December 2018 Product Update

While most of us were winding down in December heading into the holidays, our engineering team managed to release a couple of major improvements before the holidays to help make marketing on Facebook easier, and create a more efficient workflow for handling new leads in the mobile app!

Facebook Lead Ads Integration

First, like many people, you might be wondering what ‘Lead Ads’ are…

In a nutshell, it’s a product Facebook released to help advertisers more reliably capture accurate contact information from the leads they generate through Facebook (and Instagram) ads.

It’s a huge asset for agents and real estate teams since it can save you money on having a separate landing page product, and a TON of time creating and optimizing lead capture landing pages since this entire process is handled right inside of Facebook.

How it works is, when a prospect clicks on your ad, instead of taking them away from Facebook to your landing page (which if not well-optimized may not yet be a place they trust), the prospect is instead taken to a landing page right inside of Facebook where they get some additional info on what they’re signing up for, and then their contact information is pre-filled into the form so it’s really easy for them to get the info you’re offering.

This is especially important since so many Facebook users are on their mobile device, where it’s not a lot of fun to punch out an email address, name, phone number, etc. When it’s pre-filled like this your conversion rate will go through the roof!

And with Instagram becoming an increasingly popular, and important social site for Realtors, but also notoriously difficult for lead capture, using Lead Ads on Instagram becomes an important way to drive ROI from your efforts there as well.

Many real estate agents who have been using Facebook Lead Ads for a long time now absolutely swear by them as the highest quality lead source they have so if you haven’t already added them into the mix for your Facebook advertising, it’s something I’d highly recommend you start.

How does the Facebook Lead Ads Integration with Follow Up Boss work?

With our direct integration with Facebook, if you’re a Follow Up Boss customer, just click here to enable the integration. Once that’s done, your leads will flow automatically into your account, and you’ll be able to route them to your team members automatically and start running automated follow ups to those leads right away. For more information on setup, you can also check out our full support documentation.

Previously you needed to leverage a tool like Zapier to sync leads from Facebook lead ads to Follow Up Boss, but with this integration, we’re saving you money on extra tools, and setting up a more reliable connection for you!

iPhone app

We’ve been able to increase our rate of development on iOS a lot this year and Apple took note and added us to their list of best apps for real estate professionals!

We also released 2 critical improvements to the iPhone app in December.

1. Deep linking
2. Sending photos

Deep linking?

So it’s pretty clear some pretty techy folks came up with that name so let me clarify what it means for us lay-people

So if you’ve been using Follow Up Boss for a while, you’ve probably noticed that when you get an email notification about a new lead, if you’re on your phone you tap on it to view the lead in Follow Up Boss, and were taking to a pretty dated mobile site to review it which had limited information about the lead, and you weren’t able to do things like send them a text.

The change that comes from adding deep links to those notifications is that now when you tap to view the lead, you’ll be taken straight into the mobile app which is a much more actionable place to drive your follow up from.

While this is a relatively small change in flow, it represents HUGE efficiency gains for heavy Follow Up Boss users who work their leads on the go all day long.

Sending Photos

Earlier this year we added the ability to receive, and then the ability to send photos via the web, and in this released we’re now adding the ability to send photos from the app as well.

This is going to make it a lot easier to send screenshots, listing photos and other images to your clients without having to switch to your regular texting app, so you can keep everything fully tracked and logged in Follow Up Boss.

What about Android?

We hear you Android disciples and have not forgotten that you like to get cool stuff too!!

The way we’ve been doing it the last couple of years is we’ve ended up going long stretches developing and improving the app for one OS and then another dedicated stretch on the other platform.

What that often means is we start to ‘get ahead’ on one, and then have to ‘catch up’ on the other.

So basically folks on iOS have been living without a few key things that Android users have had for months, but now what you’re seeing is us starting to get ahead again with iOS.

We definitely have a goal of being able to release these kinds of things in as close to tandem as possible in the near future to avoid that all too familiar sting of seeing a cool feature that would benefit you but not being able to use it and so have plans to hire more mobile engineers in 2019 to help make that happen.

What’s coming next?

We have a lot of great stuff already planned to help you drive more sales results in 2019 and while I can’t get into too many details, we’re making a big push to help bring more of your phone-based conversations into Follow Up Boss with less effort, improve and add integrations to the other business-critical systems you use to run your business, and making some of the central parts of Follow Up Boss even easier to use.

Here’s a little sneak peek:

A look back

It’s always nice to reflect on how far we’ve come in the last 12 months. Our team has grown (and continues to grow – we’re hiring if you know anyone who’d like to join our merry band) across sales, success, support and engineering, and our product has made huge strides as well. Here’s a look back at some of the highlights of what we added in 2018:

January – Call transfers, Improved number search, Improvements to Deals Feature
February – Speed upgrades for Android, Tons of improvements to Inbox, Person screen performance improvements
March – Caller ID (iPhone), Training resources page
April – Mailing Labels, Major Improvements to Import tool, Global ‘Add Person’ button
May – Tags on iPhone, Feedback forum, Improving Zillow integration to include assignments
June – Images in texts, Quick call outcomes,
July – Drag and Drop Person Sidebar, Collaborators on Mobile, Inbox Lead Processing for Agents, File drag and drop
August – Test calls, Collapsing left sidebar sections, Smartlist counts, Download call recordings, Lead deduplication by phone number
September – Timeline filters, Call quality indicator, Improved call handling on Android
October – Automatic phone number validation, Auto-advance calling, Send images via text, Task types, Huge server upgrade, New Integrations page, People screen columns redesign, Time-based filters improvement
November – Website and email activity (iPhone), @mentions in notes on iPhone, Improved voicemail recording, Appointments set reporting

While we’ve come a long way, it still feels like we’re just getting started. Stay awesome and see you in 2019!

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