If you’ve been putting off your Facebook strategy now’s the time to start before you start missing out on the new stream of referred vendors and owners.
Real estate agents who have been avoiding Facebook now have even less excuse to avoid the social network behemoth. The company’s recent announcement that they would be setting up a “graph search” on the website – meaning that the search function will become more accurate and allow more specific requests – could lead to Facebook users utilising the site more often in their hunt for new property.
This new feature could revolutionise the way in which personal recommendations for new properties and local real estate agents get passed around. This new search tool retrieves results from your own network and profiles that have been made public (either fully public or to friends of friends, people who live in the same city etc.) Which basically means anyone looking for a new home could get quick and reliable results for the following search result examples:
- Real estate agents recommended by my friends
- Friends of friends who are real estate agents from this city
- Real estate companies liked by my friends who have moved in the past year
- Real estate companies in Altona VIC liked by people who live in Altona VIC
In this way, the new Facebook feature makes word of mouth – a much-prized promotional asset – much easier to come by. You might not be able to afford missing out on it.
There are plenty of people who can advise you on how to get started on Facebook. And if you’re already there, make sure you publish your facebook links on listing sites such as Thehomepage.com.au, where your agent and agency profile can include links to your social networks.
4 Comments
Ryan O'Grady
Nice post Ben. This will be very interesting as facebook develops it further. You now don’t need to ask your friends for recommendations, just perform a search through facebook.
Greg Vincent
Great article Ben. The writing was on the wall for me about improvements to Facebook Search the moment Lars Rasmussen defected from Google to join Facebook (and then another former Googler Tom Stocky joined the FB ranks)… Facebook Search has been by far the most underutilised part of their site’s functionality until now!
When you consider that more people visit Facebook than Google, this is going to become a massive change to online search behaviour. http://www.wired.com/business/2013/01/the-inside-story-of-graph-search-facebooks-weapon-to-challenge-google/all/
Word-of-Mouth is so much more powerful v’s Traditional Advertising and being able to search recommendations via FB is going to take the power of WOM to a whole new level.
PS: The announcement has already had a huge impact on share price of sites like Yelp http://blogs.gartner.com/chris-gaun/facebook-vs-google-search-markets-say-no/
Vanessa
Thats a good post! I really enjoyed seeing that video as well. Interesting to see how Facebook will combat the search engines in the future and what that will mean for real estate agencies and businesses.
Sam
It is going to be very interesting to see how Graph Search works.
http://actualfacebookgraphsearches.tumblr.com