Archives August 2014

Building your brand should be one of the greatest goals of your Facebook Page. In this blog post, I’ll give you 5 basic branding guidelines for your Facebook page.

These guidelines will help your Facebook Page attract fans and drive traffic to your site.

BRANDING GUIDELINE #1 – BUILD YOUR ASSET TOOLKIT

Set your Facebook Page easily using an Asset Toolkit! It is a set of files to help you update and populate your Facebook Page.

Create a separate file folder in your hard drive or cloud storage for all files related to branding – as you shall be using them consistently.

Your asset toolkit should contain more or less the following:

• Messaging for the About Section

Make sure the following properly filled out:

– Business Name
– Address
– Business Hours
– Phone
– Company Mission Statement
– Services
– Email Address

Additional Action items:

– Create 3 Taglines for your company
– Create a short description that is a brief summary of your business. The character limit is 155.
– Create a long description that includes keywords for your business along with the services you offer such as real estate listings, brokerage services, real estate investing, etc.

• Timeline Cover Images
• Profile Image
• Facebook App Images

BRANDING GUIDELINE #2 – SELECT THE BEST PROFILE IMAGE

Your profile image is the first thing your fans will remember, aside from the company name in all areas of Facebook – including chat boxes, embedded Facebook badges sidebars, and news feed. This is how your company is being branded.

How to select the best profile photo?

Due its small dimensions: 160 x 160 pixels, you should select an image that best utilizes the space available. Commonly, it could be either your company logo or your own professionally-taken photo.

Page profile pictures are square and display at 160 x 160 pixels on your Page.
The image file you upload must be at least 180 x 180 pixels.

Make sure your profile photo stands out in the news feed by adding a colored square around your photo or including your business name along with a headshot image.

BRANDING GUIDELINE #3 – OPTIMIZE YOUR COVER PHOTO AS A SALES TOOL!

The cover photo is a large, rectangular image found at the top of your page. Due to its prominence, it is important to give your audience a cover photo with a lasting impression.

What does it take to have a great cover photo?

• Use a Call to Action
• Showcase Rooms from Your Listings
• Share Your Charitable Causes

How do you optimize your cover photo?

On the image description, include a Call to Action and link to your website. This will help drive more traffic to your website and/or social sites.

Remember that Facebook favors cover images with less text, so make use of the image description and comment field accordingly.

Include your CTA as part of the cover photo design.

Cover Photo specs:

Cover photos should be:

• clear
• high resolution image file
• 851 pixels wide and 315 pixels tall

Note: If you upload images less than these dimensions, it will be stretched to fit the container.

BRANDING GUIDELINE #4 – GET A CUSTOMIZED TIMELINE URL

A customized URL, also called a vanity URL is another feature you can customize for branding. It should be the same as your Facebook page name.

For example, the name of my Facebook page is https://www.facebook.com/JenSmithSocial

To create your own vanity URL:

Admin Panel > Settings > Page Info > Edit Facebook Web Address

BRANDING GUIDELINE #5 – CREATE FACEBOOK APP THUMBNAILS

You can create Facebook App thumbnails to connect all your branding elements together.

Thumbnail image sizes are 111 x 74 pixels.

For all these graphic requirements, you can ask your designer to do it for you or you can do it yourself using FREE tools like PicMonkey or Canva.

If you have any questions, I’d love to help you answer them. Just leave a comment below.

Want to learn how to use Facebook to get a consistent source of leads online?  Sign up for my FREE video series FB Real Estate Pro and get instant access to three free videos!

Numbers don’t lie. They play an important role in everyday life, more so, in business. By knowing the right statistics, you’ll prevent making quick business decisions that you might regret in the future.

In this blog post, I will present to you 12 Facebook facts & figures that will prove that Facebook is right for your real estate business:

1. Statistics show that Facebook has 1.2+ billion users (as of February 2014)
2. There are 751 Million Mobile Users on Facebook
3. The average Facebook user checks their account five times a day, and typically spends 20 mins a day on Facebook.
4. 50% of people trust a company’s Facebook page more than their website.
5. 70% of Facebook users engage with businesses on Facebook.
6. Facebook users have pressed the “Like” button more than 4.2 billion times.
7. Facebook users post 30 billion pieces of content every month.
8. More than 7.5 Million users have promoted a post
9. 90% of home buyers searched online during their home buying process.
10. Consumers who engage with a company via Facebook spend 30% morecompared to a customer who does not.
11. 43% of Americans say that Facebook has a greater impact on their purchasing behavior than any other social network.
12. Because of its massive user base, you can find your target audience on Facebook. And, 67% of B2C marketers have generated leads via Facebook.

Based on this data, we can conclude that:

• Facebook is the largest social network on the planet.
• People are engaged on Facebook.
• Your leads are on Facebook.

Sources:
Facebook News: September 30, 2013
The Top 20 Valuable Facebook Statistics by Zephoria
2012 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers via Realtors.org Digital Study

Now, what are you waiting for? Get more leads for your real estate business now by using Facebook!

Ready for more changes on Facebook?!  It seems like they are making changes daily now and it’s hard to keep up so this post should break down for you the recent changes regarding the new Facebook ad campaign structure.

The New Facebook Ads Campaign Structure is set to roll out on September 15 and will be made available to 100% of advertisers in the next few weeks.

This change is designed to make advertising efforts easier for advertisers in three words:

• Organize
• Optimize
• Measure

WHAT’S NEW?

Before, Facebook Ads only has a 2-level structure: Campaigns and Ads.

It was in each individual campaigns that advertisers set everything: campaign goals, audience filters, budget and scheduling of ads. The Ads – there are the creatives.

This structure is particularly rigid: as it was difficult to optimize and measure ads effectiveness across different audience demographics and campaigns goals.

HENCE, THE NEW 3-LEVEL STRUCTURE: CAMPAIGN- ADS SETS- ADS.

In this new structure, you can set different campaign goals on Campaign such as branding, site visits or promote offers.

You can set your audience, budget, placements and scheduling in Ad Sets. Under each Ad sets are your Ad creatives.

To better understand, this 3-level structure allows you to:

• Separate different campaign goals from others
• Set different audience groups under each campaign
• Experiment on different Ad creatives under each demographic group.

This gives advertisers a chance to better analyze and understand how each creative content performs in a specific group of people, under each campaign goal.

Facebook has published a guide on how to bring the best out of the new Ads Campaign structure.

CAMPAIGN BEST PRACTICES:

1. Define your campaign goal.

Campaign goals are specific results set by a brand. For example, a local store will have the following objectives:

• Visits to Website
• Website Conversions
• Increase Page Post Engagement
• Likes your Page
• Install Apps
• App Engagement
• Promote Offers
• Event Responses
• Video Views

Thus a goal should be limited to some specific calls to action from a Facebook user.

2. Set up campaigns based on advertising objectives.

You can create different campaigns under each objectives. Here are a sample list of campaigns you can choose from:

3. Set the cap how much you spend across all your campaigns.

You don’t need to worry about over-spending. You can set your budget across campaigns. The Ads will stop as soon as your cap budget is reached.

4. Take note of spending for each of your campaigns.

Use the spending meter to track how much your ads had spent so far. This will let you in the loop of how much your ads costs to run, as well as compare which ad delivers better results over cost-effectiveness.

AD SET BEST PRACTICES

1. Organize ad sets by audience.

Learn to determine your audience by gender, age, location, likes and other demographic data available in the Ads Manager.

This will help you determine which audience group drives better response to your ads. For example: you can and create ad set for people you liked your Page and another for those who haven’t liked your Page yet.

One secret is to keep your Ad Set consistent so that you can easily single out the best performing Ad Sets.

2. Optimize top performing placements.

You can alternately assign one placement in an Ad Set or have multiple placements in a demographic Ad Set so optimize your ad results.

3. Set bidding to maximize performance.

Make sure that your ads have consistent optimization settings to optimize your ads; whether you are bidding for clicks, impressions or reach, your choice depends what your prefer to pay for.

4. Adjust budgets to optimize spend.

Monitor which ads perform better than the rest. Make sure your budget appropriately and equally to all top-performing ad sets.

AD BEST PRACTICES

1. Know which ad types suits your campaign objective.

Select the best types of ads to use such as link ads, photo ads, text ads, app install pages to match the needs of your campaign.

2. Come up with multiple ads to optimize creative.

As much as possible create other ad variations using a creative. For example, an ad creative can be both in form of a image or a video. This allows more optimized delivery.

3. Always monitor to improve performance of a creative.

Always make a point to record results such as number of clicks, impressions as well as rejections. This helps you see the performance of your ads in a user’s view point. Use what you have learned to improve future creatives.

4. Work within the limits of your account.

Every account can hold as much as 1000 campaigns, 1000 ad sets and 5000 ads. This only applies to live campaigns, deleted ones do not count. To better manage and track your campaigns, follow your marketing plan and run a good number of ads that you can manage.

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE NEW AD CAMPAIGN STRUCTURE?

Like-gating is a way to incentivize Facebook users who haven’t liked your page yet. It can be a simple image with a “like my page” call to action. Once a user liked your page then that’s the only time they get access to your freebie, prize or discount.

HERE IS SAMPLE FROM MY OWN FACEBOOK PAGE:

Under the ‘proper use’ policy, effective November 5th, 2014, Facebook admins are no longer allowed to give incentives for people to like a page or use social plugins.

Incentives include: rewards, freebies, discounts and gating apps to force people to like a page first.

It will still be acceptable to incentivize users, who already Liked the page every time they visit the page or login to the app.

This is stirring up some reactions among marketers online. This is what Facebook has to say:

“To ensure quality connections and help businesses reach the people who matter to them, we want people to like Pages because they want to connect and hear from the business, not because of artificial incentives. We believe this update will benefit people and advertisers alike.”

What this quote from Facebook implies is that in order for your Page Likes to grow organically, people must really like and connect with your brand in the first place.

Let us take a look at this study by Ignite Social Media.

It shows that incentives is still the top reason for people to like a page so it’s a bit shocking that Facebook would prohibit pages from doing so.  But it’s actually a VERY good thing.  If you have fans that have liked your page because you made them like your page to get something from you – they are likely not an engaged fan and the key to Facebook success is having fans that are ENGAGED with your page and your brand.

This update will challenge business owners, marketers and admins to:

• improve the content being shared on Facebook by creating genuine engagement
• maximize the use of Facebook Insights to know when your fans are online and what they “like” most
• use Facebook Ads to build a targeted audience

What do you think of the new update?  I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

Do you wonder if using your personal page is best?  Do you post listings to your personal page and wonder if your friends get irritated?

I often get asked these questions so I thought I’d write a blog post about it.

“I am a real estate agent, should I use my personal profile or create a Facebook page to post about my business?”

Without batting an eyelash, I would say you should use a Facebook Page.

Why should you set up a Facebook Page and not use your personal Facebook profile to get post on your page and get leads if you are a real estate agent?

Let me first define and differentiate the two before I go ahead and answer the big “why”.

WHAT IS A PERSONAL PROFILE?

• Personal Timelines, which are sometimes referred to as profiles, are for individual, non-commercial use.
• They represent individual people and must be held under an individual name.
• You can follow Timelines to see public updates of people you’re interested in but aren’t friends with.

WHAT IS A FACEBOOK PAGE?

• Facebook Pages look similar to personal Timelines, but they offer unique tools for connecting people to a topic they care about, like a business, brand, organization or celebrity.
• Pages are managed by people who have personal Timelines.
• Pages are not separate Facebook accounts and do not have separate login information from your Timeline.
• You can like a Page to see updates in News Feed.

As you can see, a Facebook Page can be utilized to get high-quality leads better than your Personal Profile.

Here are 10 more reasons why you should use Facebook page and not your personal profile:

1. BE SEARCHABLE

   Facebook Fan Pages are indexed by search engines which is important in building your online presence.

2. FACEBOOK TABS/ THIRD PARTY APPS

   You can practically create a website out of your Page using Facebook apps. You can add special Apps that could create beautiful landing pages, add a lead capturing-form and other integrations that you need to make your Facebook Page a lead-generating machine.

3. TAG YOUR PAGE

   Your fans, non-friends and other Pages can tag your brand on their posts. Therefore, creating more visibility.

4. RUN PROMOS AND CONTESTS

   You can run promos via the Ads Manager by simply posting an Offer on your Page. It may be discount offers or freebies when they respond to your call to action.

   In the same manner, you can run contests either by creating custom tabs.

5. ASSIGN AN ADMIN

   You can assign an admin to manage your Facebook page. You don’t need to give out your personal password to other people. This is more convenient and less risky for you.

6. COMMENT AS YOUR PAGE

   If you want to increase your online presence on Facebook, you will need to comment, reply, like and share to other Pages using your Facebook page.

   This allows other people to feel your presence by being active, not just being confined to your own page.

7. CHECK-INS

   As long as your location has a complete street address and is pinned on maps (like Bing Maps, Google Maps or Foursquare), people can check-in to your office location and share it on their own timelines.

   You cannot have that if you are using a personal page. This increases interaction between you and your clients.

8. FACEBOOK INSIGHTS

   This is a very powerful tool to learn about your Facebook audience. You can study your fan demographics, know which posts has more engagement and combining these information into improving your page activity. Which will in return get you more leads.

9. RUN ADS

   Paid advertising to promote your business can only be done on Facebook Pages and not in your personal profile.  You can do some super cool things with Facebook Ads such as advertising to your email database or promoting an open house.

10. NO “FRIEND LIMITS”

    Last but not the least, personal profile page is limited to 5,000 friends. Your Facebook Page can have an infinite number of fans.

Start setting up your Facebook page today if you haven’t yet. For more information about setting up your Facebook page, click here…

If you have any questions, I’d love to help you answer them. Just leave a comment below.