Day 5 of Building a Local Community for my Hometown using Facebook

On Day 5 I basically took the day off to finish promoting Social Media Marketing Camp (SMM Camp) but still made some progress.

First I interviewed Mimi Bell, the organizer of the Art Walk and asked her how she expected the community site to help the community. Here’s what she said:

 

Then I quickly popped over to the site and was really surprised to see how many people had become fans. Read more..

Day 4 of Building a Local Community (to get more Real Estate Deals)

Results from Day 4 of my quest to use real estate social media to build a local community on Facebook that I can later leverage to drive more real estate business.

You can view Day 1, 2 and 3 at www.smmcamp.com/blog

Day 4 was a slow day for me as I took time off to produce promotional cards to give to business owners to distribute to their customers.

I went to Office Depot to print the promotional cards. They had a special of just $4.95 for 50 cards or $39.95 for 500 cards. The card is basically just a business card with the web address. I also bought little heart stickers from Target for about $7 for a few hundred stickers. 

The goal is to have business owners distribute the cards to their customers. I expect that the site will go viral in a short period of time as people join and start to tell their friends. Read more..

Co-Opting Community Leaders

More results from Day 3 of my quest to use real estate social media to build a local community on Facebook that I can later leverage to drive more real estate business.

I finished off Day 3 by meeting with a number of local community leaders. In particular I wanted to meet with community leaders who will help me virally grow the Fan Page.  Here’s a short video of my meeting with Bert Steele, the owner of the only grocery store in town. My goal was to be allowed to distribute a small business card with the Fan Page address to shoppers as they paid for groceries at the cashier. In return I promised to promote Bert’s store on the community site. Back Scratching 101!

Day 3 of Building a Local Community (to get Real Estate Business)

This is Day 3 of my quest to use real estate social media to build a local community on Facebook that I can later leverage to drive more real estate business.

On Day 1 I set up a Fan Page on Facebook for my home town of Niwot Colorado.

Day 2 I added content, video and photos to the Fan Page.

On Day 3 I’m going to customize the Fan Page by adding a community directory, events and I’m going to get a unique URL.

The first step is to make it easy for people to find the Fan page so I registered a unique username or URL. Basically your unique URL is a sub-directory of Facebook. As an example, my personal unique URL is www.facebook.com/rosshair.

It’s worth noting that Facebook allows you to register a unique URL for your personal profile and Fan Pages but not Groups. There’s also one little catch with Fan Pages – you need 25 fans in order to get a unique URL.

To get past this obstacle I simply sent a message to my Facebook Friends and 25 of them quickly became fans of my new Fan Page. Here’s a copy of the message: Read more..

Day 2 – Build a Local Community on Facebook (to get more Real Estate Business)

This is Day 2 of my quest to use real estate social media to build a local community on Facebook that I can later leverage to drive more real estate business.

One Day 1 I set up the Niwot Fan Page on Facebook. One of the main features of the page is video so I decided to use video to promote the Fan Page and encourage the local community to join and participate in the site. Every visitor to the site is encouraged to submit a 12 second video about “Why I Love Niwot…” At the end of each week I’ll award a prize to the best videos. The prizes will all be donated by local business owners and are each worth about $25.

Here’s the sample video that I shot:

How to get your Unique Username on Facebook