Facebook…the big mysterious elephant in the room

Too often I believe we consider Facebook and other Social Media outlets to be necessary evils in our day to day marketing life. Let’s face it, on more than one occasion we have opened up our business page and stared that blank stare the means we have no idea what to post, or even more, what happens (if anything) once we do spend our valuable time to come up with content worthy of posting.

How can we make sure that creating a social media presence is actually doing anything but stressing us out? How can we make sure that our hard work is noticed and more importantly, noticed by the audience we are actually targeting?

Naples, Marco Island, Bonita Springs and the surrounding areas are rich in content perfect for Social Media and hopefully your professional real estate photographer is creating some inspiring images of your listings, so simply sharing what is being offered and leaving it at that is very tempting.

But we all know that that is not enough to keep our content stream anything more than another classified ad selling real estate. It is important to remember that the majority of Social Media users are there for personal entertainment and not to buy real estate.

So what can we do to make our posts count?

If you have a follower that is in the market to buy a house, the odds are they won’t come across your post sharing your listing if all you are posting is one listing right after another. If you aren’t posting content that is relevant to your industry and entertaining to some extent, then you are not getting anyone to interact with your commentary. And that is one of the top things that Facebook takes into account when it decides to put your post out there for you…is it getting any attention?

Be honest…do your “Look at my new listing” posts get much traffic? How many likes? How many shares? Hopefully some of course, but typically focusing on one type of post will not gain you much traction.

So what can we post that people will interact with?

Some things to take into consideration –

The one way to get your content interacted with is to interact with other content!

  • Content
    Post good, relative content that your audience will find useful or entertaining
  • Create relationships
    Seek out other pages and businesses within your industry
  • Interact & socialize
    Like, Comment & Share with your industry peers
  • Spread goodwill
    Spread the word about good things happening in your community

Content –

Your content is of course what people see when they find you. Good, relative content is the foundation of your page and should be not only be informing people what you have to offer as a business, but it should be sharing information that your industry peers may find useful or entertaining. This leads us to the next step…

Relationships –

You should be actively seeking out relationships with those in your industry. That’s right,  you should be socializing with your competition as well as your clients. Why would you want to focus so closely on people with the same goal as yourself? Because the one way to get your content interacted with is to interact with other content. I will say that again. The one way to get your content interacted with is to interact with other content!

Interact & Socialize –

One of the first things you should be doing when you open your Facebook business page is going into the “See Pages Feed” section. This is where you will interact with the pages you have chosen to follow and hopefully they will interact with you. Otherwise, if you are not blessed with thousands of followers then the odds are your posts aren’t being seen. This is one of the most important steps in getting noticed.

Share and spread goodwill –

See something you like? Share it! See something that may help someone? Share it! Here’s the thing…when someone takes the time to Like, Comment or Share one of your posts you pay attention to them. You should feel a little gratitude and the urge to reciprocate. Facebook and all Social Media outlets are depending on this natural reaction to keep the momentum up. To keep people coming back.

If we all play the game then we can all gain a little in the long run!