11 Jun Page vs profile Marketing on Facebook

Many agents incorrectly still rely on their profile to get their message and listings out there as their main source of FB marketing.  Here is a better way.

Topic – 5 ways agents get Facebook wrong

Mentor – John Hellaby

• Don’t rely on profile and listings as your FB marketing
• Profile is limited to friends and has a cap
• Profile doesn’t allow for audience creation
• Why not everyone on your profile sees what you post
• Getting in front of 5K people for $50

Marketing Monday – Auctioneer James Bell tells us about an outstanding marketing effort he has seen leading up to an auction.

Transcript:

Kevin: Look, there is no doubt whatsoever that Facebook is the emerging way for people to communicate and it’s really gathering a lot of pace within the real estate industry. We are going to focus on it this week, because I’m talking to John Hellaby. John has a website, cmhp.com.au, that we’ve got a link on on every page and he uses Facebook to generate leads for agents, but we’re going to talk about Facebook itself. Good day, John, how are you doing?

John: Very well, thanks, Kevin, how are you?

Kevin: Good, a long winded introduction. Sorry about that. My first topic today is ‘Page versus Profile’ marketing. You’re going to have to explain that to me.

John: Yeah, look, absolutely. There’s two key areas on Facebook that we engage with Facebook and people engage with us on Facebook. The first, of course, is our Facebook profile, and you can know your Facebook profile because on your profile that’s your newsfeed. That’s also where you have friends, so you know, you add a friend, you delete a friend, if they don’t post things you like and so on and so forth, but that’s where you also see what all your friends are up to in your Facebook profile newsfeed.

John: But then you’ve got your page. Your business page, as it’s becoming more commonly known, and on your page, that’s where you get people who are following you, people who liked your page in order to follow you, and that’s where you can put out a lot more content, but also reach a vastly larger audience of people, and really specifically target who it is that you want to reach.

Kevin: Can you run ads on your profile?

John: No, you can’t, and that’s one of the big mistakes that I see being made regularly. Agents are constantly putting out ads and good content, don’t get me wrong, it’s good content, but they’re putting it out on their profile, which means that all of the engagement, it’s limited to the number of friends that they have, and maybe they might get a little bit lucky and someone might share it and they might get a little extra, but that’s it.

John: Whereas on your page, you can run the ad, you can target the people you want to reach, but most importantly, Kevin, and this is something that is really important for agents to wrap their head around. When you’re running it from your page, you tap into Facebook’s ad algorithms and their ad platform, and that allows you to start building an audience out of people that have actually engaged with your content. After they’ve watched a video, they’ve clicked on a post, gone through to a website, if they’ve watched your listing video, if they’ve clicked on the link to go through to the listing on your website. You can put these people into an audience and actually remarket to that audience specifically. It’s massively powerful to be using your page.

Kevin: From what you’ve just said, not everyone on my profile is actually going to see what I post?

John: No. No, they’re not. Look, the same is slightly true for pages as well, but what Facebook is doing … If we jump into their business mindset for a second, Facebook has decided and they’ve worked out through oodles and oodles and oodles of data they’ve collected over the years that if they keep people on Facebook, they make more money, right? It’s a bit of a no brainer, but what they’ve worked out is the way they keep people on Facebook is to provide the most relevant content in their newsfeed.

Kevin: Ah, right.

John: Now, you might post something that is relevant to me, but isn’t relevant to my partner.

Kevin: Ah.

John: We’re both friends with you. I’m going to see it and she may not, right?

Kevin: Yeah.

John: Facebook’s trying to keep us on Facebook because that means more ad revenue. Now we’re going to get a little bit sidetracked here but it’s actually a really important point, I think, to make. That rule about relevance, the more relevant your content is, the more people are going to see it, that also applies to your page and it applies to every ad every time you hit the boost button. The more relevant you are, the more people you’re going to get in front of so the less ad spent, and that’s something we’ll probably circle back to sometime later in the week because it is a little bit of a tangent, but it’s something to keep in mind that relevance across all is important.

Kevin: Okay.

John: But when we’re on our profile, there’s a maximum of 5,000 people that we can reach.

Kevin: What does it cost to reach them?

John: On our profile, technically it costs nothing, but not all of them are going to see it. On our page, we have virtually an unlimited number of people we can reach. In fact, there’s 16.8 million Facebook users that we can reach via our page using the Facebook ads platform and on average, a good ad, a good post, it’ll cost you maybe $10 to $12 per thousand people to reach them.

Kevin: Okay, so we’re looking at about $50/$60 to reach that maximum of 5,000.

John: Exactly, and you actually have control over that. What then happens is you’ve got the ability to put those people that actually interact with it into an audience and they’re your audience of interested people and in doing that, you can then put a call to action in front of them and you can take them from someone who’s just an interested party who’s engaging on your Facebook page and you can turn them into a client or a lead at least.

Kevin: But with a profile, you can’t actually create that audience?

John: No, you can’t. With a profile, it’s kind of a bit of luck of the draw. You’re rolling the dice essentially and people might engage, they might not. Most aren’t even going to see it.

Kevin: Okay. Alright, so you can see that there’s a right and a wrong way to get into Facebook. That’s just one part of it. The difference between page and profile marketing. My guest is John Hellaby. The website to go to to get more information or contact John is cmhp.com.au, which is a way for you to check to find out if the post code that you work in is available for lead generation. John, we’ll catch you again tomorrow morning, mate. Thank you.

John: I look forward to it. Thanks, Kevin.