More and more real estate agents and brokers are setting up their Facebook Business Pages every day. The Facebook Page is a publicly accessibly presence for your business and group, where you can manage communication with clients, visitors, business partners and your company's or group's fans in general. As opposed to your regular Facebook Profile, Facebook Pages can be viewed and interacted with by any user without actually becoming part of your inner circle of friends. A few days ago, we wrote about how to add the Facebook Page widget to your RealBird single property websites in order to connect with your visitors. I thought I share some other ways of getting free publicity to your Facebook Page and eventually gain more followers and great social media marketing exposure.

Adding the widget to your ActiveRain sidebar

It is quite easy but it requires some extra steps because AR currently does not allow the inclusion of the standard <script > tag of the Facebook Page widget. Rather, you have to use their <iframe> version, which requires a little manual editing. Nothing complicated, just some copy and paste. The screenshots below will show you how you can do this in a few steps.

Getting the Facebook widget code

Make note of the profile_id in the <script> code. Then using that id and your Page's link, you can customize the iframe code as described below. Facebook does not generate you the iframe code automatically but it has also some instructions here

Below is an example iframe code using our own RealBird Facebook Page. 

<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/connect/connect.php?id=5611254191&amp;connections=9&amp;stream=1&amp;css=" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="border: none; width: 200px; height: 610px;"></iframe><div style="font-size: 10px; padding-left: 10px;"><a href="http://www.facebook.com/pages/Redwood-City-CA/RealBird/5611254191">RealBird</a> on Facebook</div> 

The highlighted content will have to be changed manually before pasting it into the ActiveRain textbox. The example shows the version applicable to our RealBird Facebook widget:

1. Replace it with your own Facebook Page ID
2. We are showing 9 random faces of our fans
3. Set the width to 200 pixels
4. Set the height to 610 pixels
5. Replace the link to your own Facebook Page
6. Replace RealBird with your own Facebook Page title

Adding it to ActiveRain

Once you have the iframe code created, you can add it to ActiveRain using the "Blog Description" textbox on your AR profile's Settings page. Just paste it to the position where you'd like it to appear at and click "Update".

You can also see it in action on Janie Coffey's ActiveRain blog (right side)

Adding the widget to your RealBird Property Search

The more places you add your Facebook Page widget, the more visitors will eventually become a fan. In our previous post, we explained how to add the widget to your RealBird single property websites. Our other service, the RealBird Property Search can also be customized by including the widget on the full screen version, in the right sidebar. In this case, you can use the standard Facebook widget script code and there is no need for manual configuration of the iframe code, other than adjusting the width. The screenshots below show the customization steps and also the place to paste it in the RealBird configuration area. 

Getting the Facebook widget code

See the screenshots above at the top of this post. Copy the standard <script> version auto-generated by Facebook, change the width:300px to width:200px in the code and you are good to go.

Adding it to your RealBird service

1. Login to RealBird and go the Property Search Configuration page.
2. Scroll down to the "Sidebar content" section and paste the code that you customized in the previous step
3. Save the changes

Live example on our demo service

Click the image above to see it live on our demo RealBird Property Search service.

To get your own RealBird Property Search, you can register for free at www.RealBird.com. The service can be up and running in less than 5 minutes.

-- Zoltan 
RealBird.com