Your website/blog is your home. This is where you get to give your opinion on real estate and local events, guide others and give advice, publish great and valuable content, and showcase properties and services. This is where you will let your peacock feathers shine!
Your social networks such as Facebook are your relationship-building channels. Here you inform people about your updates, distribute your content, and have real-time conversations about news and events in your real estate niche.
Your audience exists on social media networks, and hopefully soon on your blog as well, so by publishing your content on Facebook your audience gets to see it without having to make any effort.
Which one should come first?
What is the point of writing a blog if nobody can see it? What is the point of building an audience if you have nothing to show them?
In 2010, you could have nothing but a Facebook page. You could publish all your content on your page and build a large audience in a short amount of time. That was because in those days there was a huge organic reach. We did not have to advertise much back then to get lots of engagement and interaction on our pages.
The benefits of sowing first!
However, even though times have changed, there's merit in publishing a lot of your personally-created content directly on Facebook.
In fact, if you take a look at Brendon Burchard's Facebook Page, he creates a video and adds it to his Tumblr, then creates images and articles from his video content and puts them directly on his Facebook page, sometimes with links to his Tumblr and sometimes without.
Mari Smith is a fantastic example of someone who hardly EVER links out to her content, but constantly links to everyone else's-she's quite possibly the most inclusive person online today!
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Steps to take if you're just starting out
1. Create a Facebook page.
2. Fill with great content, including the kind of articles you would post on a blog. Also link back to others, share information, and generally be awesomely valuable (not strictly a word but you know what I mean!).
3. Start building your blog on the backend.
4. Convert some of your FB articles to full-blown blog articles.
5. Continue to grow using your blog as your content 'farm' and Facebook as a distribution channel.
Take your Facebook page to the next level even if you're just starting out
1. Create a simple conversion funnel and add to a tab on your page.
2. Create a Pinned Post about the tab.
3. Use Facebook ads to build your community and grow your audience.
In summary, you need to remove any bottlenecks or barriers to your progression and begin to build your community as soon as possible.
Don't wait until you passed the real estate exam or have a perfectly branded website or a content-rich blog. Use social media to expedite your exposure-that's what it's there for.