Facebook business pages are different from your personal profile. Your profile should have a picture of you and information about you. Your real estate business cannot have a personal profile. In order to be on Facebook your business must have an ‘Official Page’ and can list and present everything that relates to your real estate business.

Also Read: Facebook: Profiles, Fan Pages, and Groups… Oh My!

On your Real Estate Business page, you should include (at minimum) the following information:

- Overview of your real estate business
- Website address and contact info
- Videos (listings and or/rentals)
- Blog RSS and your Blog URL
- Updated news and status

You can use up to 6 tabs (you can use more, but they won’t be readily displayed without clicking on the ‘>>’ tab). Your six tabs should consist of:

Wall Tab:
This is where you interact with your ‘fans’ and keep them up to days with current news and information.

Info Tab:
Fill this in with as much information as you can about you, your business, and what makes you different from other agents.

Welcome Tab:
A customized page that is very similar to your website, but within Facebook. This can be a single static page, a page with information and videos, or a fully customized mini-website. You should have at least one video embedded on this tab. If you don’t know HTML or FBML you can get a free real estate welcome page by ‘liking’ Social Networking for Real Estate Agents on Facebook. (Just click on the tab that says ‘FREE’.)

Real Estate Tab:
I recommend using Roost for this tab. It is very simple to configure and has a lot of features built-in.

Offer Tab:
Whether you use Market Snapshot, Constant Contact, Mail Chimp or any other form of keeping in touch with potential clients, this tab helps you collect information from potential clients so that you can keep in touch.

RSS/Blog Tab:
I recommend using Social RSS. You should keep you blog updated at least 2-3 times a week. Using the Socail RSS application, your blog will automatically update your Facebook business page.
So, what are the 7 reasons your Facebook real estate page needs an IMMEDIATE face-lift?

Reason # 1. Traffic

The Facebook statistics speak for themselves. Facebook now has over 2.6 billion monthly visitors and growing… with your real estate business page you can leverage the power of Facebook and drive more traffic to you site.

Reason # 2. There is NO COST

If you setup your business page yourself, you don’t have to spend a dime for this POWERFUL lead generator.  If you don’t know HTML or FBML, you can get a free custom page just by ‘liking’ Social Networking for Real Estate Agents on Facebook.

Reason # 3. Viral Marketing

There are many ways you can use a Facebook business page as a viral marketing tool! Suggest your business page to all of your friends. Grow both your friend and ‘fan’ base and then give your ‘fans’ something to share. They will!

Reason # 4. SEO Power

Unlike a personal profile, business pages ARE completely public (there are some exceptions but that is beyond the scope of this post) and indexed by search engines. You will want to name your page something SEO friendly, keeping in mind that once you name your page you cannot change the name. Once you have 25 ‘fans’ you will want to customize your Facebook URL to something SEO friendly and you can also use anchor text linking (this is a huge secret, but I am revealing it anyway) to drive not only TRAFFIC but also relevant backlinks.

Reason # 5. Updates

You can update your ‘fans’ in multiple ways! You can post to your wall, share on your personal profile to attract new fans or send a mass update to all of your ‘fans’ through your administrator controls on ‘edit page’ (lower right hand side). You can also TARGET your updates to specific fans based on demographics.

Reason # 6. Unlimited ‘Fans’

Unlike a personal profile which restricts you to 5,000 connections (business pages and friends combined), your business page can have an unlimiteded amount of ‘fans’.

Reason # 7. Connects with Nearly EVERYTHING

Facebook business pages can be connected with twitter, linkedin, youtube and countless other social networking sites. You can also use the ‘like’ feature on your self-hosted WordPress blog using Simple Facebook Connect. (Simple Twitter Connect is another powerful plugin for your self-hosted WordPress blog)

Pretty soon, if not argumentatively already, Facebook business pages will become as important as having a website. If you want to stay ahead of your competition you will need to set up your page correctly now and secure your keywords in your Facebook URL!

-Cheryl

Cheryl Waller
Marketing Consultant SEO, SEM, SMM
www.CherylWaller.com

Like my post? Take a sec and ‘Like’ my pages 

Social MAX Boot Camp for Real Estate Agents

CUSTOM ‘FAN’ PAGES

BUSINESS PAGE TEMPLATES

Share on Facebook

No related posts.

This post was requested by AR member Melissa Zavala. In her comment on my blog post Facebook: Profiles, Fan Pages, and Groups… Oh My!

She asks “…Can you write a blog post about how to embed youtube video into a fan page? I know how to insert it into an fb personal page, but cannot figure out how to add it to a fan page…”

No problem Melissa!

With Facebook custom business pages you are most likely going to be using the static FBML app. If you are not sure how to add or use it, just check out the videoHow to Create Your Own Facebook Custom Fan Page

In order to add YouTube, Facebook or swf videos to your custom fan page, you are going to have to get a little bit ‘techy’. It’s actually pretty simple, but if you have never even worked with HTML, then FBML may be a bit intimidating. Fear not though because I am going to make this as simple as possible for you.

When you are editing your custom business page using the static FBML application you will see an empty box.

In that box you will need to paste your CSS, HTML and FBML. Let’s say for the sake of argument right now that we want to just add a youtube video with a headline, a subheading, and a little anchor text below the video linking to our website. What we are going to need first is a little HTML to get this started.

Let’s start with the headline. I am just going to be using the H1 tag here because there are a lot of HTML tags that will not work with the static FBML application. Most of them include font color, sizes and positioning. All of that NEEDS to be controlled with CSS, but that is beyond the scope of this post.

<h1>This is My Awesome Headline</h1>

That will give you a nice large, bold headline that will be left aligned. Now lets add a break so that the subheading starts on the next line and add our subheading.

<h1>This is My Awesome Headline</h1><br >

<h2>This is My Cool Subheading</h2>

Ok great, now we have both our headline and subheading. Let’s get to the fun part. Adding the video in FBML. Now I will let you know here that there are different versions of FBML, but as long as you are using the most current FBML version, then you do not need to specify FBML with tags. <FBML></FBML>

For our video we are going to be using <fb:swf>. Now there are many variables and controls that we can add here, but we are going to keep this nice and simple.

<h1>This is My Awesome Headline</h1><br >

<h2>This is My Cool Subheading</h2><br>

<fb:swf

swfbgcolor=”000000″

imgstyle=”border-width:3px; border-color:white;”

swfsrc=’http://www.youtube.com/v/xxxxxxxxxx’

imgsrc=’http://img.youtube.com/vi/xxxxxxxxxx/1.jpg’

width=’340′ height=’270′ />

Ok cool now all we have to do is get our video ID from youtube and replace the xxxxxxx above for both. Don’t change anything else unless you are certain that you know what you are doing.

Ok now we are going to add another break and some anchor text underneath the video that leads to our website.

<h1>This is My Awesome Headline</h1><br >

<h2>This is My Cool Subheading</h2><br>

<fb:swf

swfbgcolor=”000000″

imgstyle=”border-width:3px; border-color:white;”

swfsrc=’http://www.youtube.com/v/xxxxxxxxxx’

imgsrc=’http://img.youtube.com/vi/xxxxxxxxxx/1.jpg’

width=’340′ height=’270′ /><br>

Please visit <a href=http://www.MyCoolWebsite.com>My Cool Website</a><br>

Copy and paste all of your code into the FMBL box, choose the title of your tab and that’s it. You have successfully added a heading, subheading, video and anchor text to your custom business fan page. When you are done it should look like this:

Have another request for a tutorial? Leave a comment and let me know.

If you like what you read here, please ‘Like’ Custom Fan Pages so I can send you updates when new tutorials come out.

Cheryl Waller
Marketing Consultant SEO, SEM, SMM
www.CherylWaller.com

Like my post? Take a sec and ‘Like’ my pages 

Social Networking for Real Estate Agents

CUSTOM ‘FAN’ PAGES

BUSINESS PAGE TEMPLATES

Share on Facebook

No related posts.

Looking to create a custom Fan page on Facebook? Well I have two videos for you! The first one is shameless advertising for my custom Facebook Fan page service, but please watch it as I had a lot of fun making it and would love your feedback on the video.

The second video is a short video that shows you how to create your own custom fan page. Now, don’t yell at me here, you will need a good understanding of HTML and some FBML (Facebook Markup Language) to get your custom fan page working correctly and I do not go over that in this video. However, if you have a basic understanding of HTML, know a little about FBML, and you have a good HTML editor, this video will show you how to create your own custom fan page. Pay attention to the video as I give you a few tips on how to get HTML to work within Facebook by leaving out some common tags.

Cheryl Waller
Marketing Consultant SEO, SEM, SMM
www.CherylWaller.com

Like my post? Take a sec and ‘Like’ my pages 

Social Networking for Real Estate Agents

CUSTOM ‘FAN’ PAGES

BUSINESS PAGE TEMPLATES

Share on Facebook

No related posts.