moment. She tells a bit of the story behind that
closing and then she shares it online. And when you see the thread, the
conversation that's happening around the closing, you see people people actually endorsing Susanna Murphy
online, right there on that Facebook profile. So what she did,
she didn't wait for someone to come the and share it, she took the initiative.
She went out of her way how to create this moment.
And what influences peoples decision is what other people say about them. Not what you
say about yourself. So if you have all your friends talking about how great this is,
you know they're going to be actually interested in participating in that. So Social Broadcaster allows you
to do that. The last one here that just ties everything together for you is Social Wall.
Organizes all the updates, all the information you have into one stream on your
Homes.com site.
So guys, all the tips, all the strategies, all the information, the guys here in the orange
shirts, they have cards with them that have a link where you can get all the
information so you didn't have to write it down, okay? Thank you so much for your time today,
I really appreciate it.