Welcome to another episode of Fireside with Facebook!
In this episode Scott Shapiro from Facebook’s Real Estate Group discusses Messenger for Business and how real estate agents can utilize this tool for better customer service and lead generation. The need for instant answers has made Messenger a very important and useful tool for business and we discuss best practices. Last, Scott provides methods to organically start conversations about your real estate business by using paid advertising.
Click here for the Facebook Messenger for Real Estate Agents Guide!
If you’d prefer to watch this interview, click here to view on YouTube!
Transcript
D.J. Paris 0:00
This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by gogos bootcamp Are you a real estate agent looking for the very best media training program on the planet? Gogo Beth key is considered the top Instagram Realtor in the country. And her step by step training program will take your social media game to the next level, keeping it real listeners receive a special discount. So please visit Gogo podcast.com That’s Gee oh gee Oh podcast.com for your special discount and now on with the Show All right, everyone. Welcome to keeping it real, the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through the show today is our regular series called Fireside Chat with Facebook, we’ve teamed up with the real estate team at Facebook to produce episodes designed to help agents better utilize Facebook and their entire suite of tools. And we have Scott Shapiro from Facebook corporate with us as our guest. As always, let me tell you a little bit about Scott. Now Scott Shapiro is a senior client partner on the real estate team at Facebook, where he focuses on engaging with key clients and their ecosystem partners to develop marketing solutions and strategies to drive their businesses forward. In addition to the client partner role, Scott also serves as the industry reIation sorry, and the industry relations liaison between the Facebook real estate sales team and the real estate industry helping to educate agents, brokers and leaders on Facebook’s platforms and best practices. Prior to joining Facebook, Scott was a sales executive at ABC, where he also participated in the sales advisory role acting as a consultant for the digital and the sports teams. Scott once again, welcome to keeping it real.
Scott Shapiro 2:02
Thanks, DJ, always love being together, always love just chatting. I think we you know, this is not work. This is fun. And I really always enjoy our conversations and certainly hope that the folks out there who download the podcast and are watching on Facebook Live, get something out of this as well. Yeah,
D.J. Paris 2:20
we really are super excited and honored to have Facebook, you representing Facebook on our show. This is you know, obviously the number one largest social media platform in the world. And also really the number one question we get from agents is how do I best utilize social media to you know, find more clients and service the clients I have. So every month Scott comes on and we bring, we can bring up a topic that we think would be helpful for everyone. And this is one that most of our listeners haven’t yet asked us about, which is actually even more exciting in a way, because I think this will be introducing our listeners and our viewers to to a new part of utilizing social media that you might not have given much attention to in the past, which is Facebook Messenger. Yeah,
Scott Shapiro 3:08
I this is kind of a passion point. For me, I think about sometimes my boss is like, Wow, you really, really, really feel strongly about messaging and messaging for business. And I think as we walked through the materials, part of it is really, it’s where consumers are always there spending time. And it’s such a lightweight, easy way to answer consumer questions to engage with the consumer. And to do so in a really fun way that is, with real identity. I don’t know about you, DJ, but like I constantly get these weird, random texts, SMS text, and I’m like, I don’t know that phone number. That person, this is really a phenomenal way for both individuals and businesses to kind of close that gap, engage consumers serve the consumer. And so I’m really excited even if we’re a little ahead of the curve here. Just to kind of tip people to the functionality and the reasons why messenger can do good for your business.
D.J. Paris 4:01
I remember there was a funny story. This is probably five or more years ago, I read it online on maybe CNN or somewhere where there was interview with Mark Zuckerberg and they were asking him about Facebook Messenger. And I think one of the impetus is for him to really develop this platform or or his team to develop the platform was I think he was going around to various schools, I think across the country and talking to students to ask, like, you know, for feature improvements, and what do they like about Facebook and what challenges any any app and to ask about email, or somebody brought up that email was slow in delivery. And he he sort of and I’m completely, I’m sure paraphrasing or maybe missing a little bit of, of how it was talked about. But he said, he said, Well, emails really fast and the students said no email is very slow and and he was like, Well, no, it’s pretty quick and they’re like, No, it’s way too slow for us. And so then he said, Okay, we need to develop something faster and better. And in a way he’s right. Like I know when I have a customer support Word question with a various service that I, maybe I have a membership to, and there’s a website and they have that little chat window right there on their homepage, I will nine times out of 10 Go there even before calling in. So this really what we’re going to talk about today speaks to that need that consumers have for for sort of instant and quick communication. Sometimes when they don’t want to pick up the phone or send an email
Scott Shapiro 5:23
90% of our internal communication as a team, if not more is done by messenger on our workplace enterprise suite. So basically, workplace is Facebook, for businesses. And it has, you know, the groups that has your news feed, it’s basically just an enterprise tool. And, I mean, that is the primary communication method that we have. I’m on a team of four people, within a larger team, you know, kind of a sales pod, for lack of a better word, and we’re consistently we have different types of threads, different types of chats, you know, attachments, you name it, it’s really easy, lightweight. And that’s internally for our business, I think externally for realtors. And how they should think about it is, it’s just a really great, easy way to help the consumer in their journey and start a conversation. I think the way I think about this is, you know, we want to build relationships and relationships, start with conversations. And that’s really the use of messaging tools. So whether it’s just Facebook Messenger, or whether it’s DM through Instagram, or it’s WhatsApp, I mean, that’s what helps to build that relationship with that first level of communication. And I think especially amongst realtors, you know, if we think about it, as the consumer is showing an interest in something a service, right, you know, most likely their listing, but maybe it is their expertise, or maybe they’ve seen something about that agent and or the team in the marketplace. It allows for that first conversation, it’s a barrier to entry that we kind of taken a wall down. It made it simple. And as of last year, you know, we have about 1.3 billion people connecting on Messenger is a core functionality of how we think about our family of apps and services. I’m constantly reminding people, when you think about Facebook, its Facebook, its Instagram, its Facebook Messenger. And it’s WhatsApp. And so they’re built alone standalone communication channels, yes. You know, on your desktop, it lives within Facebook. But certainly if you think about the way you use your smartphone, you most likely have messenger on your phone as a standalone app as a standalone destination. So super important for I think agents to understand that their consumers are there. So everything you and I always talk about, you know, I always put the hat on not just, it’s a Facebook product. It’s more where is the consumer and they’re here on this on in this channel, just this part of the Facebook ecosystem in the family of family of apps and services.
D.J. Paris 7:53
We even have installed it internally at our company. For our own agents, we have a internal wiki, it’s basically a private website, where there’s a password to protect it from from anyone else. But it’s for our agents that they can get support, watch training videos, etc. And one of the things we installed years ago, and it was one of the smartest things we ever did, we weren’t sure that anyone would use it was basically the Facebook Messenger. through an API, we’re able to plug into our our own website, the Facebook messenger service so that it pops up, when you go to the website, little thing in the corner says, hey, if you’d like to chat with us do this. And we actually, we actually had to turn it off at one point because so many of our agents were we weren’t sure anyone would use it. So many of our agents were using it, we didn’t have a good monitoring system to be able to respond right away. And so we actually temporarily had to disable it because it was so popular. But our agents just they were loving doing that more than emailing or calling us even when they needed immediate help. And so, we retooled and made sure somebody was monitoring it around the clock, and then we put it back up. But it’s just been so helpful for us as well, even just internally with our own employees, like you were saying, internally with your team.
Scott Shapiro 9:06
Yeah, and I think the other thing, so if I’m a brokerage owner, I’m thinking about it in two ways. I’m thinking about it, as you know, how to my employees, how do we all communicate, especially if you’re a team, right, you have the ISA, you have so many different facets of the business that are moving in real time really fast. So there’s I think, you know, the business side, your hub, your team, your brokerage, or if you’re an agent, you know, we always talked about this TJ that you know, you’re the CEO, the CMO, the CTO, right, you’re wearing the entire C suite as that agent. This allows for speed, efficiency and ease of use. Again, I think one of the things that we’re always trying to think of is how do we make tools that are impactful, but also simple, right, that you don’t need to have, you know, a PhD from MIT to actually figure this out. Right. So I think that that’s that’s one part of it. I think the other is just you know, some of us I’m showing and I know we have people on podcast while we’re doing the Facebook Live. So I always want to make sure that those folks know kind of where we’re going is just people preference here. So what I would say is, you know, if you’re not on the Facebook live here, I’m talking a little bit of moving us forward into why does messaging matter? It’s really, we’ve done surveys, we’ve done a lot of detailed research on this, and 63% of people across all generations prefer to message than call or email. And I will give my dad a shout out, my dad is in his mid 70s, he was a former Keller Williams team lead. And, you know, my dad is at that generation where maybe you would think, as a boomer, that he would not be a power user of this technology. It’s actually not true. I mean, he is absolutely adept power user understands it. And I would say, you know, one, I think people across all generations are now comfortable with technology and with smartphones. But I’d also say to that, you know, going back to have we made this easy for the consumer or the end recipient to use the answer’s yes. And so if you think about somebody, you know, we talked a lot about, you know, the technology issues that we may face as technology moves faster than we can. This is something that is a very simplified thing. So no matter what spectrum of the consumer you’re trying to reach, you know, the, you know, Boomer may be trying to downsize or, you know, the, you know, the millennial who’s getting into their first home, what we’re finding is that this is ubiquitous, this is cross generational behavior, as far as preference of communication and messaging is really where they’re spending their time.
D.J. Paris 11:41
Yeah, I agree. Like I was saying, whenever I need to cut, I mean, I’m busy. We know our, if you’re working realtor, you’re busy. As Scott saying, you have to wear every single hat. And this is a way to I know, when I have a support request from a service I use, I don’t really want to jump on the phone and wait. Usually, they’re going to have to call me back anyway, I, I certainly can open a support ticket via email, that’s okay, too. But I like chatting with somebody instantly, just to while I’m in the process of doing other things. And I imagine everyone who’s listening can relate to that. But also your clients can relate to that too, because they’re probably working, or they’re busy running the household. And, you know, a lot of times it’s easy just to keep your phone open, have the chat going. And you can do other things.
Scott Shapiro 12:26
There are a couple of other things, I think that really are important kind of tying back to some of our earlier segments, DJ, we know that what about 50% of people go with the first realtor they talk to so something I hear consistently before COVID had when we would go to conferences, remember conferences, remember airplanes remember that so 2019 That’s right. Probably not a good joke. But I guess I’m missing my my real estate community. I’m missing energy that you guys out in the industry bring when I get to attend conferences. But you know, one of the leading things that agents would talk about is like the speed to lead the speed to the consumer. Messaging is convenient. It’s inconvenience matters. And so we’ve done some polling, made reference to Facebook IQ. It is a research part of our marketing team, our research arm, it’s a website. If you have not subscribed, please go subscribe. It’s free. There’s so much good stuff coming from this team, about consumers consumer behavior, mobile minutes, all this stuff that we talked about, really great to see what they’re putting together. They put together a study a couple years ago about like the emotional connection, and the motivational connection and messaging. And what we found, at least in the United States is that 62% of the recipient for people who participated in this study, felt that again, messaging was the easiest way, and the most convenient way to contact a business. And why I think this is important. So think about this in two points. The point, the first point is, your consumer wants to use it because it’s easy for them. The second point, if you’re an agent, is you’re multitasking and to DJs point, you’re wearing so many hats, you need a lightweight communication device, so you don’t lose connection to that customer. Because they expect sort of that on demand connection point right in this. And we’ll get into bots. And we’ll get into scripting. And I’ll show some examples of how to do that can really facilitate that. So whether it’s you in real time messaging, or you’re using it as sort of the first entry point with some qualifying questions through bot technology. It’s a great way to really kind of hit that consumer first up. Very good. Cool. The other thing I would state and again, for folks who are on the podcast, I’m showing a slide here that talks about trust. One in two people from that same survey said that they feel messaging and business helps them feel more personally connected to the brand. And if you go back to a couple of episodes where TJ and I were talking about the way that consumers look for local businesses, so eight and 10 people in the United States At least once a week, go back and look for a Facebook business page. So what we’re talking about here is, agents should have a Facebook business page, the messenger experience can be tied to the business page. So you don’t have to have it just as person, one like DJ as an individual and Scott as an individual, what you really should be thinking about from a messaging perspective as your business persona. So they tie together, it’s the consumers looking for those Facebook, local business pages, that’s an entry point. And then the messaging application within that experience, becomes the touch point for the consumer, that lightweight, fast interface. And that also allows you the opportunity, and you can combine inboxes. And I’ll show you some examples of that. But really, it allows you to have like, this is my business. This is how you connect with me as a business person. And using messenger is that tool off of that page. So it is harmony, it’s a way to reach the consumer, they’re searching for you. They’ve seen your listing, they’ve seen you in the marketplace, they go to your Facebook page, having a good messaging experience really helps to tie that all together.
D.J. Paris 16:03
And it’s also a place having your own page with your own messenger application, which which you’ll have if you have a page really also helps to anonymize and at the same time, personalize the experience because for example, for our keeping it real podcast page on Facebook, we of course have a Facebook Messenger setup we have people who are listeners and viewers contact us every day on there, we love it. And what’s nice is my producers on or myself were really the the two people who work on the show that the most, we can both jump in there. And we can act as the business responding where the person doesn’t necessarily know if it’s DJ Marzano sometimes will say our names on it just if somebody says something very nice will say, Oh, this is DJ, thank you for the kind words or whatever. But it’s also a place where you can you can, you can not hide, but you can have your brand answer the questions that of you. And there’s some benefit to that. And sometimes you don’t necessarily want somebody to know that it’s you responding when it when it’s your brand, but it’s somebody from the brand who can represent you or the brand in a way that you want. And it does, it does sort of separate it from your own personal life. So it’s nice that, that if you want to identify yourself in those chats, you certainly can, but you don’t have to. And I just think that’s a really cool feature.
Scott Shapiro 17:19
So it’s interesting, you mentioned that I had an experience this morning. For those of you who are on Facebook Live and can see me over my right shoulder, the shoulder, you’ll see a couple of pieces of whimsical baseball art. There’s a gentleman out in Los Angeles, who produces these. And it was interesting this morning, I was working. And all of a sudden, I noticed that my personal messenger went up. And it was coming from his business page. And he happened to mention that he was doing a new series based on soccer. I’m a huge passionate soccer fan. And I thought that was a really interesting way of going to me as a repeating consumer directly. It’s obvious I’m sitting in a CRM with his, you know, he’s not looking, you know, it wasn’t that personal that message, but it was personalized enough where it was like, he knew my order history, he knew that I was buying a certain amount of art from him, he knew that he was producing a new series, and I thought it was really interesting. instead of emailing me, he actually reached out directly on on Facebook Messenger to start that conversation. So even again, about that touchpoint of being proactive, you don’t have to always be reactive, you can be proactive. And I think drip campaigns and management of CRM can allow messaging to be that. So you know, if you have a conversation with somebody, maybe you meet them once or twice with coffee, and they’re five months out or six months out, you know, how much stuff is coming through their email box that they tend to kind of say it? Or how much can you just quickly hit a lightweight message, which is I’ve got a new listing coming up in such and such neighborhood. Take a look at it, I know you’re still in the decision making process or you’re in a fact finding process. One thing I would say and again, you know, this is the stats for the for the listeners on the podcast, because you can see it on the Facebook live feature is that, you know, again, in that same study, what we’re finding is that, you know, 81% of consumers are proactive, they ask about products and services they make, they actually generate messages to make a purchase. So like, again, that example this morning, even though it came from the gentleman who runs the art studio, he’s actually proactively looking for me to make a purchase. I mean, it’s very smart business strategy. I mean, holy smokes, I’m not looking at his website every day. So that was a really great way in a real life example of the messenger experience. And then I do think a little bit less on the real estate side, we’re going to share some experiences that are a little bit more on the travel side of the fulfillment side is like messaging in product or support. My thought here is obviously if you’re having a communication from, you know, as you as an agent, or you as a broker or a team, you’re probably already in touch with the consumer. Whereas like messenger, what we’re finding is also being used for there’s a really interesting example from WestJet airlines in Canada, about you know, by flight status, so that’s a little bit different. But it just shows the scope of how the consumers are using this experience. Here’s another way to think about this. And the slide I’m showing here, talks a little bit about this being a modern way to communicate. So one in two people that were surveyed, and we’ve looked at 15, markets, 15 countries, consider business messaging, a modern way to communicate. And I actually agree with this, again, there’s a little bit of the perception being, you know, are you on top of technology, and I think there is a surprise and delight moment. And I certainly felt it in my interaction this morning, it’s not that an email would have been less impactful about what he was producing. But it was more like, I just thought, wow, this is somebody who’s kind of on top of it, kind of modern kind of thinking differently. And I think there’s a way of showing innovation in the use of technology, because consumers when they look for real estate, love technology, and one of our first podcasts, remember, we talked about the mobile phone is now really the front door to the open house, it’s the same way here, you know, instead of the old fashioned phone call, even meeting for coffee, it’s messaging that starts the conversation, it’s that process of communicating, it’s the process of really tying you together your service, your, you know, your value proposition to the consumer, and what the consumer is looking for. So just food for thought, again, is like, you know, there’s, there’s sort of like a psychological factor of wow, you know, this person is using this tool, and I use this tool, and this tool is like, ubiquitous to me everyday. Oh, this is great. And again, I think that real life communication piece. So I’m gonna move this ahead, DJ, I’m gonna talk a little bit about messenger for business. By the way, if you’re on the if you’re not, if you’re on the podcast, you’re missing a lot of smiley faces and emojis, I just want to let the the audience on how to look into this. It’s actually Mickey Kyle attack. So
D.J. Paris 21:55
move forward to that. I want to make sure everyone who is listening and not watching, and we appreciate you listening. And we’re going to do our best to describe these slides. But if you haven’t yet joined our Facebook page, please do it’s keeping it I’m sorry. It’s facebook.com. Forward slash, keeping it real pod. And not only can you could you be watching this live while we do it. But you also, of course, can watch it on demand indefinitely, every single episode we’ve done is there. So please, please follow us on Facebook, because there are, and we appreciate your listening. And we will definitely make it worth your while but be able to, you know, especially for these Facebook monthly fireside chats, we’d love it if you also joined us on Facebook to be able to watch these slides and we will post slides. So if you’re listening to this right now, in the notes for your episode, there is going to be a link to the to the video. So you’ll be able to watch it there as
Scott Shapiro 22:44
well. Absolutely. So a couple of things. So let’s think about this as business. So let’s put on our we have our business page, we are the C suite. We are the agent, we do our we do it all Live Messenger and think about it from a business perspective. We’ve talked a little bit about global reach. I think the other thing that’s really important is the cross platform, way cross device way that messenger works. So you know, I always think about the example of you know, Starbucks before COVID. Right? You know, realtors are out there hustling, you know, they might, it might not be at the office, eight to nine hours of the day, for a variety of reasons. Whether you have your phone or your laptop, it’s cross device is cross platform. It’s ubiquitous, it allows you that in a moment where maybe you’re working on a laptop, that message pops up versus the phone. So I think those that we’ve talked about real identity, I think real identity is extremely important. You are a real person representing your business. And then there’s a real consumer at the other end of that, and it’s not that weird, you know, what’s the what’s the 512 area code I’m getting? Who is this? You know, it’s DJ, it’s you, it’s me, as a business, there’s that conversations are seamless, super easy to start and reengaged. There’s the persistent thread, you know, and it’s synchronous or asynchronous. So whenever we’re having that conversation, we can drop a thread, and then pick it up at any one point in time, then you’re able to search so you’re able to search by topic. I do that all the time, especially on the business side, when we’re using workplace messenger. You know, you can imagine that there are hundreds of, you know, in some cases for people I’ve worked with for years, 1000s of messages, and so you can search by topic. So if you were talking as an example about the inspection on a house, you can type in, if you’re selling me the house inspection, and then it’s going to pop up in the thread. It’s almost like a really nice quick cheat to searching and finding point in a conversation. Super lightweight, much easier than email unless you’re keeping emails on each client and having to go in. This is super easy, seamless come to us. We’ve talked about it being modern. I also think there’s a way to be whimsical and have fun. There’s stickers, there’s gifts, there are things that we don’t measure that as business success, potentially, but it’s a way of being human and having a relationship and kind of getting that off the ground again, there’s a lot of personalization and fun you can have. And then the in the integration is easy, right? So it’s pages, there’s advertising you can do from it. We’re going to talk a little bit about the way that you can use partners to start bots. That’s a little bit more on the technical side. But I think again, it’s it should be known that like, you know, there’s a native tool that does a lot of the lifting and the heavy lifting that you don’t have to go out and get someone. It’s only when you start thinking about the bot experience when you want to establish that so that it’s answering for you, or qualifying consumers, on the startup conversation, that’s when you’re probably going to want to look for a firm to help you out in designing a bot experience.
So I have on the video screen here, a couple of things as to why businesses are using messenger, how are they succeeding? So the first thing for the folks on the podcast is, you know, I’m showing a slide here that talks about raising awareness. So what we found in studies is that 42%, we saw a 42% of an increase in qualified leads. Again, if you ask me, why is that? I think it is a real identity, right? You know, DJ is DJ on Facebook, you can’t be someone you’re not right. It’s a real experience of who you are as a person. on the sales side, we found it especially this is important, I think, on the E commerce side. But I think it would be interesting as we see more agents use this as what is what is the purchase? What are we doing from driving sales. What we found is that companies that do use messenger, from a business perspective, are driving for X purchases in Messenger compared to other channels. And I don’t think that’s a surprise, I think, again, real estate’s a little bit of a different business here. But I think it’s important to know that that conversation you’re having with that consumer can drive sales, and how does that compare to other forms and other communication that you’re having with the consumer through text or email or through any other system that you’re maybe using. So just food for thought that that can drive, the messenger experience can drive sales. And then for bigger brands, what we found is there’s an example that’s running in real time, from Air France, I talked a little bit about travel, in particular, using this as kind of a customer service support line. I don’t think it’s as germane for real estate, because these are much more one to one conversations. But it is important to know that large companies are setting up these messenger experiences to really facilitate conversation with consumers in real time. And that really does help what they consider to be an important metric with net promoter score, which increases about 15 points. So businesses, we talked about that modernity about communication, it shows up here so that I think for agents, and especially if you’re on the podcast, what you want to take away from this is it can help you raise awareness, and it can increase and should increase your qualified leads, you’re really getting that one to one real person communication, versus just an email, or a phone number, you’re actually having a real one to one communication with a human being. Yep. So how would you get started on this? There are four things that we look at, when we think about messenger for business, four steps, plan, create, connect, and optimize. And I always think about this, this is kind of an interesting point, when I reviewed this in advance of our time together, DJ, I thought, boy, that’s just good business, get a plan, create the plan, connect to people and optimize what you’re doing for success. And so it was kind of funny, is I thought about this, yes, this is germane to messenger. But it’s also really germane to like how we run our businesses. You know, the first thing I would say is anything you do on our platform, and we’ve talked about this with advertising, as well as like, have a clear business objective in mind. I don’t want people to run out and do this just to do it. I want people to really think about how does this impact my business? How does this help me close more sales? How does this help me communicate to my consumer? How does this make my consumer feel? And so I think one of the things I would say to people in this kind of comes in the plan thing is, is there a point where I’m having an issue, and messenger can solve it. And I think back to just the day to day, if you are in a busy day to day business, and you feel like that immediate need the immediate reach touchpoint with the consumer is important. That’s a friction point in the business. And that’s a friction point that messenger can solve as an example. So really understanding what is it that this does, in my mind, it does two things closes the speed to lead and the consumer expectation. It also helps you get that real identity. So we like what’s our does that close our gap. So planning where you would insert messenger is really important. Um, so again, you know, start with that clear business objective, who are we trying to reach and identify the points right now that this helps to remove friction. And it can be even that it’s friction for you as the agent, which is like, wow, I really wish I could get back to my consumers faster. Messenger can be, you know, with some planning, some intentionality can be a really great point and a place to do that.
The second thing is, okay, now that we’ve done that with the plan is what’s our business objective? I have three things on the screen here for people on the podcast, it’s generating leads, it’s increasing transactions, or it’s answering support questions. I really think about this much more, if you see the generating leads. perspective here is like, again, bots, really helping to answer the question of the lead. So here, we’re talking from original Coast company, what type of stylist outfit Are you looking for. And for people who come into the Facebook Live, or go back and watch this later, you will see a real life example of what having kind of bought technology can do to start the consumer journey. And then the second one here, these these load a little bit slow, is you know how to increase your transaction. So again, getting started, this is an example from happy socks and comm business. While these are not necessarily related perfectly to real estate, I think, again, asking questions, what would be the first questions you would ask me if I picked up the phone to call you? Or what would be the first questions you would ask at a coffee? Right? load that in with robotics rights? And DJ, go? Go for it? I
D.J. Paris 31:35
know, I was I was going to just answer that. But yeah, I mean, you certainly if you have a business Facebook page, before your real estate practice, you have the ability and if you’re listening to this, you’re you’re not seeing what happy socks is doing. But if you see the slides, you’ll you’ll probably be able to tell what I’m about to say, which is, you know, you can start it’s not even so much qualifying, it’s more just determining what’s the nature of the request support request, or the inquiry. So you can actually create, you know, these options with through bot technology to ask questions like, hey, thanks so much for contacting me, are you interested in purchasing a home or maybe selling a home or maybe renting and you can put those options there, people are used to chatting that way with with different companies. So this isn’t even a new experience for your your consumers. This is an experience they’re already used to. So you’re not going to it’s not going to be something that’s going to be off putting in any way they’re already doing this. And you can, as Scott was saying, you can add this in, as he was saying, think about the questions you ask over that first meeting, and some of those you can put right into here to then be able to give you better information to be able to then answer more directly what what they’re looking for.
Scott Shapiro 32:45
Absolutely. And I think the other thing I’ve noticed in the business, just traveling the country is you know, there are companies and we’ll we’ll show a slide and I’ll kind of linger on that that you can use to do this. So I don’t want people to feel like well, boy, this sounds really cool. But I don’t know how to do it. I want to leave you with like who you can connect with. The other thing I’d say is that a lot of really technology forward brokerages and teams have people who have been doing this on their own. So you might, you know, it might surprise you asking around your office? Has anybody built a bot for messenger? You might be surprised by the answer that somebody would raise their hand and say, Actually, I have I heard and seen that more and more that, you know, that’s just something that people, you know, we call it in technology nerding out, but I think you know, geeking out. But you might be surprised by who has developed this already, even within your own offices so that you don’t necessarily have to hire a third party company. So I’m going to move us ahead a little bit just because I want to make sure we’re getting to a couple more things. One, we talked a little bit about this for which is our first party messaging tools. So pages manager has an app, and then you have a unified inbox. And then you can build a business inboxing messenger, I happen to run a couple of different pages for some nonprofits. And so the toggling between me Scott, as a first party one, a party of one using Facebook’s tools, shows up in Messenger, but also for the pages that I’m helping to run, I have the opportunity to switch over and answer as the business is super easy and seamless. The thing that I would really want people to walk away from is connect this to your business page. And the reason we want to connect it to the business pages, sort of the mantra of one, you are a business, people are going to search for you as a business, they’re not going to search for you as a person back to that eight and 10 looking for those local business pages. Obviously, we’ve talked a little bit in the past about you need a page to advertise. So that’s another key element to pages. And then this is that third part of it, which is that ability to message as a business back to the consumer. So I think it’s super important and if you want to have your page set up, you know, Scott Shapiro, you know, real ID are great, you know, that’s fine. ain’t like again, you can have those identifiers in there so that people understand that you’re answering as a business, as the real estate agent, and or team or broker versus you answering is just yourself. The other thing you can start doing, which is really, really interesting is first party messenger features. So like, I clicked too much, too many builds on this DJ. But what I’m showing for folks on the podcast is you can save replies, you can have automated responses in a way messages. So we think about that speed delete, it is okay to say, hey, I have an automated message. If I’m in a meeting from nine to 1030, I will get back to you as soon as possible. Talk about a surprise and delight moment for the consumer. That just means, you know what, I really do want to talk to DJ about that house, I saw, he’s tied up till 1030. Not a problem, I’m not expecting that immediacy of reply, or the feeling that somebody’s not getting my message, not answering my message, which we all know is then the consumer moves on to the next person. So here, you can set it based upon where your day is, what your schedule is set the expectation for the consumer. And lastly, similar to a lot of different types of email providers, you can start labeling consumers in Messenger based upon the rules you set up. So if you look on this live example, on the right hand side of the screen, important VIP new customer, you can start designating and start kind of organizing your inbox with messenger to get back to people to understand are those new customers is that you know, maybe I’m messaging, the title company, maybe I’m messaging, the inspector like you can start organizing your day in a way that it actually makes sense, while using messaging technology and being really lightweight.
The platform API, this is where we get into partners and probably going to go through this really quickly. But you know, partners offer enhanced automation. They offer linking and authentication. I’m not as worried about that for the real estate field integrations, I think, again, that’s what we’re talking about from a more bought view, which is again, how do we answer and have a script so that we can kind of prequalify the consumer and really understand what they’re looking for. So a couple of different examples here of like how these work, like I spend too much time on them. But again, if you want to go back in and look at this later, really, it’s just how do we talk to the consumer? How do we let technology do that, or what is an API is how most companies so when we talked a little bit earlier about advertising, they connect through our API, they wire pipes up, and that allows them to build on top of our platforms. So again, here, you’re looking at different opportunities, like integrations so you can chat with an agent. Again, I think most people here are going to use it as a one to one communication tool. If you’re a broker, though, or a team, and you have several people on your team, or you want to kind of distribute leads or inquiries, this would be a really interesting way of having that, which is, again, if they were to come to you as a team, or they come to you as a brokerage, you can have a script ready, and then kind of cycle in and pass out the different leads, should they come in through that channel versus the agent page. So partners can really help set this up. There are a variety of different partners that we’re going to talk about. And this is the slide I really wanted to kind of take a moment and just kind of slow up and let people digest this. If you’re on the podcast, I can call it a couple of these different companies. Sprinkler is one amplify.ai ai Oh falcon.io. I’ll come on Converse social. They are part of our ecosystem, what I would say is, again, if you’re on the podcast versus watching the slide, you can browse the directory based on our on our we have a destination for folks to go to about messenger and more companies will pop up. But I just wanted to give you guys kind of a idea of who the developers are, who builds on our platform. I think a lot of agents know about sprinkler in particular. But there are other companies that facilitate that build on the platform. And you know, our partners who build on top of our API. So I’ll pause here and let people if you’re on the live, take a screenshot. And again, if you’re on the podcast, coming back to this, there are a couple of again sprinkler customer with a K K u s t o m er amplify.ai. Congress social falcon.io and I’ll come on a LCM e o n. So a couple of partners for you to look at if you’re thinking about this and you want to work with a partner. And lastly, just what I would say is that messenger is a great way to ever data conversations. So again, you know, this can be that somebody comes to your page, we talked about that eight to 10, looking for a local business page every week, having a Send a messenger so that they can start talking about the questions, DJ, you talked about your website. So again, you can have a messenger chat experience on your website, if you think most agents probably find that the majority of their things are coming through Facebook. I know that agents do have, obviously run their own websites. But again, it’s a way to connect all of these different devices, so that the consumer can have, you know, a linear conversation with you. So it’s not just your mobile phone, you can also set it up on your website as well. And then lastly, we can start conversations with scale by doing paid advertising. So you can have ads the click to messenger. So I’m going to show an example here. And then sponsored messages. So if you’re in your inbox, and you’re looking at messenger, you will see from time to time, companies actually in the feed as you scroll, having ads, sponsored messages in those environments, it’s another great way to break out. This is something that when we talked earlier about advertising and partners, partners really should be offering messenger as a place as a destination for you to put your ads into automatically. It’s not just about newsfeed. It’s not just about stories, this is another great way to advertise your business and show up in a place where people are spending a lot of time. So know that it’s not just a conversational piece, but it’s also an advertising destination. And so like I think, again, just thinking about this kind of sealing up our conversation is, you know, look about messenger test on it, learn, expand, iterate, these are ways that you can use the platform to your benefit.
Certainly, if you’ve used it as a person, think about what it can do for your business. And I think, again, think about the consumer there in that environment. And certainly, the more you can use these tools, the more surprise and delight moments you can bring to your consumers as you engage with them. DJ, I don’t know if you’re muted, but I can’t hear you
D.J. Paris 42:11
just based on reserved and advertising, or sorry, different demographics. And you can actually send out offers you say, well, as a real estate agent, once my offers, well, it could be Hey, I’d love to give you an accurate quote on the value of your home. Things like that, you know, think about how valuable that would be for people who maybe they’re going to Zillow, and they’re seeing the value of their home. What Zillow says is their value and they go, I’m not sure if that’s accurate. And then they get an offer from me saying, Hey, I’m happy to do that at no cost for you and give you a really, that’s that’s a really useful offer that you can provide. So Facebook, Facebook, messenger sponsored messaging, look into it, it’s very cool. And most people aren’t using it, who are real estate agents.
Scott Shapiro 42:54
You know, hopefully, they talk about the technology play, I’m laughing here, like, the more we the more we want technology, the more makes for fun. Hopefully you can hear me there, you know, I think it’s a way to also really specify the customer journey. And so I think one of the things that we’ve talked a little bit about is open homes, right? Just making sure people know how to put it out, use your CRM, without messages on Messenger, right, you can kind of use it to your advantage. So I think the way I think about it is laser technology suite. How do you think about communicating? And what are the ways in which our platforms and our family of apps and services integrate into those? So, you know, yes, it is a great advertising destination with messenger and I think you’re absolutely underutilized. I think there’s a lot of great opportunity there. I just look at messenger is really what what I love is it’s a way to really engage with the consumer really tell the consumer what you’re up to as well. You know, I think we’re only getting to the very right part of like, we’re messaging the back to this identical company for eight years, and we’ve always had that messaging capability, like think about, like, how much more creative the tools are, you know, and if you had told me eight years ago that you could integrate your business page into a chatbot and start real time customer service and profitability. People do the overhead stuff. But I think you know, again, the technology the earlier you get into it, as we continue to grow technology and as consumer expectations rise. I think that that’s a really great way to stay on top of the business and to frankly win more business without winning more monitor. easier and faster. You can communicate with the consumer the better. Like what’s your homework, there’s so many relief interesting ways to engage with the consumer, considering schools can either have messenger plastic, like a coffee shop opened on Main Street, lightweight touch points about how you can stay relevant to people who are engaged with you as a consumer, but also, just as a community leader. I think that’s another way of thinking in front of the consumer more often. So I hope that the last 15 minutes opened up, some folks eyes, the tools and hopefully didn’t scare you guys off, I think the United States is like, yes, we showed some really advanced examples. But if that’s a little too much, just think about simply aligning your business page, your profile, communicating. I think if you do that, even beyond bot technology, it’s such a personal way to have a conversation with consumers. It goes a long way. And it really breaks down some of those barriers. So, you know, some of this is too much to say start at the basics and know.
D.J. Paris 46:07
Well, what a perfect place to wrap up. And Scott as usual, delivering a tremendous amount of value to our viewers and listeners, you know, every one of us is on Facebook, our clients are on Facebook, our prospective clients are on Facebook, they are using Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger as it really Facebook Messenger is a standalone tool. I mean, it has a standalone app in the App Store as well. So start to think of it as its, as Scott was said at the very beginning as its own product and its own way for you to communicate with your clients. And of course, it’s integrated with Facebook and your Facebook page. But it really is its own experience. So you start learning more about that, well, you can provide some additional content in the future about some best practices there. But as always, we want to thank Scott Shapiro from Facebook coming on our show every month delivering incredible value to our viewers and listeners. And we want to ask everybody to do two quick things before we sign off. Number one, please follow us on Facebook. I mentioned this earlier, but just in case you haven’t gotten around to it, go to facebook.com forward slash keeping it real pod, send us a message we would love to hear your comments, your concerns, we get requests almost every day from people saying you got to interview my friend, he or she is amazing. And that’s a lot of times how we get our guests. So we ask all of you guys to not only follow us, but talk to us, we love to hear from you, this show is for you. So let us know what you want, what you want more of what you want less of and also, for everyone going, Hey, this was really helpful. I want to go and listen to all of the Facebook episodes with Scott. Well, you can actually do that very easily. But the easiest way to do it’s actually on our website, which is keeping it real pod.com. And if you scroll to the bottom of the homepage, you’ll see we have all of our different series categorized. So if you want to just look at the the Scott Facebook episodes, they’re right down there. If you want to look at some of our other series, you can do that as well, instead of scrolling through and saying, Okay, I got to find the last Scott episode, just go to the bottom of the homepage. It’s all right there. We built that with you in mind to help make it easier for you to get the content that you want from our show. And again, on behalf of the audience. We want to thank Scott for coming on. He is a busy guy. He runs a very busy team. Really the Facebook real estate team is so important to the real estate community. And they are here to help you guys use those tools to increase your business. It’s quite that it’s just really that simple. So continue to support our show. And and also on behalf of Scott and myself we say thank you to everyone who is listening and watching and we will see you next time. Thank you, Scott.
Scott Shapiro 48:39
Anytime DJ Happy Holidays early to folks. Happy Halloween and Thanksgiving. Happy Thanksgiving. As always. Thank you.
D.J. Paris 48:49
Awesome, thank you so much.
Scott Shapiro 48:51
Thanks, guys. Take care
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