Facebook is an excellent place to do business, but you really have to know how to use it, if it is going to work the way you want it to.

Facebook is a place for keeping in touch with friends, family, and even acquaintances.
Use it accordingly.
There is nothing worse than seeing updates about every home we(Real estate agents) are listing and every appointment and always plugging your web site. It gets extremely annoying.
Idealogy:
Facebook is like a huge apartment complex with a common area in the middle for people to gather, converse, and catch up. As tenants living in this apartment complex we can choose to hang out in the commons and chit chat or we can go on about our business, we can even just look form our balcony if we please. The coolest part about your "Apartment Complex" is that you get to choose who lives there. So pick and choose, but realize that if you do not like one of you "tenants", eviction is just a click away.
With that being said: If a group of people are having a conversation, you wouldn't just bust into the middle of the conversation and say: "Hey, let me be your REALTOR!!!" Or you wouldn't stand on the balcony and yell: "I got 2 listings today and I have 8 showing appointments." or Walk out into the common areas every day and say "visit JoeBobrealEstate.com for all of your real estate needs".
In order to interact with people on Facebook and see benefits, you have to act just as you would if you were in person and not on the internet/facebook, if you want to successfully interact with the hopes of building relationships and in turn building business.
I own a real estate company and I have more than 30 agents that work with me, but I hardly ever talk about my listings or my clients. I talk about what real people in a personal setting talk about - more important stuff: Texans football, my kids, being pissed at work, taking my wife out dancing, taking the kids to the splash pad, my kids fighting and me letting them because stopping them doesn't seem to help.
The "REAL IMPORTANT STUFF" is what people care about. People want to know the real you and they want you to get to know them. In order to form real relationships on Facebook, you have to want to form real relationships with people in real life. Showing a genuine interest in other people will give them a vested interest in showing a genuine interest in you.
People do not post pictures and status updates on facebook just for fun, they want to be accepted and they want to feel relevant just as you and I do.
So stop talking about work and how successful you are, talk about what really makes you who you are. Stop pitching your web site and start finding out more about the people that are posting their real life in your face everyday via Facebook.
Use this amazing 2 way communication tool to find out about people and communicate about real life. If you build a solid relationship, they will know what you do and you won't have to keep hitting them in the face with your almost worthless markting campaigns.
Just recently the Houston Association of REALTORS® asked me to speak on an educational panel to a room full of REALTORS® about Digital/Social Media and real estate. I spoke briefly about this topic and after the event I spoke with many individuals about my Social/Digital Media Idealogy. As I spoke with these people I began to realize that too many people are thinking about big business on these sites, such as twitter, facebook, linkedIn and blogging. They are thinking that they can add hundreds of friends and market them to death. There is nothing further from the truth. The true fundamentals of business have not changed, just the medium has. Do busines as you always have and just use Social Media to enhance your communications.

Some cannot grasp how it is beneficial, so I am going to break it down even more.

In life before Facebook, Twitter, Myspace and other sites we, real estate agents, relyed heavily on referrals ans relationships. We first service our family and friends to learn the business and get started, then we eventually build our business beyond friends and family due to referrals and getting to know more people and them getting to know what you do. In real life you can only touchbase with so many people in a day, month, year because whether it be face to face, via e-mail or phone. So in pre-facebook life you could onlye remain up close and personal with about 100 people without completely spreading yourself thin. Now that we have Facebook, we can have hundreds of people that we stay in contact with. I can sit down for 30 minutes and read about everyone's day, see pictures of their kids, and see that they still hang out witht he same old people from back in High School. It's amazing. I simply click on the "Like" button and I have added relevancy to their posted on Facebook lives. I comment on their status updates or pictures and suddenly we are having a conversation. A conversation that can span weeks before we actually respond, but we both get a little from it. Now that I can manage that time and those relationships when I am ready, I can managge time with huundreds of people and not skip a beat. Now my sphere of influences has expnnentially grown and I am not spending any more time communicating than I did before. Unless you get addicted like me.

So, that is my take on Facebook and how to use it properly to develope relationships and eventually grow business, if that is your goal. Sometimes when growing your business is not your goal, your business will grow even faster. HMMMMM? That is a thought worth pondering.

Feel free to comment and input your thoughts about this note. I love feedback.

About the Blogger:

That's me. Ozzie Ramirez. I am a husband, a father, a brother, a son and many other things before you ever get to the fact that I am a Licensed REALTOR®. Sometimes people forget that. Busines will come and go, but your family, if you treat them right, will always be there. If you are ever in Pearland or the Greater Houston area, do not hesitate to look me up. 

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