By James Sheldon
First things first, what is social media marketing and how can it help your estate agency? Well, it is fair to say that selling houses in this current climate is not a walk in the park but using social media effectively can certainly help your agency. Social media marketing is the process of creating organic content and/or adverts to promote your businesses products and services.
In this article we will discuss what the top agents are doing right now on social media. Find out exactly what your agency has to do in order to compete and gain great results that lead to the ultimate goal of any estate agent, selling more property!
Posting organically involves publishing content that your audience will find interesting, tangible and relevant. In 2020 the average time spent on social media per day is around 3 hours. As social media is becoming more integrated into our daily lives, it unveils countless opportunities for estate agents who are looking to reach out to their audience through social media marketing.
Don’t constantly post about properties for sale in every Tweet or Status you share, it will get stale and people will tune out. Make sure you share some useful industry content in between to keep your followers engaged.
Other than promoting your brand and properties for sale, other things to communicate with your audience should include:
Be the one-stop place your client will want to visit to find out everything about the property industry. This will be much more interesting than bombarding people with the latest properties for sale.
Follow the right people on social media to spread the word about your estate agency.
Use websites such as Crowdfire to find and follow potential clients in bulk by searching for property-related accounts or you could even follow your competitor’s followers. If you bulk follows, make sure you bulk unfollow any account that does not follow you back, depending on who they are.
If you follow the right accounts and mention the right people, you will see likes, shares and comments in return which will generate greater brand interest.
If your agency has not been using social media to its full potential you are not alone. A huge amount of agents seem to struggle to see the potential within social media marketing however, I’m afraid you’re missing out on a huge audience that is the top lead generating channel for other estate agents.
One of the main money-makers and lead-generators for estate agents is paid social media. Creating various styles of adverts that display properties with crystal clear imagery and persuasive text to intrigue users into entering their website and enquiring for more information.
Social Media Marketing for estate agents has become almost a necessity. However to make the most of your budget and time you’re going to have to create a strategy that works for your business. A mixture of organic scheduled posts and product ads can lead to a fully comprehensive strategy that can achieve great results.
Social Media Strategy
You may be excited to get your social media accounts set up and posting but before you hit that publish button you must complete some research into what strategy you’re going to use. There is no defined pathway you MUST use, every business is different and has different USPs that can be honed in upon. But first, you can think about what your goals are? How can social media help achieve those goals? Increasing your brand awareness or increasing leads for your agency through social media is a tangible goal that can be tracked and analyzed.
Planning/Publishing
With 3 billion people using social media every day you need to give your audience the best chance of finding your agency. You will want to plan your content ahead of time instead of creating and publishing content spontaneously. Also, to ensure that you are maximizing your reach on social media, you need to publish great content that your audience likes, at the right timing and frequency. If publishing your posts organically is not really your thing, there are various social media scheduling tools that you can use to plan and publish your content ahead of time.
Advertising
Social media ads allow you to reach a wider, targeted audience. Organic posts keep your accounts ticking over with content but to make a real impact and generate leads and enquiries some sort of budget is required. One fantastic thing about social media marketing is the cost of running ads can start at a small budget you feel comfortable with. Just because all major social media platforms offer ads doesn’t mean you need to take them up on the opportunity to use them.
Facebook Ads for Real Estate – Facebook offers so much and in our opinion it is the best platform for real estate social media. You can take advantage of image ads, video ads, polls, carousel ads, dynamic ads and more. The list really is long!
The type of advert that you should focus on for your estate agency is Dynamic Ads. Dynamic ads allow you to promote targeted products to the customers most likely to be interested in them. This allows you to remarket to people who have viewed a specific property on your website, reminding them of what they were viewing earlier, keeping your brand and the property you’re selling in their head and at the front of your mind.
Instagram Ads for Real Estate – In our opinion, the second-best option for advertising your agency would be Instagram. Also offering a range of advert types including stories ads, photo ads, carousel ads and more the Facebook-owned platform can yield great results. You can bring the property to life with real estate video ads and also retarget to specific audiences.
Both of the above focus upon remarketing which we find incredibly useful, why? The people who are seeing your ads have already visited your website and showed intent. A huge number of people feel like the internet is following them when they see adverts for things they were looking at a few days ago, but that is just simple remarketing. It doesn’t have to be creepy if it’s done right. If you’re genuine and strategic in tone, you can actually be doing your audience a service by reminding them of your brand presence.
To remarket your ads for your website you must install a Facebook pixel on your website, this tracks all the users who are entering your website and allows for this remarketing to take place. The Facebook pixel provides important information you can use to create better Facebook ads, and better target your ads. Facebook tracking pixel data helps ensure your ads are seen by the people who are most likely to take your desired action.
Analytics
When it comes to organic posts, the engagement and views are critical and they vary a lot. If you create interesting, humorous and relevant content for your social media accounts you will receive likes and other forms of engagement.
If you see the reactions and followers increase, this is a clear indicator that your brand’s popularity is expanding.
For paid campaigns, you need to be able to see if the time, effort and money you’re putting into your campaigns are paying off. How can you track the performance of your campaigns?
These are just two of the tools that will help you track your paid advertising performance. Knowing what demographics are clicking and converting on your ads the most could give you the information you need to tailor your ads and make them even more beneficial than they already were.
Facebook Ads allows you to get the information you need to manage your campaigns and create recurring emailed reports. You can also create custom reports from scratch, as well as use breakdowns, filters, sorting and other advanced functions to customize your reports.
For example, say you wanted to get a weekly report about how your ads are performing with certain groups of people. You would use Ads Reporting to customize what audiences and ad metrics you would like to see in the report.
So in conclusion if your estate agency gets its marketing strategy correct, social media can become the top-performing channel for generating leads and selling property. Focussing on your brand message for organic posting, sharing interesting content whether it be video content, blog content or something more extravagant like a Facebook live home tour. Paid campaigns must be dynamic with the ability to remarket to users who have shown interest via the Google pixel. Also your agency must be able to gain data via analytical tools in order to make informed decisions upon which style of adverts are working and which others could be improved.
By Ben Spowart