Promotional Post Purgatory…

That’s what I call it.  Facebook is now penalizing promotional posts so the big question is, how do you get your message “out there”?

Here’s how…. (video above)

Something to note: in the video I talk about posting services and I definitely need to clarify this.

When I’m talking about posting services, in this case, I’m specifically referring to services we as real estate agents pay for that exclusively push our listings out to our social networks. That’s it. That’s the only thing they push out / post for us.

In other words, they are a listing advertising service that pushes our listings out to our networks. It is these services that I’m talking about in this video. This is where Facebook is heading next… right now they are filtering promotional posts by keywords (and other algorithm data no one is privy too) and eventually, they’ll be moving along to other sources as their system “gets smarter.” Which means services that only push out promotional posts are next on the chopping block.

Do you have a question about using Facebook for your real estate lead generation?

You can ask me here

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TRANSCRIPT:

Hi, this is Christina with Leads and Leverage. Today I'm coming to you with a Q&A, question and answer. And actually, this came out a couple of weeks ago, but I've been getting a lot of questions about this. What does it mean for realtors and things like that?

Really the question is “With the new rules with Facebook, how am I going to promote to my fans on my business page?”. And if you're not familiar with the new rules, here's the thing, starting January 1st and they've actually started it now. “official January 1st”.

Facebook is going to penalize any business pages that post promotional posts. They're going to penalize the posts.The individual posts and promotional posts. Whether it's, a post that says “Hey, come like this post or come like this page” or selling something, directly selling something or whatever, things like that.

So they have keywords they'll be using and then eventually they'll get to, if you're feeding stuff in through sources that are typically promotional, it'll eventually get to that. Now that parts of supposition on my part. But it's typical Facebook. That's what they're trying to get rid of people, spamming the audiences, their audiences with crap.

Here's the deal. So I call it promotional poster, promo post purgatory. How do you prepare for it? Do you have to pay to play? How do you get your posts to your fans? Things like that. So here's the deal, you need to make a division. To create a divide. If you're going to put out promotional content. if you're going to promote your services, if you're going to promote a listing, if you're going to do anything like that. You need to be putting that out via your Facebook ads account.

So you need to be paying to put that kind of stuff out. If anything else, if you're offering free, valuable, relevant information, whether you're linking to an article that you wrote or someone else wrote, whether you're putting up just a picture of something and you just want to share the picture to enjoy it, whatever it is, if it's non-promotional in nature. That's the kind of stuff that goes on your page that you don't pay for. It. That's a status update for your page.

So anything promotional needs to be paid. So promotional equals paid. Anything, that's just a gift and free needs to be not paid. Here's the other thing, if you do a post that's all about a listing and then you, and it's just a post on your page. And then you also advertise that same exact post, which would be through boost posts, kind of a similar thing. If you do your promotional posts on your page, and then you boost them and they're promotional in nature, that's going to be a big no-no. They're not going to put those out.

So you need to separate yet. There's a big divide, separate anything that's promotional or sales related, under paid. Anything that's not would go under the the free stuff that you put on your page.

So make sure you have that divide going. And here's where we can kind of extrapolate that It's going to get farther down the line. If you're using services to push your listings out. There's a lot of different services, but if you're plugging your listings into services and they're just pushing your listings out to your pages, what's going to happen and what's likely to happen is once Facebook really starts weeding out the people who are doing it by hand. So, you know, the hand promotional stuff, they're going to start targeting the services that that's all they do.

So if you have a service that just pushes out your listings out on your Facebook page, I would strongly, strongly recommend stop using that service for that. Don't push your listings out to your page through that service. If you want to put listings on your page, first of all, either do them through an ad or second of all, do them through a different way. That consumers like, that they're interested in. That's relevant to the consumer.

To where they're actually getting something, instead of saying, “Hey, look at my new listing”, things like that. So there you go. Promo posts purgatory is coming, if it's not already here. So be very careful. Pay for promotional, giveaway the rest.

Talk to you later.