Could Facebook topple realestate.com.au?

I was recently speaking with a real estate agent about the different ways of advertising both their properties for sale AND their own services as a real estate agent and they couldn’t stop talking about Facebook!

The agent mentioned Facebook over a dozen times and talked about getting a Facebook page to promote themselves locally. In all of this, what stood out the most about this conversation was that we were talking about the future of online property marketing – and this person didn’t mention the major property portals once!

What’s so special about Facebook for real estate?

This individual had just attended a marketing conference and spoken with others about the demographic and geo-targeting capabilities of the social media giant – about how by using Facebook, the agent could target ONLY people living in the suburb. To top it off they thought that if they jumped in now they could own the suburb, so to speak!

Facebook advertising is the service that we ended up talking about and we went on to reflect on what we’d do after we attracted all of those locals to our website or Facebook page. Was it Likes we were after? Shares? Were we getting people to do anything in particular once they got to our Facebook page? When you drill down even further you have to understand the value of one of these actions and match it to your own goals.

Without focus, Facebook advertising could flop

We decided that the focus for the real estate agent’s Facebook advertising campaign would be to reach existing clients, people who the agent had done business with, or at least met, at an open home sometime in the past, and share with them some information and selling tips.

There are several types of Facebook advertising campaigns you can run and the analytics information you get from each will be different. Therefore our campaign was focussed on not only reaching existing contacts, but sharing information about how the local property market is performing (by providing a market report), as well as some solid tips and advice for selling property. The reason we created blogs, featuring genuinely helpful, relevant advice, is because we didn’t want to turn our Facebook audience away from our own website. Furthermore, the information is useful and reveals more about who we are and our helpful selling style.

Facebook ads keep you front of mind

In the end, our real estate agent’s Facebook ads campaign was aimed at getting his image in front of existing clients using a custom audience and sharing useful information that they could share with their friends and colleagues looking to sell their homes. It was partly to offset, as well as test and measure, the performance of their DL mailing card campaign that they sent regularly in the past.

We view Facebook and social media advertising as part of a bigger picture in your digital strategy to build brand awareness. Most importantly, however, it should bring potential customers into your sphere of influence and encourage them to recommend you based on the quality content that you create.

Read more about how we manage the Facebook advertising campaigns for real estate agents for no extra charge as part of our digital strategy.