Is Facebook a viable Real Estate Lead gen source? Opinion 2

If you haven’t read the first addition of this post entitled Is Facebook a viable Real Estate Lead gen source? Opinion 1,   Please do.

It is not so different from the same crap we have been buying since Homes.com started selling real estate websites door to door or SEO companies told you that for $5000 they could make you #1 on

a Google search for whatever term that you wanted. This second one always seemed odd to me since there are hundreds of companies saying this to every Realtor they meet. It also remind

ed me of an arms race in the Middle East. “We will sell you the weapon that will destroy the enemy”  but they will also sell the enemy the only defense for the weapon we just sold the first guys. Seemed just a bit suspicious? Because it should.

The new sales pitch is Social Media. I will show you how to rule Facebook for Real Estate or Mortgages or whatever and you will have more likes than any of your competitors. My question…Who cares?

Here is why you shouldn’t care:

Facebook users don’t go to Facebook to buy a house. They go to Facebook to play games, to have fun and to socialize. When you offer a business opportunity no matter how valuable you may feel it is, it comes off like someone knocking on your door to sell a magazine subscription. That is to say that the door may get answered,   but only the lonely are happy to be talking about what you have to sell. And the key difference is that on Facebook all they have to do unfriend you whereas it is much harder to do this while someone stands at their front door pitching a subscription to “Tigerbeat”.

Here’s why you should care:

As each new platform comes online we are cannot possibly determine which ones that will actually help us the most. Twitter did not kill Facebook and Twitter doesn’t make Google+ irrelevant. The

This isn’t hard to figure out when the majority of Real Estate Agents report that they have never sold a home through their website. Their website has listings and perhaps some calls to action to try to create a Real Estate Lead. Now when we remove all of listings and calls to action and replace them with photos of puppies and macrame, you have social media. If you weren’t generating Real Estate Leads through a website, you are 100% not selling homes through your Facebook page…yet?  y each have their benefit but all the benefits are indirect. If you are the person that loves social media or the person that hates it and feels it is a drain on your time trying to keep up, both people have one thing in common. Odds are that you have never sold a house because of something that you posted, Tweeted or shared online. That is because social media is not a sales tool, it is a social tool.

However if you are not in the social stream at all there is a very good chance that as these platforms continue to entrench themselves you will be left behind and find it very difficult to catch up. Media players like Facebook and Google allow us to have some presence online even if it is not immediately beneficial. So is it better to be on the field even if you don’t understand the game than to be off the field and find out later that the rules have changed and are weighted towards benefiting the players that have been participating the longest. See Google+ and search results on Google.