Facebook's Evolution and Your Real Estate Social Networking Strategy

Posted by Metropolitan Group on Monday, May 10th, 2010 at 5:47pm.

Facebook turned the Internet on its head when it announced several big changes that could significantly affect potential clients’ search patterns and usage of the Web to find Realtors® and real estate.  New Social Plugins can be integrated with virtually any website and the “Open Graph Protocol” gives webpages the ability to take advantage of the Facebook platform.  With these formidable pieces of technology, Facebook can help websites, pages, blog posts and videos go “viral” more easily than before.

Facebook VS Google?

Google’s PageRank system may be significantly affected by Facebook’s “Like” button, the button that you can embed into your website.  According to GoogleWebmasterHelp’s video on the subject, Google treats links the same – it doesn’t matter who owns it, who funds it or who provides the content. 

“When a user enters a query, our machines search the index for matching pages and return the results we believe are the most relevant to the user. Relevancy is determined by over 200 factors, one of which is the PageRank for a given page. PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages. In simple terms, each link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site's PageRank. Not all links are equal: Google works hard to improve the user experience by identifying spam links and other practices that negatively impact search results. The best types of links are those that are given based on the quality of your content.” - source

Since many people don’t know or don’t care about Facebook privacy concerns, their pages are open to be crawled by the GoogleBot and their links to other sites recorded.  The “Like” button makes it possible for a page to go “viral” on Facebook and thereby skew Google’s rankings for its importance, even if it wouldn’t be considered higher ranked than other sites in the normal scheme of things.

Google is not going to be obsolete; people don’t generally share information that isn’t interesting.  If you’re looking for something like real estate statistics for Hungry Horse, Montana from 1997, you're going to need Google or a search engine like it to find them; stuff like that doesn't go viral unless it's connected to something of general interest.

The Open Graph Protocol allows people to turn their websites into Facebook “graph objects”, which makes any website into a “Facebook page”.  Facebook users can then interact with the website as a Facebook page – it will show up in search results, in user profiles and in News Feeds.  By utilizing this powerful new platform, it is possible to make your website available to a huge audience, provide regular updates, administer your page, include location and contact information. 

What does this mean for Realtors®?

What could this mean for Realtors® who want to make sure that they are on top of the social marketing campaign?  It is quite possible that Facebook could achieve a formidable level of influence over what content users view and how information is passed around.  By adding Social Plugins, such as the “Like” button, on your pages and blog posts, you are upping your chance of a post of yours passing from person to person in such a way that people interested in your subjects are most likely to be exposed to your message(s).

You must offer something beyond the ordinary

However, to be successful on the social networking platform, it isn’t enough to post dry information about the latest house you are featuring and real estate statistics.  You have to be interesting.   People don’t pass on random content; they pass on content that they think will elicit a desired reaction out of their connections. 

The questions is: "How can I be interesting?"

Have an opinion! Explore your city or your area - find out what's hot and what's not about it. Blog about the great meal you had at the new restaurant downtown. Tell people about the marathon you just ran. Give timely tips on gardening if you're into that. Introduce people to your interests so they have a sense of who you are. Sometimes realtors get leads from the strangest places - like their social circles outside of their real estate career.

Even if it isn’t precisely real estate related, becoming known for something amusing, informative to the general public or a breaking piece of news is not a bad thing. If people can connect with you and your business when they aren’t looking for real estate to buy or sell, they may just think of you when they are. 

Be the first to comment on this blog entry!

Leave a Comment