Just Stop! 4 Facebook Marketing Tactics Real Estate Agents Should Abandon Now
Spamming Pages & Groups with Irrelevant Marketing Material
Every savvy real estate agent knows that online communities offer a wealth of exposure & lead generation opportunity.
When it comes to choosing the best place to pitch on Facebook we have three words for you: location, location, location!
Got a property in the Eastern suburbs that you’re desperate to shift? Don’t just randomly post it on every real estate page and group you can find on Facebook.
First, find a page/group specifically created for buying and renting in the physical location you’re working in. Even if that page/group only has 300 followers, it’s still going to have an audience that’s a lot more qualified than the audience of a general national (or, even worse, international) real estate group.
Second, check the advertising policy of the page/group & respect that “no advertisements” means no advertisements! Don’t get yourself kicked out of a great online community because you flaunt the rules.
Third, optimise your posts. This means you should post at the time and day your target audience is most likely to be online and make sure that the important aspects of your post show up on mobile view. Always add a picture, and don’t forget to include a call to action that has your contact details.
Fourth, adjust your message based on the level of response you get. Social media marketing is a process of refinement. Test out changing your imagery, the tone of your wording and other elements until you find the combination that sticks.
No matter what you’re trying to promote, if you use these four steps in your group & page marketing you’ll be marketing much more effectively and with less time and effort!
Trying to Out-Post Your Competition
Online marketing is not a “who can post the most wins” kind of game. In fact, if you’re consistently writing posts that generate little to no engagement with your audience, you’re shooting yourself in the foot – in fact, you’d probably be better off not posting anything at all.
Why is over-posting so bad? Because Facebook knows when you’re not popular and it actively punishes boring pages.
So, instead of making 14 posts a week that nobody is going to read, focus your time and energy on making three posts a week that are going to generate engagement.
The more engagement you have, the more credible you look to Facebook, and the more people it will show your posts to in the future.
Attempting to Sell Houses on Your News Feed
There are so many reasons not to use your personal news feed to push your career agenda. But for the sake of brevity, we’ll narrow it down to three:
- Only 2% of your friends actually see your posts. Yes, that’s right – just 2%! So, even if you have 5000 friends, you’re not going to be reaching an audience greater than 100 people.
- Your Facebook friends are not a qualified audience. Chances are, only a few of them are going to be interested in buying and selling and even fewer are going to be interested in the area/price range you’re pitching.
- Nobody cares. Your friends are your friends, not your customers. And every time someone hits “hide this post” or “show me fewer posts like this” on one of your Facebook posts, Facebook takes note of the fact that you’re annoying people. Once it knows you’re an annoyer, it’s going to show fewer people your posts.
Only Taking & Not Contributing
Often real estate agents can get so caught up in the need to promote what they have to offer as business people that they forget the other things they have to offer on a personal level.
Australians need real estate advice. Renters, landlords, buyers, sellers -they all have questions that you can answer. If you want to make a name for yourself online, start spending time every day in both general real estate advice groups and local community groups providing answers to real estate questions.
This tactic is called “comment marketing” and it’s one of the best ways to build relationships and make a positive name for yourself.
It’s free, it only takes a couple of minutes every day to get involved, and it allows you to provide real value – something that an industry so drowned in marketing materials tends to forget about.
If you’re a real estate agent that’s keen to up-skill, or you’re curious about training to become an agent, take a look at Validum’s courses. Or, call (07) 3193 5270 and talk to one of our highly experienced trainers now.
