The pace of real estate agents joining Facebook is amazing. My brother and I started watching how many agents were on Facebook over 6 months ago. We were finding out how many people identified themselves as real estate agents and back then it was just over 50K agents had put somewhere in their profile that they were in fact in real estate. Fast forward several months later and there were over 125K real estate agents on Facebook.

What we have found in doing live training events on Social Networking is many real estate agents are on Faceook but not many are making any money. They aren’t doing business. The primary reason is they are looking to Facebook as an escape from the current reality of real estate. They look at it as a vacation from what is happening in their market.

The #1 mistake that any real estate agent can make with Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Twitter, etc is to treat it as an escape.

These websites are tools to be used for your business. I am not saying you can’t have some fun on these websites however being on an eternal vacation is not possible for most of us, myself included, so we should make sure to do business on Facebook and take vacations in the real world.

One of the best ways to make sure that you treat Facebook as a tool is to use it for a certain period of time and then put your tool back in it’s tool box. You wouldn’t swing a hammer 8 hours a day constantly. Eventually you would set it down and use another tool. My brother and I like to recommend that agents spend no more than 15 minutes on Facebook at a time maximum. People often say that you can’t get much done in 15 minutes. You can get tons of work done on Facebook in 15 minutes but you can’t get much goofing off done.

In 15 minutes on Facebook you can easily:

• Comment on the statuses of 10 if your friends or referral agents - 5 minutes, 30 seconds a comment
• Post a link to an article you read that is of value to your network - 2 minutes
• Write a personal e-mail to 1 person in your network - 5 minutes
• Reach out to one real estate agent outside of your area & write a personal mesage to them - 3 minutes

Take this process and repeat daily and you will find Facebook a tremendous tool for your success.