"Exposed" on Facebook

“Exposed” on Facebook

By Anthony Longo 28 11 2008 by Author

With lots of talk on real estate becoming more and more transparent these days (and even blogs focusing on the subject at hand here, here & here), many ask, “Ok how do I do this.”

Here @ CondoDomain we have spent quite a bit of time researching and trying new techniques to tranparent-ize our business & our local industry to our consumers & “followers”. (Twitter play on word) Facebook was our first true push at it…and here is our stroy.

*** Side Note: Yes, it has really started to pay off recently, but I am not going to make any claims of a good ROI as of yet. ***

When we first started to ‘Expose” ourselves on the web - both business-minded and personally, we were very conservative. Not as conservative as a corporate profile to enter the space…but conservative for us as an innovative, edgy company. We were not sure where the boundaries were between a ‘professional marketed image & brand’ vs. our very outgoing young personalities and opinions.

The best way to really to explain this is to track back to some of the steps we took.

1. We created a mini “off-site” forum on the social media platform called “Facebook.” We branded our online-platform forum - Boston Real Estate Exposed.

Result: Some local ‘facebook’ traction and I personally received many “friend requests” as the group organizer. Most requests were industry peers as I really was not an on the street broker, but I “felt” the traction.

2. We opened Dallas, Charlotte & Atlanta and added the “Real Estate Exposed” groups for those cities as well on Facebook. Now some groups have had more traction in their city compared to others…but I am getting to my point here as now I was approaching 2,000 friend requests from again - industry peers.

3. The next step was to add some advertisement on our blogs to let our blog readers know we also have a Facebook group, after all they were all web 2.0′ers. This immediately boosted our Facebook status and we started to see a more comfortable and open social group now communicating with us on FB and off FB through email.

Result: Awesome move….lets keep this going and get all of our team involved.

4. We told the team here in Boston what was going on and asked them to explore taking their personal Facebook page to the next level and join in to these groups so now users could actually speak with our real agents & team members. This was funny as I researched companies using Facebook and it seemed like corporate america was banning the site and here we are telling eveyrone to get on it. Awesome!

This meant letting in individuals who we don’t necessarily know so they can learn about all of us, who we are and gain the trust & transparency they all want. (We wanted to ‘keep it real’ BUT for some of us, we did have to remove some of the college keg-stand photos…well, not those, but you know what I am talking about!

So…we all opened up our Facebook profiles in Boston - Jessica, Tommy, Erica, BL and myself - totally exposed!

Result: The social experiment - a success. Friends of friends reading up on the Exposed groups and getting an introduction to Jessica or Thomas who are our Boston agents & now daily Facebook users.

CondoDomain is now open in 8 cities nationally and we have asked all of our agent/brokers to crack open their Facebook profiles and let these users in. We are still balancing between the Web 1.0′er and the Web 2.0′er. Meaning, our Facebook groups are still only promoted on our blogs and really have not been pushed across our main site where all of our visitors land.

I mean, we aren’t ready to horrify our ‘Empty nester” buyer who is moving in from the suburbs looking to buy a $5M brownstone in the city and who may have not heard of Facebook yet…but I do think the time is coming and coming soon.

So what are our next steps:

Well, Erica Farthing who is now leading our Social Media marketing and has jumped in to other Social networks like Twitter & other community builders AND has tapped our client database of all of our 2008 clients. She is currently in the process of interviewing our clients and showing them our new tools & networks to see if they would have reserached our firm or used our forums & groups to help them in their search for real estate or a real estate agent. Once we compile the data we will certainly post it and let you know our next steps.

My assumptions is that we will somehow integrate our social media efforts into our main website & search pages. I don’t think it will a forum like TruliaVoices, but more of just a 3rd party intergration of our members & past clients.

Find Us On Facebook

CondoDomain Fan Page (Corporate Fan Page)

CondoDomain Wants You (Agent Recruiting page)

Individual CondoDomain Agent/Broker Links - Here

Our “Real Estate Exposed” Pages:

Other posts we have written on Facebook