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:

I need a little help – I just started a local community page for my village and need to rent 25 fans. Please sign up as a fan for a few days so I can get a username for my fan page – http://www.facebook.com/pages/Niwot-Colorado/291835003898?ref=search&sid=630458847.1119697440..1

It took a couple of hours to get 25 fans but I was then able to register my unique URL. It’s www.facebook.com/niwot. That’s a great name and I’m surprised it was available.

Here’s a short video on how to register a unique URL:

Next I wanted to add a community directory and a few local events. To do this I needed to download two Applications from the Facebook Applications home page. To find applications go to the bottom left footer of your profile page or www.facebook.com/applications.

First I downloaded an Application called Static FBML. This application allows me to create custom pages within the Fan Page. You can find the application by typing in the keywords “Static FBML” in the search applications box.

I added the Static FBML application to my Fan Page and used it to create a new tab and page called Community Directory. Here’s a snapshot of the Community Directory page:

The second Application I downloaded was the Events Application. This application was developed by Facebook and is extremely powerful.

I then added a number of events on the local community calendar. Again I basically “borrowed” the copy from the town’s official website.

Here’s an event I set up for the monthly Art Walk. It’s held on the first Friday of the month and features local artists, craftsmen and designers.

I mentioned earlier that the event application was a very powerful application. This is because you can mass invite people to attend an event. You’re not limited to just your friends on Facebook. You can also import a contact list and Facebook will send an invite to the event on your behalf.

The reason I love this feature is because I can co-opt local business owners and ask them to invite their customers to the event. This is one way to get the site to go viral.

That’s it for day 3. I’m pretty pleased with the progress as I now have a fully loaded Fan Page that has a great unique URL and has been seeded with content.

About Ross Hair

Ross Hair is bald, a huge fan of real estate social media and the founder of Social Media Marketing Camp (SMM Camp).