How to Make Money From Facebook – The Ultimate Question

I ran across a very interesting article on how a real estate agent is making money from Facebook.

Before I talk about his strategy and how it can work for you, I want to talk about what prompted his article.

He recently read an article calling social media a sinkhole for real estate.  The author of that article made several outlandish statements like this one:

Social media is a sinkhole that absorbs time, effort and money that could better be spent on finding listings and selling houses. Social media is the new blogging.

I’ve seen many people on the Internet say social media takes too much time.  If that’s the case, I don’t think you’re doing it right.  What takes me time is writing my blog.  Promoting it through Facebook and Twitter only takes a few minutes.  I don’t use Twitter to promote other people’s links, I use it to promote mine.  I’ll sometimes do a search for one of my keywords and if someone has a question, I’ll answer it.

For Facebook, I’ll check in a few times a day to see if anybody made a comment on a post.  That’s it.  If I get a new member on my business page, I send them a short message to thank them for joining.  When I get a bigger membership, I know I won’t be able to do this, but for now it works for me.

How do you make money from Facebook?

Here’s the million dollar answer from Matt Thompson a Gig Harbor real estate agent.

I spent much of ’08 cranking out my social media prowess.  I developed a top notch blog, I grew my social presence, I was becoming a social media rockstar.  And I never actually met with anyone and I only sold 6 houses.

’09 has been a different story.  I still have my blog, I’ve grown my Twitter base and my Facebook Fan Page and I have lots of Flickr contacts. And my focus has been on meeting these folks face to face, in real life, and I’m approaching $4.5M in closed transactions this year.  So what’s the difference?  How is social media working for me now when it didn’t work before?

Matt makes it a point to meet everyone who follows or fans him in real life.  What a brilliant strategy!  We have to remember all advertising is designed with the goal of getting the buyer in front of the seller.  I call it analog marketing.  Facebook, Twitter, blogs, websites are just tools to accomplish this goal.  If you’re not using them to physically get in front of your prospects, you’re not being as effective as you should.

I had somebody call me the other day who had found me on Facebook and fanned my page.  After talking to him a little bit, I invited him to one of my networking lunches so we could meet.  He had to re-schedule, but I was automatically thinking of meeting in person.

This strategy will work for anybody that works in an industry that has a long sales cycle and is locally based.  I think it could work for non-local businesses as well by using the telephone instead.  It doesn’t matter if you’re in real estate,  if you’ve got Facebook fans, they’re interested in you or your business.  Why not sit down with them in real life?