Facebook has taken a hit to its public image in the last few weeks. The media hoopla has extended out from announcements the company made at its f8 conference, as well as some less-than-glamorous instant messages founder Mark Zuckerberg wrote back in 2004.

You’ve heard it: Facebook sells people’s personal information to advertisers without their knowledge. It’s impossible to de-activate your account (or nearly so). Their “open graph” foreshadows future moves Facebook will take to capitalize on the wealth of user data they know possess.

And so the story goes.

Forget for a minute about yourself the Facebook user, and instead let’s focus on the business side of Facebook. Namely, what’s working for businesses now using Facebook advertising and Facebook fan pages? Does this bad PR change anything?

First, there are plenty of businesses utilizing Facebook’s advertising platform to create new customers, both in real estate and in mortgages. We’re spending about $400/day on Facebook and we’ve had an account for over 1 year. I can speak from experience here, and this is what’s working for us right now.

Facebook Ads
1. Keep your ads fresh.
The number one thing to do with your Facebook ads is update them every day. Try a new picture, a new headline, a new pitch. You need to put 10 new Facebook ads up each day. I know this may sound like a lot of work, but it can take less than 5 minutes. Facebook has a “Create Similar Ad” button that allows you to simply build off an existing ad instead of starting from scratch.

2. Break your ads up into a lot of campaigns.
Example: You’re a realtor in Chicago, doing business in a 25 mile radius. With Facebook’s ability to target people down to the littlest detail, hopefully you are creating ads for specific municipalities and/or zip codes. When you do that, put each set of ads into its own campaign.

Explicitly, I mean instead of one campaign called “My Facebook ads”, you need 10 of them called “Oak Park-60652” “Wilmette-60639” “Skokie-60634”.

Breaking your ads up this way will increase the number of targeted impressions you get.

3. Use a great picture. Not a good one, a great one.
Most of our success has come with pictures of attractive young faces. People respond to them. A zoomed-out picture of a family in front of house will perform much worse than a headshot of you in your Sunday’s best. The picture you show is extremely important when it comes to getting ads clicked on this platform, so proceed accordingly.

4. Words like “I” and “my” seem to do well.
In your ads, use “My company can help you . . .” or “I’ve helped 250 Chicago families get a home.” This personal touch is right up Facebook’s alley, where people are interacting with friends and expect something other than marketing-speak.

Facebook Fan Pages
Maintaining a Facebook fan page for your business became “en vogue” in 2009, so it’s likely most of you have them. That’s great. These have proven to be an effective place for interacting with customers, both past and present.

But have you done anything to drive additional fans outside your customer base? One thing that’s worked really well for companies has been services that run promos to drive Facebook fans, like Wildfire.

Facebook actually changed their guidelines recently on how contests and giveaways can run on their platform, making it even more enticing to use a pro service like Wildfire. Check out some of their cool case studies.

While we haven’t used them yet, the end goal of a Facebook fan page for your business should definitely include adding new customers, not just staying in touch with past customers.

Does the Negative PR Change Things?
For business owners trying to leverage Facebook as a marketing channel, this is a serious question. If users truly do end up losing faith in Facebook en masse, there could be a lot of wasted effort for agents and brokers who’ve invested their time in a Facebook campaign.

With 400 million strong in users, my guess is things are going to be just fine on Facebook. Recent events have not changed the success rates of our campaigns in the slightest. And while there are thousands of companies using Facebook from the real estate world, it still is pretty “green” out there as far as opportunity goes.

Take some of the steps above, and hopefully you can make Facebook work for your business better than it has so far. The anti-Facebook sentiments in our media will pass with time.

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