It’s all about interaction on Facebook. It’s a “social” network: interacting, adding friends, talking to users, joining groups, etc. are all vital in order to make the most out of Facebook. The more friends you have (and the more your interact with them), the farther your reach will be and the more opportunities you have to find new, high-value leads. 
  

The Key to Facebook is in the News Feed. When you first login to Facebook, the majority of the page (the entire left side) is used for the “news feed.” When any of your friends update their status, write on your wall, upload new pictures or do virtually anything on Facebook, it will show under your news feed as it’s happening. This means that when users comment on your wall, all of THEIR friends will see your information. When they join your group, all of THEIR friends will see your information. This is where it gets powerful…if you have 20 people a day interacting with you and they each have 100 friends, that’s 2,000 people (mostly local) that will see your name and may potentially click through to your profile – every day, for free.
 

If you don’t have a fan page for yourself, you’re missing out. Facebook allows users to create pages for anyone (including themselves). These are different from profiles in that they can showcase your business more than your personal profile can. An example of this would be “Danny Greene” (whom I just picked randomly) and has 74 “fans” of his real estate business.

Once your page is online, Users can become fans of you. From there, they can leave comments, read more about your business and you can interact as well. Fan pages even provide the opportunity to email all users in a group (i.e. about new listings, open houses or any other newsworthy things you’re doing). This keeps your potential clients actively involved with you and keeps you at the forefront of their minds. 

To create a Facebook page for yourself visit this link: http://www.Facebook.com/pages/create.php
 

Advertise on Facebook. If you have an advertising budget, Facebook is absolutely worth a try. It’s one of the most targeted ways to reach your potential customers. One really powerful thing about the Facebook advertising system is that it even allows you to promote your fan pages (see above) rather than some static, external site. The ads are also extremely targeted: you can place ads that will show only to demographics that you select (i.e. Boston residents age 25-35) and they will be directed back to the Facebook fan page where they will see your information. This is another opportunity to build relationships. Another opportunity to generate leads. 

http://www.Facebook.com/business/?socialads

To recap, four simple tips to get the most from Facebook are:

Interact with the community. Get out there and add friends, send messages and talk to your audience. This gives you dozens (hundreds?) of personal connections with potential real estate clients. 

Use the news feed to your advantage. To do this, get people talking to you and interacting with you on some level, every day.

Setup a fan page. Get your business and your brand a page where users can discuss your business and you can interact on a more targeted level

If you have a budget, advertise. With thousands of local visitors you can target, there’s few places can provide the return on investment that Facebook can.

And of course, the final step is to add me to your friends

Everything can be expressed in 140 characters or less. If you’re like me, you tend to turn quick notes into full blown essays. But what I’ve learned from Twitter (which has a limit of 140 characters per status update) is that virtually everything in life can be expressed in 140 characters. And even more, most things should be expressed in 140 characters or less. If an important client sends you a quick note and you reply in 2 sentences instead of 20, a few things are accomplished: You don’t waste time writing more than you need to, the recipient doesn’t waste time reading it, the reader still gets the answer they were looking for and you sound more powerful. There’s a sense of power in saying: “See you then.” that cannot be achieved with “Oh yeah, that sounds great! I’m looking forward to it… Oh and ….and also….and…..”. 

Everybody Likes to be @ed. When you tweet that you just ate at Burger King and someone and says “@yourusername – I love Burger King too!” you like that person from then on. You respect them, you pay attention to them and you look for opportunities to @ them back. The fact that they took the time to recognize you and your interests is something you value. The problem is, we @ people a lot more on Twitter than we do in real life. Why is this? And as much as people like being @ed on Twitter, they like it a lot more in real life. Think about how you can @family @clients @friends. Would it make a difference if you started “@ing” your past clients more often?

Trust, friendships, and followers are built through contribution. If you’ve been using Twitter for long, you have undoubtedly noticed spammers adding you. You view their profile and they have 1 update and are following 12,000 people. Does this pay off? Have they built meaningful relationships with the people they’re following? NO! I see this as another representation of the real world. Sure, you can cold call everyone in the phone book or send an email to 100,000 addresses at once, but without the individual relationships to support that contact, it’s likely to fail. Another way this could be seen is in terms of contribution. If that spammer had instead taken the time to update their account with interesting, informative, meaningful tweets for a few months and slowly started adding & engaging other users, they would have been hugely successful at promoting their business. Instead, they tried to take a shortcut and their account was quietly ignored by everyone. 

And, of course, you can follow me @realspace and if you like this post, feel free to tweet it out!

Finally, I stick by what I say, and I did claim that everything can be expressed in 140 characters or less, so…let’s try re-wording this entry:

Life lessons I learned from Twitter: everything can be said in 140 char., people like to be recognized & you can’t shortcut contribution!