REALTORS: How’s This for a Facebook Strategy – Don’t Friend Family and Friends on Facebook.

This Facebook marketing tip relates to the profile marketing tool in Facebook. For clarification on where this tip fits into the greater Facebook marketing picture, please view our post Facebook Foundations: Facebook’s Marketing Tools Explained.

Do you think I’m nuts for suggesting this?  Bear with me, particularly if you are not using Facebook for business development because you have privacy concerns.

I was at the Real Estate Marketing Summit this past week in San Diego where I heard Realtor Robin Milonokis give a presentation on her Facebook strategy.  Robin is known in the real estate tech crowd for successfully using Facebook to build her business and swears by it as a critical tool in her real estate practice.  I’ve also recently met with Kim Cohen, an escrow sales manager who flew onto my radar for her assertive use of connecting with agents in my local area on Facebook.  Both women are strong advocates of using Facebook for business development.  What is similar about both of their success stories is that both of them are using their Facebook profile to connect with AGENTS.

It occurred to me, what a great strategy for using your Facebook profile.  Don’t connect with your friends and family, connect with agents you know.  For Realtors who worry about privacy on Facebook, I suggest actively declining friend requests from family and friends who will potentially post things (photos, status updates, etc) you are concerned about your business contacts seeing.  This way, you have full control over the data you put into Facebook (only put in information that supports your business goals), and you minimize the risk of the nuances of your personal life being tied to your Facebook profile.

Consider using your profile as a B2B tool and grow your relationship with other real estate professionals who can send you business over time.  This is a great strategy for several reasons:

1. There are lots of Realtors and business contacts on Facebook.  Someone you know who can help your business can be found on Facebook.
2. Realtors are people too!  They want to know who they are sending referrals to.  Connecting on Facebook provides an opportunity to deepen a relationship with someone who shares a common business goal with you.
3. If you aren’t connected to your friends and family it is very unlikely that photos or posts that expose your children or your vacation plans are ever going to appear on your profile.  These are often two of the things that real estate agents are most concerned about exposing to colleagues and stop them from getting on Facebook in the first place.

A few notes of cautions regarding this strategy:

• Know the agent you are friending. In other words, only connect with agents you personally know.  If you don’t know them well already, did you at least meet them through a conference, through a client, or at an event?  Reaching out to people you don’t know is not only HIGHLY frowned upon on Facebook, it is against the terms of service.  And, if you are perceived as spamming people through friend requests, or are perceived as not having a connection to the person based on Facebook’s algorithm, they will not allow you to send friend requests and may block your account.  I know of Realtors who have had their accounts shut down on Facebook for aggressively friending other Realtors they didn’t know.  Users can report you as spam or not knowing you and Facebook listens.  Your entire strategy is dead in the water if Facebook shuts down your account.  Avoid these types of messages from Facebook by making sure you are connecting only with people you already know and are likely to accept your friend request:

• DO NOT sell via your wall.  Use your wall to converse, listen, and engage with those you are connected to.  Build a relationship with them.  Use your profile as a relationship building tool, not a business development, or sales tool.  Otherwise, you will be perceived as spam and be hidden from view, de-friended, or reported to Facebook and potentially loose your account.  In addition, it is still against the terms of service to use your profile for commercial gain…this means NO listings (even if you are only connecting to agents…posting listings is still a terms of service violation).
• Don’t create a 2^nd profile to do this.  It is against the Facebook terms of service to have two profiles.  Segregating your personal life from your professional one can be done by doing what I’ve suggested here – don’t friend family and personal friends.  Or, you can have a business page where people like your page and this leaves your personal profile for connections with your family and friends.  A third option for dealing with this overlap between personal and professional is learning the nuances of the profile product and applying items like Facebook lists to your friends.

In summary, if you are not using Facebook because of privacy concerns or concerns about overlapping your personal and professional life, then I suggest that you don’t connect with family and friends on your personal profile. Decline the requests!  Use your profile to connect with other agents you know.  Think of it as a B2B platform.  Don’t use it as a personal platform.  Use it as a one to connect with people who can help your business and build a relationship with them.

This article is part of a month long series of tips, tricks, and strategies for real estate marketing with Facebook. View additional posts from our “Tip a Day” series on Pixel Coaching.