Category: Social Media

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Content Marketing Facebook Advertising real estate agents Social Media

Real estate agent’s frenzied hunt for locals via Facebook advertising

facebook advertising and social media for real estate agents

Could Facebook topple realestate.com.au?

Facebook-as a marketing tool for real estate agentsI 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.

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Content Marketing Social Media Wordpress Website Training Courses

Real estate agents turn vendors away with anti social Facebook behaviour

real estate agents and social media

Social Media builds communities, but that can be hard

Everybody wants to be on social media because there is a fear of missing out, just like in many alleged stock market and property market bubbles that are going on in Australia (and China).

Every coach, adviser, website designer and online marketing expert is spruiking the benefits of getting onto social media to be discovered, but like most things you can’t just be there, you have to participate, otherwise you’re not really being social. In fact if you’re not putting in the right amount of effort, you might be seen as anti-social by sending people away from your Facebook page.

Do you want to be social or do you just want to shout?

If you’re the owner of a Facebook business page and want your page to be successful, actually add value and help build a community, then you’ll need a community manager and that can be a big expense and not practical for small businesses. Larger social media sites who have taken the time to hire a good community manager have mastered the purpose of social sites – they encourage members (call them likers, friends etc) to make comments as part of a group that adds value to the topics you’ve discussed. The best example I can think of is social groups for Mums and social groups for IT nerds (which is becoming most of us these days). When you go to one of these sites you learn some fantastic things you didn’t know and if they are really good (and genuine) you’ll feel like sharing your stories.

So if you still want to get onto social media with a Facebook page you can do things that people like and not have to spend too much time, effort and money, growing a community. You can share useful information and tell people about what YOU are doing that might interest them. Australians are VERY interested in real estate and they want to know what is going on in the market, what their own property is worth etc so you can add value and contribute using social media.

What to shout about!

There’s plenty to shout about if you want to share and be helpful, including:

  • Images of houses that are prepared beautifully for sale
  • Information about how many people are showing interest in open homes
  • Developments in the local area that affect house prices
  • Place to visit and have a great coffee, parks that cater well to those with kids

Social media sites like Instagram, Foursquare and Yelp all enable people to share images, videos, information and recommendations that other people are interested in and if you really want to participate in social media you’ll need to get on and connect with businesses you like and recommend and make comments about them.

The saddest thing to happen to social media

The saddest thing that I have seen at some Facebook pages is reposting, particularly if that’s all that happens. If you are a victim of reposting and don’t know it, you’ll notice it when everything you post (or repost) on your timeline just sends your visitors away to other sites. It’s OK to repost from time to time and particularly if you’ve just read something useful, but if someone is managing your Facebook page and they are just sending visitors away they are reducing the value of any other digital marketing you are doing.

There is another way – and it’s to create your own content (or have someone create it for you) and that’s what we do.

Content marketing can bring happiness and success to your social strategy

Content marketing is all the rage these days, but it’s actually been happening for many years under boring names like ‘business blogging’ and the humble ‘news’ section of websites. The great thing about content marketing is that if you do it right, you can link back to other great content you’ve created. Content marketing should be designed to provide useful information that your potential vendors are looking for; that they are searching for, and that they are interested in. If you do a great job then your readers will follow you and possibly even subscribe to your blog, newsletter, education series or whatever it happens to be.

Remember that not all of the people who read your website, blog or social media pages need you right now, but if they like what you write, they’ll want a way of being reminded of you for when they are ready to buy. That’s when they join your list or like your page.

If you just want to shout out on social media then do it using your own great content. That way you’ll be sending readers back to your own website – and not to someone else’s. You’ll then have more analytics to look at.

 

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Why Facebook is #2 and sticky – what real estate agents can do about it

Facebook-as a marketing tool for real estate agents

Facebook is sticky because users stay there

Website visitor information for facebook and why it is so sticky and good social media for real estate agents
Social media giant Facebook’s visitor stats what are your real estate agent website analytics like?

When a website is described as sticky it just means that visitors to the site stay their longer and click on more things. You probably do it because you find your friends, the things they do and the placed they go to interesting. Google and other systems that measure engagement of websites measure this using bounce rate, page views per visit and the time spent on the site each visit and that is something that we make our clients aware of in our quarterly digital strategy progress report for their website.

When you think about your own site, are their interesting places to visit? Are their stories about the people you work with, about your vendors or even about the buyers that others might find interesting? Some people have said to me that writing about real estate is boring but if you look at how popular ANY article that relates to real estate is in the press you’d soon find lots of things to write about and that is exactly what we do.

Content Marketing includes Words, Pictures and Videos

mobile friendly real estate agent websitesContent marketing is the buzz word in digital marketing these days but it has been popular for a long time. It’s commonly also referred to as blogging, business blogging or even newsletters (if you want to go back to more traditional terms). Content marketing refers to the writing on your wesbite but also to the images that you use (and how they are optimised for search engines) and the videos you create. The ultimate goal of all this content creation is to produce something that visitors to your real estate agent website want to see. If you tell a compelling story your visitors will come along on your journey.

Instagram is not as popular as Facebook

Website visitor information for instagram not as popular as Facebook but good social media for real estate agents
Instagram website visitor statistics and anlytics

Instagram was bought by Facebook in 2012 but it’s statistics don’t come close to those of it’s parent. Despite this Instagram is a good social media tool for real estate agents who want to appear as tech savvy and increase their content by taking photos and uploading them. Instagram is a tool that enables people to view great images and videos, like and share them and remain connected to people who they like so if you sell some great houses that you think people would like to know about its a good idea to give Instagram a go.

As a digital agency we can advise on all aspects of digital marketing and provide our clients with regular reports that demonstrate the statistics and analytics but focus on the goals and action points. If you’re a real estate agent and interested in 123ezy website for yourself take a look at our pricing but more importantly give us a call and ask us some questions, we’d love to help.