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:

Day 1 of Building a Local Community – A Real Estate Social Media Case Study –

 

This is Day 1 of my quest to use real estate social media to build a local community on Facebook that I can leverage to drive more real estate business.

I made the decision to build my local community using Facebook Fan Pages. I was going to use Facebook Groups but decided at the last moment to change to a Fan Page because it can be accessed by non-members of Facebook.

So step 1 is to set up the Fan Page for my home town of Niwot, Colorado.

Setting up a Fan Page is really easy. Simply log in to your Facebook account and click on the Ads and Pages icon at the bottom of the page or you can also go to www.facebook.com/pages. Read more..

How to get a Great Real Estate Domain

You need a number of good real estate domains that will be remembered by your customers and rated by the search engines. This video shows you how to get a great real estate domain in any real estate market. Plus I included a coupon code to get the domain for just $7.67 a year.