Every day, real estate agents and businesses use Facebook to foster business relationships with peers and connect with prospective home buyers. Maintaining these relationships, however, is quite a handful.
While Facebook has become more saturated with content, there are still a plethora of methods to make your real estate Facebook posts stand out. Construct the perfect pos, target the right audience and garner more interest, leads, and increase engagement—all through Facebook marketing for real estate.
Create a Facebook page
If you are looking to build an audience and engage them through this mammoth platform, the first step is to set up a Facebook Page. Using your personal Facebook account, you can easily set up a page. Never use your personal Facebook account for real estate. It is prudent to keep the two profiles separate, since you would want to keep the tone professional and the content tailored to your audiences specifically. Not to mention, why not leverage the bevy of marketing tools that Facebook pages give you. Once your Facebook page has been set up, it is time to start posting. Here are a few tips to get you started.
Posting Ideas:
Include cool facts about your state, city, especially neighborhood
Realtors often have very localized audiences, and there is nothing that people love to read about more than what’s happening right under their noses, in their neighborhood. Stay attuned and keep putting up exciting developments in different neighborhoods. Catch interesting tidbits from the local news channels, keep an eye on social media updates, or seek out people who can give you the juice on different localities. Even better, your local museum can inevitably help you dig up old skeletons in some neighborhood, resulting in unique content that people to love to read about.
Huntington Beach Homes & Happenings posted about a local attempt to break a world record for the most people riding a surfboard at once.
Look at this real estate social media post in Kansas City, packing bucketful of information about KC:
For a real estate social media news feed to truly make a mark, it’s focus must be hyperlocal, and it should be a repository of informative posts or articles for prospective homebuyers or current residents. Try to inform the broader community with homebuying and selling tips, local calendar links, blogs, or curated articles.
Use Images when you Update
Images are the most interesting and riveting content type on Facebook. The more comments, shares, and likes you get on your posts, the more they have a chance of being viewed in the News Feed by the friends of your followers, their friends in turn, and so on. Facebook has new capabilities for posting 360-degree photos. These work much better than wide-angle shots when it comes to getting the full impact of a room. Perhaps there is a wide-open floor plan in a Toronto condo for sale or a balcony with an excellent view, that you can’t do justice to with a normal picture.
Video tours of all listing
When it comes to houses, people need to see rather than hear about that luxe “2 bed Toronto loft for sale that everybody is going on about. Using listing videos to highlight properties for sale/rent helps prospects see exactly what is on the plate. This is a great idea to motivate prospects to wish to connect with you schedule a meeting.
Neighborhood Community Videos
Why not make videos that elucidate on the community and neighbor ambiance in the periphery of the homes you sell. In addition to liking the house, your prospects need to know whether they are moving into a safe and friendly area, with excellent parks, schools, access to public transport and surrounding areas. In your videos, be sure to cover other homes, shopping areas, restaurants, development, businesses, and other facilities in proximity, so that your prospects can envisage themselves living in that community and get a feel for it.
Cover image
Keep updating your page’s cover image to add value. Who knew that you could even add a 360-degree image or video as your cover photo. Since it is the part of the page that visitors would see first, why not make a spectacle of it. For instance, Focus Real Estate has added a dedicated campaign hashtag (#focuseffect) to their cover image. This helps you track your real estate social media marketing efforts.
Post about Events in your Neighborhood
Highlight your city culture. Post about all the local events in your town, show outsiders the brighter side of your town or city, motivate people to seek residence in a particular neighborhood. If you’re going to a neighborly event, why not share it with their fans by going live, or better yet, invite them to join you. Ask questions as well to spark engagement.
Polygon Homes has leveraged this tactic on their Facebook Page. They engage with their market by flaunting the amazing events they could go to if they lived in their city. They always end discussion with a question to get more comments and create a friendly tone.
Offer Helpful Advice
Why not offer helpful advice pertaining to how someone could stage her home for sale or renovate a new home, in order to gain likes and comments. For instance, Home Star Staging posted this tidbit about how to place furniture around a fireplace.
Posts that Celebrate your Fans
If you want your clients to know how much you care about them, your Facebook page is the way to go. See how Realtors Marni and Shannon eagerly welcome new homeowners on possession day. While this post is subtle, it is nevertheless visually appealing. This shows prospective homebuyers that you genuinely care and follow up, and not just a faceless organization that just wants to milk their purses dry.
Engage with Contests
Contests and Sweepstakes boost engagement on your page, and let you have fun with your clients and prospects. In addition to carving deeper relationships with your clients, such contests can be used to collect valuable data, like the likes and dislikes of your prospects or which area they reside in. Not to mention, creating contests and following up proactively lets you promote yourself as a realtor who listens. On the side, contest can be to market your listings, too! For example, run a Vote Contest to ask your Fans to confide in you which photo they liked the best from your latest listing. This is killing two birds with one stone. One the one hand you are engaging with your prospects against a prize, on the other, you get them to view your listing.
Alternatively, you can also run a photo contest, perhaps to get more photos of your neighborhood (and not having to hire a photographer), follow up with clients who’ve recently renovated, or get more images of a new listing.
Showcase Unique Features
While your properties might not have an inspiring wine cellar to die for, you might have certain unique features to boast that could set your listing apart from others. Highlighting that custom pizza oven, rolling hills of acreage, or that gorgeous lap pool in your real estate Facebook posts might get you more engagement that you could want.
In addition, why not Post Photos of Eye-catching, unique, and fancy Homes in your listings. These can also arouse interest and foster comments and likes. See how this real estate business has posted pictures of this stunning home surrounded by gorgeous scenery.
Create a Facebook Group & Participate in Local Groups
Facebook Groups can now be linked to Facebook pages, which lets you offer even better personalized services to your clients. Most relators see Facebook Groups as a mean to circumnavigate the Facebook algorithm. Your group would bring a lot of people with the same intent together in a monitored environment, where clients would be able to post in the Group and help each other through the selling or buying process. This reveals the other side of Facebook Groups: an excellent networking opportunity.
See how Mid-America Association uses regional Groups to post helpful advice and connect professionals in the area.
Go Live at a Property
In the world of photo editing, buyers have become wary of what’s real and what’s edited. Facebook live for business is an amazing way for businesses to showcase unedited, behind-the-scenes look of a property. Go live at a property and promote your video before the listing goes up, like giving an inside scoop to your customers. These videos greatly engage your audience and are often highly ranked in Facebook feeds. Incorporating a Q&A session in your live videos make potential buyers feel like they are personally viewing the property without ever setting foot inside.
Here’s what two Realtors John & Melissa Steele, have to say about Live videos,
“Our current favorite platform is Instagram, Stories, Instagram TV and, of course, Facebook. We use these tools to offer a behind-the-scenes look into our day-to-day as real estate agents, to share our personality and love of San Diego, and also to provide information to those interested in real estate. We frequently tour properties that we view in the field on Instagram and get great feedback and interaction from followers. We also have a regular series called “Fixer Friday,” where we tour homes that need renovations.”
Add Reviews & Services
When it comes to real estate, referrals work best. Enable both services and reviews on your Facebook page. To make it easier for clients to communicate with you, allow them to message for questions or make an appointment with you on your Facebook page.
Bower Real Estate does an excellent job of offering information about their services, while leaving an area for client testimonials.
You can even ask for referrals, like this startup has done.
Facebook Ad: “Buying A House”
Facebook has a very specific interest category for potential buyers, known as “Buying a house”. Isn’t it amazing? The intent of a customer falling in this category has a much higher chance of meeting the requirements of a real estate agent. Facebook can find you these consumers from its rich behavioral data sets, including both offline and online data about such customers.
Laser Targeted Facebook Segmentation
Let’s say you are a realtor in San Diego, specializing in dealing with upper middle-income neighborhoods in specific areas that see more than $100,000 per year in household incomes. By pulling the zip codes in those areas on Facebook, you would inevitably come up with thousands of people that you can target on Facebook. But when you add the filter of “Buying A House”, Facebook actually narrows that number down to potential buyers with active intent.
Here’s how it looks in the Facebook’s ad platform:
Whether you are looking for buyers or sellers, Facebook ads for real estate let you layer the targeting and focus more on who your ideal customer is, who is the most likely to respond to you. However, you want to be careful not to narrow your audience too much, lest it becomes not worth the effort invested.
Announce your Achievements
Facebooks isn’t somewhere you exhibit well-meaning modesty. In your online presence, people will only know what you tell them, so you want to be sure your achievements are showcased. We are not telling you to appear self-involved. it’s a wonderful idea to highlight your accomplishments and awards in your real estate Facebook posts.
See, how highlighted in this post, Sophie Ravet and Mike Lubin’s penthouse listing for featured in New York Times. Definitely something to brag about.