Setting Up Your Facebook Agents Page – For Absolute Beginners

In 2014 almost all real estate agents are active on social media. It not only helps get your face out amongst your local area, it’s also free advertising.

To get you started we’re going to guide you through the set up of your new Facebook page. If you are doing our real estate courses while reading this, this will form part of your real estate certificate and/or real estate licence course. Otherwise just consider it a friendly guide!

1. First you’ll need a photo of you dressed in your professional business attire, this will be the profile picture of your new page.

2. Log into your usual Facebook profile if you aren’t already logged in. If you don’t have one, sign up to Facebook using any email address that you have access to. You will be able to change this to a work Facebook address if you don’t yet have one, at a later point.

3. Make sure you are in the “Home” section of Facebook. Click on “Home” at the top of the page, just to be sure.

4. On the left hand side you will see a menu that at the top has your display picture, or if your profile is brand new just your name with “Edit Profile” written under it. If you look down you will see “Pages” and if you hover over it a “More” button will appear. If you click on this you will come to a page that at the top will have a “Create Page” button. Click it.

5. Here you will be able to select the type of page. I always click on the “Artist, Band or Public Figure” section and select “Business Person” from the list. Write your name as you wish for it to be displayed. You might like it to be your name, or maybe your name and the company you’ll be working for? eg. “John Johnson – Coronis Realty Lutwyche”. You can change this as many times as you like until you have 250 people who like your page, at which point it gets locked in.

6. You’ll now be taken to an “About” section, here you can write a small bit about you and input your website if you have one. You of course, aren’t a real celebrity or famous person, yet, so click no. Click next when you’re done.

7. Here you can upload your photo. Facebook will trim to fit. If the photo you have doesn’t work you can change this at a later point quite easily. Here is a guide to Facebook image dimensions.

8. Once you’ve uploaded your photo you are taken to a screen that allows you to add your page to your favourites menu. This is only really useful if you’re going to be managing lots of pages so that your main one stays in the main menu. Otherwise you’ll have to click on that “More” button to access it.

9. The next screen is for Facebook advertising. If you want to get some quick likes you can input demographics here such as location, interests, age and gender and input a budget. You might prefer to skip this part and instead use the Power Editor or Adverts Manager to design a bit more of an advanced ad if you want to go down this path.

10. Now you arrive at your page. You will receive a few prompts to start you off. Go through the mini-tutorial. This will prompt you to like your own page and also to invite your email contacts, both good ideas.

11. Congratulations, you now have your page. But there are still a few things to go through. Your page will look a bit drab until you add a cover image which is default set as a boring gray image. Over time you might find that this cover image is best displayed as a marketing campaign such as your referral deal or whatever marketing campaign your agency is running at the time. Or perhaps a nice landscape shot of a local park or skyline. Up to you really. If you choose to upload now it’s quite simple. Simply click “+Add a Cover” which is on the right side of the gray image and “Upload Photo” finding the photo you wish to use on your computer. Read the Facebook Photo Size Guide to get the dimensions right if you have any issues with the photo cropping badly. You might need to get the assistance of a more tech savvy friend if you don’t know how to change the dimensions of your photo.

12. Now click on Settings and complete your profile. On the left side click on “Page Info” and click edit on the rest of the settings you can input. You don’t have to use them all, and in fact many of them are superfluous. All you should have left to input is a longer description, which isn’t really required unless you do like to talk about yourself a lot.

13. Now you have a real page! Make your first post now. Something simple like a message about what you’ll be using the page for will suffice. This is because you’ll want to have something there already for when you get your first likes.

14. You’ll now want to get your friends into it (if you’re using your actual profile). Click on “Build Audience” at the top of the page and “Invite Friends”. Here you’ll see a list of your friends in order of the ones you have most contact with. Start hitting invite!

15. And you’re done! Use this page to post relevant information about your community, photos of you, your colleagues and happy buyers and a sprinkle of your available listings to achieve a nice balance and avoid getting unliked for delivering too much marketing.

16. Oh and one last thing, check out REAA on Facebook and give them a like too!