This past February 18th I wrote an article about how Realtor Doug Newby’s Modern Homes Facebook page surpassed 50,000 “fans”.  As of this writing he is just a few hours (minutes?) from clearing 110,000 members to his page.  This exceeds the sum of the Facebook page membership of every major real estate franchise combined probably at least two times over.

Don’t Blink…

When I share Doug’s Facebook numbers with audiences the very first question I get is “Great, now what has it done for his business?”.  I can tell you this; Doug gets over 95% of his business online and traffic to his SignificantHomes.com site is up dramatically since last Fall (when his Facebook membership was zero).

Now if you are one of those folks who still doubt the power (and necessity) of social networking within your business, check this out:

And in terms of impact on your business:

EdgeRank optimization appears to be an order of magnitude greater than search engine optimization…

TechCrunch

*EdgeRank is Facebook’s algorithm that measures social networking relevancy.

Clearly Doug’s Facebook numbers put him as an Outlier in the realm of Realtor social media.  Be that as it may, his success on (and as a result of) Facebook is something we all can aspire to.  Just don’t expect to play the online game well without this part of the equation.  Mainly because it IS the equation for success online.