Is Facebook a viable Real Estate Lead gen source? Opinion 1

Facebook is great for so many things, from keeping up with your family and friends to making new friends and following your favorite sports teams. But does Facebook actually create any direct business for anyone other than Zynga and a handful of gambling apps.

Ask any social media expert about adding your listings on Facebook or offering to help someone sell or buy a home and you will hear variations of the same response. “You can’t sell things to people, you have to engage with them and give them valuable information that is important to them you…it’s called the soft sell”

Well I like making friends but until my friends start paying my bills I guess I still need to make my own money since my mortgage company likes real money not soft money. Don’t you think that Real Estate agents and loan officers have enough going on without enduring the pain of being sold the concept of the “soft sell”?  Hasn’t the pain been bad enough without being pressed by those that do not know our jobs that we need to spend our valuable time on countless hours nurturing relationships with the world at large in the hopes that they will think of us when they determine to buy a home? The ROI on this “soft sell” concept is so low that a gnat with thick glasses couldn’t find it. This soft sell “BS” is the result of the new wave of social media gurus that oddly enough don’t make their money soft selling. They instead flood our inbox’s with emails and call our offices to teach us how to soft sell. If this doesn’t strike you as a contradiction, it should. When I want a Real Estate lead I am not going to spend half of my day posting pictures of puppies and NOT talking about houses.

The other sales line that social gurus let slide off of their tongues as if it was the greatest insight ever discovered is that if you are competing with another real estate pro over the same real estate lead and the lead does a search for the two of you online and the other guy comes up and you don’t on a Google search than you will lose that client to the better connected professional. Well this has more truth to it than the soft sell but it still lacks a degree of reality. The reality is that if you contact someone and the two of you get along and you can answer their questions with honesty clarity and value and the other guy doesn’t…you win.

If on the other hand you make an appointment to talk to the client but instead find yourself posting pictures of your vacation online to increase your likability factor and forget to go to the appointment then the other real estate pro is going to win. For me it gets back to the things that came before social media or the internet; it comes back to good service and bringing your value as a professional to the table.

I look at it this way: If you enjoy being on Facebook, Google+ and Tweeting great! If you don’t, I suggest being the best professional you can be and spend your time selling houses the old fashioned way. Earn the trust of the Real Estate lead and make them a client by providing valuable service, guidance and honest educated answers. Then hire a guru to do the Facebook postings so that you can do more of what makes you money and gets people into the home that they want.