Whether they use Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, or stick with their own website, 21st century businesses operate on a landscape that has come to all but require an online presence, and increasingly demands a social media presence as well. Hasty attempts to adopt the trend can lead to entrepreneurs who blog with gusto, only to wonder later how their status updates are actually helping them sell their products and services.

Lake Tapps real estate agents Liz Johnson and Heidi North have found a formula that works for them.

“We created something larger than a real estate forum for people to go to,” Johnson said. “From that, sales happen naturally.”

The Keller-Williams agents are the creators of I Love Lake Tapps, an online brand that represents Johnson and North’s real estate business, but on first glance seems to function more as a cheerleader and online gathering space for the lake community. The Facebook page and website feature a few of the agents’ articles on selling or buying homes and act as a calendar of events coming up around the island’s neighborhoods.

The two agents met and teamed up in January 2010, after coming to the same idea independently of each other.

“I actually parked the domain name ILoveLakeTapps.com in the fall of 2007 to eventually focus business on the community, and I didn’t do anything with it right away,” North said. “I met Liz in 2010 after I looked at Facebook to set up a social media page. Liz happened to own I Love Lake Tapps. I decided to keep checking until it expired.

“When we met, I asked her ‘Guess what domain name I own?’ We had been living parallel lives in a weird way.”

Discovering they had the similar lives and the same interests—both in the real estate agency, both live on Lake Tapps, and both were looking to social media as an inexpensive means of business promotion—they decided to join their parallel lives and run the website and Facebook page parallel to each other.

As of press time, the Facebook page has almost 3,800 “Likes,” obtained entirely by word of mouth, they said.

“I guess you’ll see some pages with 10,000 fans as a result of advertising,” Johnson said. “They paid for those Likes in advertising, or they hired somebody web savvy.”

By contrast, their Facebook has obtained its connections from people who searched Lake Tapps on Google or shared the page with friends. The only thing they have done to actively bring people into the fold is to add information that people might want to know about neighborhood events, such as the calendar/blog “52 Weeks on Lake Tapps.”

“The good part about it is we’ve really become community experts,” Johnson said.

Johnson and North have worked information gathering into their routine, checking RSS feeds, bookmarked go-to sites, Twitter feeds, and the old fashioned method of “keeping ears to the ground” when they’re out in the community, North said.

They have worked to refine the manner in which they manage online content. For example, two posts a day turned out to be the threshold at which fans would begin to unsubscribe from the page to unclog their news feed, Johnson said. By contrast, online fans seem to consistently enjoy posted photos and other page Likes.

In addition, they have created a YouTube channel for video blogs (vlogs) and virtual home tours, created on advice from staff at Home Eagle mortgage company that the videos would improve their Search Engine Optimization.

The “I Love Lake Tapps” branding was popular enough that they put the logo on a t-shirt available for purchase on their website.

Between all the required work to put out content and manage their online presence, they still have to find time to perform their primary duties as real estate agents—a balance that can be hard to strike perfectly, North said. But they stand by their model: winning people over today for sales tomorrow.

“There’s so much we do that we may not see the rewards of for years,” Johnson said. “It’s hard to track. Did we gain that customer because of a postcard we sent, did we make it through Facebook? Was it a combination? The stuff we’re doing is very much like farming in that sense.”