subject: How To Use Fan Pages & Twitter Accounts For Real Estate Investors [print this page] How To Use Fan Pages & Twitter Accounts For Real Estate Investors
Social media is a very powerful communications tool. As real estate investors, there are a number of tools that you can use to build your investing business. One combination of tools that is truly powerful is the use of a Facebook fan page and a Twitter account for your real estate investing business.
A Facebook Fan Page is a special page that you can create on the social networking website of Facebook. This page allows followers of your business who are also on Facebook to track what is going on in your business. There are a number of ways that you can use this page to attract people that you as an investor will want to do business with.
To start, you want to create a fan page that adds value to the type of people that you are looking to attract. For instance, let's say you are looking to attract motivated sellers so that you can find potential properties that might make a good investment for your business. One way to utilize a fan page is to provide content that would be of a benefit to motivated sellers.
What's great about a fan page is that you don't even have to be the person that creates the content! All you have to do is find content that is already available on the internet. You then share that content on your fan page. That content gets shared to all of the fans of your Facebook fan page. In return, your fans might choose to share it and as a result, attract more fans for you to your fan page.
Of course a fan page does you no good if you don't have any fans to join your fan page. Therefore, you will need to know how to attract new fans to become a part of your fan page. The first step is to use the "suggest" feature and share your new fan page with all of your existing friends on Facebook. Some of your friends will join the page. Their friends will see that they joined it and potentially some of their friends will join as well.
If your real estate investing company already has a website and/or a blog, it is a good idea for you to include links to your Facebook fan page on your website. Some of your website visitors, once they recognize that you have a fan page, will want to join it. This gives your fan page additional exposure.
Another way to promote your fan page is to create related groups. For example, you could create a group called "Georgia Foreclosure Help" that people can join to get help related to foreclosure in Georgia. In this group you can provide helpful information in the form of articles, videos, etc as well as links to your company fan page. The group serves as the initial attractor to your target person and then some of them will be attracted to your fan page.
However, if you are using Facebook to promote your fan page, there are two ways that are the most effective ways to promote your fan page. They are through the use of your own personal Facebook profile and through the use of Facebook's advertising program.
With your personal profile, you have the ability to join groups and fan pages of other individuals or companies that have the type of people you are interested in attracting. All you have to do is become friends with these people using your own personal profile and then suggest your fan page to them. A percentage of them will join your fan page and one of those new fans could potentially be a good investing deal for you.
The other way is through the use of Facebook advertising. This type of advertising allows you to find people on Facebook who are likely target people that you are looking for and it promotes your fan page to these people. You can control the demographics, such as requiring that all people who see your ad are between the ages of 35 to 50. The bottom line is when you are advertising any business, the best place to advertise is where the people are and there is no question that there is a lot of people spending significant time on Facebook.
Finally, you should make sure that your Facebook account is linked to your Twitter account. This way, anytime you post onto Facebook fan page, it will automatically update the Twitter account that you will create for your real estate investing business also.
Twitter is also a powerful social networking tool that you can use to help you build your real estate investing business. Twitter is a different format than the Facebook fan page format. While it will provide many of the same functions, the real power with Twitter is the ability to create conversations related to your real estate investing efforts.
That doesn't mean that you shouldn't share resources on Twitter because you absolutely should. This is why it is helpful to display your content from your Facebook fan page to your Twitter account. If your content is very helpful, you could receive what is known as a retweet. This is when someone on Twitter likes your information so much that they share it with all of their followers also. Some of these people may begin to follow you on Twitter and that potentially opens the door up for more prospects for your real estate investing business.
So how do you attract followers on Twitter? The fastest way to attract followers is to find people that you believe would be great people to follow you and then engage in a conversation with them. You can simply follow them and hope that they follow you back and that will work for a percentage of these people.
However, having thousands of followers does you no good if it isn't resulting in the increase of your real estate investing business. This is why engaging in conversations with these people is a better approach for attracting followers. If you have a good conversation and you provide value, that person is more likely to follow you.
One of the most powerful features of Twitter is your ability to find in real time potential prospects for whatever you are looking for in your real estate investing business. Twitter has a search capability that you can access by visiting http://search.twitter.com.
For example, if you type in the worlds "house in foreclosure" in the search engine for Twitter, it will bring up a list of all of the tweets (the messages that people post on Twitter) that have those words in the message. One person posted about their sister's house in foreclosure. That could be a great potential prospect for you to talk to especially if they are in the area that you invest in.
To make sure the searches are within your particular area, you will want to click on the "Advanced Search" option. There is a field named "places" where you can type in the name of the place you want to look for tweets and how many miles from that place you want to find those tweets. This allows you to see the people who are in the geographical area that you are focused on. You can reach out to these people by sending them a message on Twitter.
Finally, Twitter is also a great way for you to gather information as well. You can follow key people such as other successful real estate investors, real estate professionals in your community and other people that would be able to provide you with useful information. Following these people and receiving their messages could help you down the road with a timely tip to help you with your investing efforts.
The combination of a Facebook fan page and a Twitter account accounts for a very powerful combination indeed. Using these two tools together could be a huge asset for the building of your real estate investing business. If you are not using them currently, you should strongly consider doing so.
