Facebook for LANDLORDS – Do You Use Facebook?

I use Facebook to check out prospective tenants. It's not always possible as a lot of people set their security settings but the real numpties tend to forget and it is very revealing what some people say on Facebook. One tenant I was considering said "landlord did the inventory a day early - party at my place tonight". Needless to say I called them to say sorry but I have decided to let my property to somebody else. They were not happy but tough, it was a close escape for me!

A landlord told me a couple of weeks ago that there was a deposit dispute with a group of tenants because the house smelled of cigarette smoke and the walls were stained. The AST forbad smoking and the tenants denied that they had smoked. The landlord found photographs on on of their FBs showing a party in the house and everyone smoking. They sent them to the tenants and the deposit dispute was withdrawn. It is very difficult to photograph smoke stains and smell can not be proven so without this photograph I expect the landlords would have lost the deposit dispute.
Follow me on Twitter@landlordtweets

Microsoft did some research on the effect of the cost of sending emails on the returns spanners made. They found that even if an email cost only a fraction of pence, most spanning would stop due to the very low response rates.

Hence Facebook charging people to email me may not be a big issue in the end.

I am very dubious about FB, especially when you mix up social and business use and tend to go along with Vanessa's posts, although as Mary mentioned, looking in from the outside, so to speak, can be very revealing.

It's not for me though so in terms of being a landlord I won't be sharing this one I'm afraid Mark.

It's quite easy to separate your personal and business use of Facebook. Once you have a personal account - which you can use or not, with locked down the privacy settings or not, entirely as you wish - you then set up a FB 'Page' with another name. This could be directly business-related or something fanciful, depending on how you intend to use it.

To set up a Page, click on the 'Create a Page' link at the bottom of any page. FB walks you through it, or you can search the internet for instructions - but make sure they are recent.

Once it is set up you can then switch to use FB as that page and post comments, like pages and join groups as that entity. The point is that the owner of a Page is hidden from visitors, so they cannot cross over to your personal use of FB. However, having a Page is best done as part of a business promotion strategy than just a way of hiding your identity.

By the way, if you are wondering 'why not just set up a personal account under a false name?' (which you can do if you have a separate email account), this is possible but is against FB's terms and conditions whereas the 'Page' process described above is perfectly OK because FB can trace it is you, even if other users cannot.

As a FB user you may not like being advertised to but that's the price of it being free to use. However, for business owners with a Page the opportunities for low-cost advertising within FB are fantastic.

I personaly use facebook for a couple things but find it a scarey thing. I would be anxious talking on facebook.