Hiring the right company to build the right website is very effective in generating more business

The National Association of Realtors 2010 member survey suggest that their agents are becoming more tech savvy, and for those who are increasing their spend on their websites are getting returns!

56% of agents are now using a smart phone daily compared to 42% in 2009,  of which 66% were agents who had been in the business 2 years or less, compared with 48% usage for those with careers 16 years or more.

Social media, (twitter, facebook, etc) and  personal networking in general rocketed up to 51% in 2010 compared with 35% from 2009.

10% of agents reported having a blog (i wondering what % are actively blogging , 63% reported having a website, with a median of 3% of their business being reported coming from it.

Interestingly, agents who spent  $1000 or more to build & maintain on their site said that it generated 19% of their business.

Suggesting that simply ‘having  a website’ misses the mark by a long way. Agents who embrace the web and create a substantial and effective website site get significant returns.

Facebook business pages are a great tool to use in offering real estate agents another avenue to generate leads. Here’s how to create a Facebook business page for your real estate business.

Open your personal facebook page, then go to the following url: www.facebook.com/advertising/?pages

From there click the “Create a Page” green button:

On the Create New Facebook Page window, select Real Estate:

Then choose the name of the page you will ultimately want to use. This will become your facebook url, or domain name, eg: www.facebook.com/limeyboy. Ideally, this should match the keywords that are within your domain name or the ones that you website is designed around. Once you choose your page name, you can’t change it, (you can delete it, or create another, but you can edit one that you have created).

Then click, “Create Page”, which will bring you to your Facebook business page:

This page will come with an initial facebook business page url such as the one below. It’s somewhat conveluted at this point…

It is this address that you need to share with your personal/professional facebook friends. Send out an email to suggest that your friends ‘fan’ your facebook page. Once you get 25 ‘fan’s’ of your page, Facebook will trim that down to the shortened version.

How To Add a Photo To Your Facebook Business Page

From your business page, homepage, roll over the words Change Picture on the large ?, and choose, Upload a Picture…

Navigate to your photo:

Wait a moment….

Then see the results: Cute!

Below your photo, click where it says, Write Something, and, well, write something about your business…

And your done!

How to Get to Your Business Page from Your Personal Page

Sign into your facebook account.  Click Pages & Ads, from the left navigation window:

This will take you a summary window, where you can click on your page:

How do you get one of those snappy, facebook urls for your facebook real estate business page, like www.facebook.com/limeyboy (for example

Simply get 25 fans, then with your facebook account open, click this link,

http://www.facebook.com/username/

Choose your the page you want to shorten, then type in the shortened version you want, if available and you are away!!!

So you have your website, your blog, your twitter account all nicely focused on the day job, then there’s the facebook account.

Tagged photos of you tagged a hundred years ago at school, vacation photos, you name it. The only thing that links this disparate kernels of you-ness is that you can’t really control them. Scary!

This is where the facebook business page come in. It’s your chance for a do-over.

A facebook business page is the clean sheet if you like. You set one up, then select, carefully, from your ‘friends’ list who you want to be a ‘fan’ of this page. From there you can start again. You are in efffect the editor, the admin.

Until recently the facebook business page, and the regular ‘person?’ page were very similar. But recently facebook has enabled business pagers to add customized content. It’s in it’s infancy, and as a consequence fairly basic however, it’s is a great improvement on…er…nothing.

See an example of our custom facebook business page.

At www.limeyboy.com we can help you integrate the look and feel and some of the functionality of your existing website, blog and twitter feed into your business page with our facebook custom business page design service.

Contact us today