Over the last two years I have been talking about being where the people are, where the home buyers are, where the home sellers are, and if you have been listening, you have heard me say that where the people are is not in your office.

I have been a huge proponent of packing up your gear and getting out into the coffee shops and shopping malls and working from wherever your clients congregate. I even teach classes on how to assemble, set up and use a mobile office. A real estate office in a brief case as it were. (I have a class on that topic coming later this month at Bay East Association of REALTORS® on March 29th)

This presupposes that the only way to be where the people are is to physically be in the same locations as they are. But, you can also be where they are by being available to them online.

As real estate professionals, we know that we need to have a web site, so we do. But precious few of us enjoy stellar success with our web sites. So, some of us have converted to blogs. Again, it’s a precious few that enjoy stellar success with that platform.

There is an online method of reaching people that a lot of us have discovered, and that is Facebook. I see more and more people coming to Facebook every day. No one seems to know what to do or say when they first arrive, but over a short period of time, most folks get the hang of the social interaction that takes place on Facebook.

Facebook’s popularity is phenomenal, so much so that the SFGate website reports that Facebook edged out Google as the leader in website traffic. Take a moment to read the short article here: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/techchron/detail?entry_id=59202.

Given that Facebook appears to be on a steady growth path, and given that everyone you know is either already there, or will be shortly, it’s important that you be there too.

Don’t worry about the business aspects when you start out. Instead, concentrate on connecting with people that you know. Spend some time searching for past and current clients, past and current school mates, past and current neighbors, past and current jobs and so on. The idea here is to simply connect with people and to interact with them. In many ways, Facebook has become the new AOL. New and improved AOL for sure, but it embodies much of what fueled AOL’s popularity in the past.

There are any number of books available on how to leverage your Facebook experience and still maintain some semblance of personal privacy, so I won’t rehash that here. I will suggest that you contact everyone that you know and ask to “friend” them. Categorize them into lists as you do that. Keeping your friends in lists will help you configure your privacy controls later.

Another thing I’d suggest is that you talk to people on Facebook about things that are interesting to them, not necessarily what’s interesting to you. In other words, all of the social rules of interacting with people that you have already learned in life apply here as well.

More on this in a future post or in a class, but for now, watch the trend, get in on the action and start thinking of ways that you can become a valuable contributor to the Facebook experience for the people that you know.