Should You Use Your Facebook Personal Profile or a Facebook Business Page For Your Real Estate Business?

NOTE: Click the speaker icon in the video to UNMUTE the audio.

Warning: This transcript is not perfect. I am testing a computerised transcription service rather than a warm body version, so it doesn’t get everything correct. Please be understanding if some of it doesn’t make sense. I’ll clean it up manually in time.

Greetings real estate people was, it is Friday the 13th, and I hope you haven’t had any horrible, nasty, bad guys leaping through your window with a knife wearing a hockey mask. So far so good here. No major dramas, other ones being killed or had any accidents or anything like that. So yeah, we just go, God probably about three and a half hours till the end of the 13th. So who knows. Anything could happen. Anyway, welcome to Friday. I honestly, I’ll tell you what, when it comes to doing this kind of stuff, you gotta be committed. I really wanted to go to bed like two hours ago. I’m exhausted. So just for you folks, I’m sticking around and doing my day to of 30 days of Facebook live or I’ll be answering all the most common questions people have about anything to do with digital marketing and the real estate industry.

So got me notes here. I’m just going to walk through some points for you. So today’s topic is a little bit of a different one. I often get asked the question, should I just use my personal Facebook profile or should I set up a Facebook business page when it comes to promoting myself as a real estate agent and these schools of thought that say one or the other or both. I’m kind of a bit fence sitting on that one myself, but I’ll walk you through some of the key points to be aware of and maybe you can come up with some idea of what works for you. So first things first, let’s start with the basics. Number one, everyone on Facebook has a personal profile. So if you’re connecting with me, Aaron Mellick, not this page that I’m going live from real estate marketing, then you’re connecting with my personal profile.

So that means to get one set up, you have to put at the bare minimum and an email address in and probably a few contact details. And sometimes I’ll ask you all, they always ask you for your mobile number, but whether you put it in, it’s up to you. A important thing to note, everyone should only have one personal protocol. Now that, why is that important? Because the business page, which is the other option you can have as many of them as you want. They are free. Yay. Facebook. And so that’s where a lot of agents tend to start is to get themselves a business Pike’s set up, you know, Fred Smith, real estate agent, Mitt, West Perth or whatever the case may be. So there’s pros and cons to both of them. Okay. officially speaking this is Facebook’s policy is that you should not be using your personal profile for business or commercial use.

I haven’t really seen them crack down on it, but it’s not to say it won’t happen at some stage, so you should be aware of that. Because you do run the risk at, see, here’s the thing, if they if they think you’re using your personal profile inappropriately and they decided to get Nazi issue about it and like flip the switch and turn it off, then you’ve lost everything and it’s real difficult to get anything back. And I just don’t like one of your pages and they shut that down. Usually you’ve still got your business page and your personal profile that can go back to and maybe create a new page. One thing I will say though in, I’m talking about all of this, if you are using Facebook with a business page and an ad account and an ad campaign, you know, if you’re doing a boost post that’s using an ad account.

So everyone gets a personal quote unquote personal ad account. First thing I would tell you to do is to go and set up something called a business manager, which is a free tool that Facebook provides. And what it does is allows you to import your pages and your ad into one what management platform and then you can go in and do lots of violet cool things with it. So one of the nice things is allows you to do is you can assign access rights to your pages and or your ad account for people external, either staff members or maybe if you were, if you had hired me to run your Facebook ads for you, you’ll need to give me access to your ad account and your Facebook page. Otherwise you would have to give me more your personal login to Facebook, which I do not recommend you do that to anyone.

I’ve heard plenty of stories over the years of people who have had lost ad accounts, lost pages, and even lost personal profiles because somebody went rogue on them and had access to their account. Maybe there were a family member or a friend or a staff member. The relationship went sour and they got into the account and caused all sorts of dramas. So when you have a business manager with your ad account and your business pages in it, you can control the level of access they have to your business pages and your ad accounts. So you can make it literally observer only and right up to full admin privileges. Okay. So that is actually one of the big advantages of having a a business page. And then I’m using a business manager as well. Now if you don’t know how to get a business manager, just Google Facebook business manager, I think as business.facebook.com and it will allow you to set the account up and tell you how to import the ad account and the the pages.

So we’ll go now. Why would you use one or the other? So one of the reasons I would think of in trying to identify between the two is do you have plenty of contact with your, either your customers or your potential customers on one or the other. So most people don’t necessarily sort of try to run a lot of their business on their personal profile. So if you do have lots of connections on your personal profile with people that are either clients or potential clients, then I’d probably still keep doing something with it. Whereas if you have to start from scratch with a business page, you kind of, you’ve got to build that audience from the start and that can take time and money. So that’s the first one. If you’re going to use a personal profile, the other thing I would tell you to do is to go softly, softly, don’t go hardcore, boom, boom, boom.

Pitch, pitch, pitch. Yeah. One of the biggest mistakes I see real estate agents make on social media, and particularly Facebook in particular, cause that’s where I am mostly is all I do is post their open homes, their listings and their sales results and they just keep cycling this stuff over. And you know what? That people just don’t care about that stuff. 99.9% of the time they don’t care about it. The only time they care is when they’re actually thinking about maybe using a real estate agent. And let’s be honest, it’s only once every 10 years, seven to 10 to 12 years depending on where you are. So what are you going to do the other, let’s say it’s 10 years, the of what are you going to do the other nine years and nine months or so before they start paying attention to you as a real estate agent and looking at what kind of results you’re getting.

So I personally wouldn’t use my personal profile for providing myself, which I do a fair bit all. I keep it softly, softly. It’s more educational entertainment, a little bit of fun here and there. If I want to get real serious business-y, I always go into my page. Now. one of the differences between the two is that I, personal profile allows you to create new connections by sending a friend request to someone. So that’s a, it’s actually a useful way to potentially get in front of your audience. You can’t do that with a page with a page. The way they connect with you is that like your page or they become a fan of your page. So if you’re going to get the personal profile to do it it is a good way to reach out, particularly in the Beta based B to c space in particular, which real estate obviously is mostly they, what I would encourage you to is if you get them connected via your personal property, try and send them over to your page and get them to get, get them, give them a reason to connect with you there as well.

Now one of the nice options with a business pages that you can actually run Facebook ads to build that audience of page fans or likes. It’s called a an engagement ad and then there’s a sub section below it called page likes. Now I hear a lot of people saying, oh, back on the day, and he used to do that, but it doesn’t work in my, well, seriously having page likes if you’re getting in front of the right people is well worthwhile because you want to think of it this way. I what’s the word? I can’t think of that word correlating. I like to try. I encourage people to quarantine their business page so that the people that are fans of that page are potentially high quality prospects for their business and or good customers. Don’t just take a Tom, Dick and Harry and every time you run a competition giving away a free iPad or a free gift card or a free this, that or the other, you attract a whole pile of Freebie sake is which are not necessarily ever going to be clients of yours and you’re diluting the effect of your page.

So with a a pine July ad campaign, you can run very specific ads to very specific people offering a very specific message if they like your page, you think on an audience you can rerun or reshow ads too. So you might not be aware of this. But in the ads manager, some [inaudible] and the ads manager, you can actually run an ad to people that are fans of your page. So that’s actually a really handy thing to do. It’s something I actually don’t see a lot of people doing and not just in real estate, but in general. Okay. What’s next? So now this is a bit anecdotal, but from my experience with a personal profile, you can get more reach when you post something. And it’s probably more to do with the people that you engage with are probably family and friends mostly. And if you don’t already know this, so one of the ways Facebook determines where whether someone will see your content is and the number of people engaged with it.

So the more engagement likes, shares, comments, that kind of stuff, the more of that you get, the more like push that page out to people free. And that works both on your personal profile and also on your business page. Now generally speaking, business pages give very, very, very low reach unless you’re actually spending money to push the post out. But if you actually, I’ve seen people do this before and I’ve done it before. If you post something that people really like on your business page and it organically gets seen and engaged with by people, it can still get a lot of reach out there without having to spend any money. Now my experience has been that with a personal profile, it’s a bit easier to do that, but it depends largely on whether your ideal audience is connected with you on your personal profile.

If they’re not, I would just focus on your business page and if necessarily boost posts or run ads to get your information out there. Okay. let’s look here. So I think I mentioned or anything, but I’ll say it again just in case I didn’t. If you’re using your personal profile, stop just posting your home opens your listings and your sales results. Keep it to a minimum. You can stick that shit on your bloody business page if you want to. Yeah. When you use a page, one of the Nice things you have is it, you can control what people post on your page. So you can, you can set your page setting up so that people can’t post anything. If you want to do it, you can say no comments, no shares, no nothing. Might not necessarily want to do that.

But one of the things I like to do is block people from sharing their business page link to my page. And I caught often and we’ll go. And the other thing that if someone posts something, expand me in there, you can go in and delete the post and they end block and ban them from the page so they can’t come back. So that’s quite handy. Whereas on Facebook, a personal profile you control all of that can be your privacy settings. I don’t know that it’s necessarily easier or harder, it’s just a little bit different. I tend to follow in my personal profile. If I don’t like someone, I’ll just to completely block them and they’ll never see me again. Where’s the business pay? Sometimes I don’t mind them seeing my page, but I just don’t like them post on it.

So next, here’s the biggie. So I mentioned earlier with Your Business Manager make sure that you use a business manager in combination with your business page and your ad to give people access to the page that you need to stop members, your PII, your marketing person, your marketing agency Guy, et Cetera much sightful white for you to let other people have access to it. Then handing out your personal placeable profile logins. And I get people offering to give me their personal logins all the time. Don’t do it. I’m not gonna screw around with them, but you just don’t know who they will. So, and as I say, if you have a staff member that goes rogue and you fire them, or I have to fire them or get rid of them or a relationship that goes bad you could be in a whole world of pioneers.

Like I put access to your personal logins. Now we all know that we can send a friend request from a personal profile. You can’t do that from a page, but you can buy fans with those page like campaigns, which I already said. Another big one. You can’t run ads or boost posts from your personal profile. You can only do that from your Facebook business page. So that’s probably for me, that’s probably the number one reason why I prefer to use a business page is because if I want to post something and get it out to an audience, I can’t do that from my personal profile. It doesn’t matter how great I think my post is personally, I can’t push it out. So if it doesn’t get lots of engagement and lots of people aren’t going to see it, there’s nothing I can do about it.

So that’s probably for me the number one reason why I’d use a business page in preference to a personal profile. Another thing we all probably know and use Facebook messenger, but you might, and you may be aware that there’s something called Messenger bots. So chatbots many chats, probably the most well known one. You can’t set up to the best of my knowledge, you can’t set up a chat Bot on your personal profile. You can only do it on a business one. So if you ever want to use one of those and they can be handy you’ve got to have a business page for now. If you’re using a mobile to manage any of your Facebook stuff and you’ve got yourself a business manager set up with the business page and the ad account in there, you’ll need to download to you apps because they won’t run the way they used to before. So there’s an app for Facebook Apps, it’s called ads, but you look for it main via Facebook and the other one’s called page manager also made by Facebook. Once you get those that’s what you need to have on your phone to be able to run things. I’m going to sneeze. Excuse me. [inaudible]

Oh, okay.

Excuse me. I have never sneezed on Facebook live before. You are very lucky tonight. How privileged are you guys and gals? So that’s probably the main points. So which one should you use? My personal preference is to lean towards the business profile page because it has a few extra elements that I find really helpful. But at the end of the day, like I guess it comes down from eight largely to if you’ve got a personal protocol and lots of your customers and, or potential customers on there and they engage with you regularly and you can get that engagement for a little no for no cost, then I would still keep using your personal profile. I’d probably, I’d use both, but you might want to focus on that one if it’s more useful. So anyway, that is a day two done and dusted. Ladies and Gents, I hope you find that, hope you found that helpful. If you have any questions, pop them in the comments below and I’ll get back to them later on. Other than that, have a fantastic day and I will catch you tomorrow on Saturday the 14th of September, four day three. Can I get this thing back? What’s important? All right. Have a great day. Like folks, see you later.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Scroll to Top