By Matthew Ferrara

Today's internet offers a variety of ways to attract, engage and convert consumers into new business. From traditional Web sites to real-time social media, creating a presence has never been easier.

Many of the tools are more intuitive than in the past. Rarely are you required to do programming these days. So it's the strategy, not the technology, that makes a difference. And that's exactly what we discussed with Dana Hybl of Realty Executives Prestige in Arlington Heights, IL, who was the winner of Women's Council's Web Presence Makeover Contest.

Dana Hybl

Dana has had a Web presence for quite some time. Her personal Web site has anchored her online marketing strategy for years. She was also an early adopter of the popular social networks Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Her activity inside these social platforms has been largely personal interactions, which gave us the starting point for taking her business presence to the next level.

Dana actively uses Facebook. During our review we noted an average of one posting per day. Most of the time, Dana uses her smartphone to update her status or share a photo, which creates a strong foundation for improving her Facebook presence. Most real estate agents should be updating and interacting with social media "on the go," and using a smartphone is the simplest way.

For Dana, taking her Facebook presence to the next level now involves incorporating some business updates as well as personal ones. Like most of us, she is concerned about seeming too "salesy" by adding professional content to Facebook. So her first step will be to separate her contacts into lists using the Create List function in the Facebook address book.

This will let Dana partition her contacts into different audiences, to whom she can target specific updates and content. By creating a couple of simple lists, such as "Family" or "Business Contacts" or "Women's Council Friends," Dana can restrict her updates so the right groups see the right message. When she posts content, she can click the "lock" next to the share button and select which lists should see each posting. This will allow her to integrate more business-specific content such as local real estate news, market information, research from NAR and so on.

She can even selectively target information about her listings and open houses (periodically, not too frequently) by filtering updates to the right audience, even on a person-by-person basis.

At the same time, Dana should do more to leverage her network. With nearly 500 contacts, she should start using her friends as a research tool. 

At least twice a day, Dana will begin monitoring the news feed from her smartphone, checking her friends for any indication they might need her expertise or market knowledge. She'll also keep an eye on personal opportunities to interact – birthday announcements or other celebrations in the lives of her sphere – and use the "like" function to let others know she's thinking of them.

More aggressively, Dana will try "surveying" her sphere by using more questions in her updates to learn more about people's lives and interests. This will help her create a dialogue with her sphere, and not just talk "to" them on the platform. Her time commitment should be about five minutes three times a day, to both watch and interact with her Facebook network.

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