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Social Media Can Be a Strategic Weapon in Real Estate Marketing
Real estate marketers should embrace social media as a strategic tool for brand positioning, reputation management, and market intelligence.
Is your business cheating itself out of a major marketing advantage? It’s all too common for companies in the real estate industry to be stuck in traditional marketing methods that don’t reflect how modern buyers and tenants are searching for properties: online.
The real estate industry is built on relationships, partnerships, cooperation, networks, and communication. Being social is a key part of forging a successful real estate marketing strategy. It’s time for the industry to embrace the tools that social media platforms offer.
In addition to starting their searches online, buyers and tenants often write reviews about properties and agents online on social media sites and user-review sites like Yelp. Increasingly, your prospects will evaluate you based on what they read on sites like this.
So what can you do to leverage these resources? Real estate marketers can meet buyers and tenants where they are by using social media as a tool for brand awareness, lead generation, reputation management, and market intelligence.
4 ways to use social media as a strategic weapon in real estate marketing
Here are four ways you can make social media a strategic weapon for your business or property.
1) Distribute content and communicate
Social media is a natural way to communicate news and updates with your followers. Distribute your content as well as third-party curated content to share information with them. You’ll establish your brand as a valuable resource and enhance your property’s position within the marketplace by doing so.
2) Gain market intelligence
Potential buyers and tenants are online, sharing news and information with friends, colleagues, and — it turns out — you! So are your competitors, brokers, potential business partners, and important people in the community that have influence over various aspects affecting your property. There’s lots of valuable information that you can mine from social media. Use it to your advantage.
3) Control the conversation
Something people are talking about online? You and your property. Be an active participant in that conversation as a means to facilitate reputation management and to promote good customer service.
4) Listen and respond
Relatedly, taking the extra step of reading and responding to comments, posts, and reviews is what really makes social media such a valuable tool for the real estate industry. This way, you engender lasting and meaningful relationships with your buyers or tenants — and there’s no better way to build your brand and grow business than that.
Related posts:
- This Is How Often Real Estate Companies Should Post on Social Media
- When Traditional Real Estate Marketing Methods Stop Working, Try Digital Marketing
- 5 Tips for Building a Successful Real Estate Social Media Marketing Program
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Facebook Lead Ads: Why Your Property Should Use Them
Facebook Lead Ads allow prospects to leave their contact information without ever leaving Facebook or Instagram, increasing the chances of conversion.
On pace to hit 2 billion users this year, Facebook obviously has reach. Yet only 45% of B2C marketers feel that their Facebook marketing efforts are working. So why is Facebook advertising not showing a greater ROI for your business?
Well, what kind of ads are you running? Are you using lead ads? If not, that’s probably one of the reasons.
How Facebook Lead Ads work
Facebook lead ads allow you to run lead-generation campaigns on Facebook and Instagram. This kind of social advertising shows an ad for your property within the newsfeeds of potential buyers and renters. Just set the parameters (e.g. demographics, location, etc.) for your target audience, and the network’s algorithm will identify who sees the ad based on information they’ve provided in their profiles.
But here’s the real kicker: Unlike other ad types, lead ads include a contact form that lets prospects show their interest by filling out the form with their details without ever leaving Facebook (or Instagram).
Need more convincing? Here at Fronetics Real Estate, we find Facebook Lead Ads one of the most effective for generating leads. Because they streamline the process through which prospects sign up to learn more about your property, it’s more likely they’ll convert to leads. Besides, you save time and money because you don’t have to create extra landing pages to get their contact information.
Lead generation made easy
These days, people expect that everything from shopping to job searching can be done on their handheld devices. Facebook Lead Ads make that true for people wanting to learn more about potential properties.
Here’s how it works: Prospects click on a lead ad, and their contact information automatically populates based on information from their profile. No leaving Facebook to visit the property’s website or taking the time to provide contact information necessary. Lead ads make submitting information as easy as two taps on a phone: one to open the ad, and one to submit the information.
“If you want to iterate through lead forms quickly, Facebook Lead Ads are a great way to collect the information without building new landing pages and creating tons of copy,” says Tony Adams in Visible Factors. “The contact forms appear natively on Facebook and Instagram. You can easily use them to sign people up to newsletters for drip marketing campaigns.”
In a prime success story, news and information site theSkimm wanted to expand its reach and increase its conversion rate, with the ultimate goal of attracting more highly qualified leads and significantly increasing its subscriber pool. After testing a number of different tactics, theSkimm created a series of Facebook Lead Ads. The ads featured the company logo to reinforce its branding and a ‘Subscribe’ link inviting people to sign up on the spot. The result was a 22% increase in lead quality at a cost per acquisition of just $1-2.
Creating and modifying your ads
As buyers continue to turn to their handheld devices for quick, easy information, Facebook lead ads will give your property the opportunity to capture new leads with the click of a button. But just like any form of lead generation, you need to monitor and tweak your Facebook Lead Ads for optimal results.
Through Facebook’s Ads Manager reporting interface, you can obtain reports about cost, impressions, and clicks. As with all marketing tools, consistent refinement is the key to success, particularly in real estate marketing. Lead ads can easily be fine-tuned to cultivate a larger target audience.
Facebook Lead Ads provide real estate businesses an opportunity to gain leads and a larger reach. If you haven’t tried this yet, we highly recommend switching over some of your social advertising budget.
Related posts:
- 6 Social Media Don’ts for Property Management Companies
- Start Your Property’s Social Media Program in 6 Steps
- Social Media Can Be a Strategic Weapon in Real Estate Marketing
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This is How Often Real Estate Companies Should Post on Social Media
Remember these best practices when deciding how often your company or property is going to post on each of these social media platforms.
Creating engaging, relevant content in a strategic and consistent manner raises brand awareness for your property and drives sales. But as BuzzFeed’s Jonathan Perelman said, “Content is king, but distribution is queen and she wears the pants.”
It’s not enough to just create interesting and pertinent content; you have to put it out there to reach your target buyer or tenant. Moreover, the content needs to be delivered consistently over time, at the right time, and in the right place.
With social media networks changing daily, it’s hard to keep up with where to distribute content, much less how often. Countless studies have attempted to solve the social-media-frequency equation. And while audiences vary across price points and regions, best practices give us some general guidelines.
Here’s our assessment of social media posting frequency.
How often to post on social media
Twitter: 40 per day*
*Big caveat here: 40 tweets per day is what we’ve found works for us and most of our clients. Let me explain.
Socialbakers suggests that posting to Twitter three times per day is the ideal frequency for brands. Buffer posts to Twitter 14 times per day. Fronetics, our supply chain brand, happens to tweet 40 times per day. So recently, after seeing the Socialbakers and Buffer stats, we conducted a month-long experiment to see how dropping our posting frequency closer to their benchmarks would affect our engagement.
As we’ve written about before, it wasn’t pretty. We confirmed that our engagement, web traffic, lead generation, and other key performance indicators are at optimal levels when we tweet 40 times per day.
Your company, or your marketing partner, should conduct due diligence and determine what the right frequency is for your business. For Fronetics Real Estate, we’re currently tweeting 6-10 times a day, working up to more as we are able. The strategic growth of your social media program is also an important element to consider when determining a posting frequency that’s best for your company or property.
Facebook: 1 per day
Most companies find that posting 1 time per day is their sweet spot for most social media networks. Facebook is no exception: The network’s algorithm values quality over quantity, so the more engaged your followers are with your content, the more likely they are to see your posts. This also means that posting content that does not facilitate engagement can actually decrease the likelihood that followers will see your posts.
One sure way to encourage disengagement is by overwhelming your audience. We all have that friend or company we follow that posts too much — don’t be like that person.
Remember that the lifespan of a Facebook post (about 5 hours) is significantly longer than that of a tweet. So you don’t need to provide a constant stream of content to get your audience’s attention. Your focus should be distributing the most relevant, interesting content you can, at a time when most of your audience will be on Facebook.
Instagram: 1-2 per day
There’s an unwritten rule among Instagramers that a user shouldn’t post more than once per day. We generally agree for the same reason we don’t think brands should post more than once a day to Facebook: Don’t overwhelm your audience because the lifespan of your posts is pretty long. In fact, a Union Metrics study found that many Instagram posts continue to receive engagement for days — even weeks — after posting.
Most brands end up posting 11-20 posts per month. If you focus on compelling images with strategic messages, that’s probably a good benchmark to stick with. It’s important to note, however, that another Union Metrics study suggests posting consistency is more important than frequency. Again, taking the time to test the Instagram posting frequency that works best for your business is a worthwhile endeavor.
LinkedIn: 1 per workday or less
A more formal and technical social media network, LinkedIn is a platform for business-related content. But users also seek information about potential investments and market information — and that is where your opportunity lies.
Consider posting on LinkedIn only during the workweek, or even less. To provide the most value for your LinkedIn followers, content should be less promotional and more heavily focused on market trends and insights. Followers will come to consider your company or property as a go-to resource about the real estate market, local amenities and attractions, and investment opportunities.
At the end of the day, optimal posting frequency for your company or property rests heavily on the audience you want to reach. Experimenting with different social media networks and posting frequencies will give you greater insight into your ideal distribution approach. With these best practices as a guide, let your own analysis be your guide. Maintaining a dynamic and fluid posting strategy will ensure that your social efforts drive followers to action, rather than drive them away.
Related posts:
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When Traditional Real Estate Marketing Methods Stop Working, Try Digital Marketing
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6 Signs It’s Time to Consider Outsourcing Your Real Estate Marketing
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5 Tips for Building a Successful Real Estate Social Media Marketing Program
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Paid Digital Advertising: A Beginner’s Guide for Real Estate Marketers
Paid digital advertising can help accelerate your content marketing efforts so that your content gets in front of prospective buyers and renters faster than would happen organically.
We are strong believers in content marketing. Build it, and they will come — or, in content-marketing speak, publish quality content, and buyers will come to you. But, content marketing takes time to bear fruit. There’s not much you can do about that.
Except paid digital advertising.
By investing in paid digital advertising, you can boost the reach of your posts, display ads, and videos. Pair quality content with a comprehensive digital advertising strategy, and you will be in a position to drive more traffic, create more brand visibility, and sell or lease more properties.
Your peers understand this. Within the first quarter of 2017, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and Pinterest saw a 61.5% increase in paid media spend. And that’s only going to increase through 2018.
So where do you start? Here are three places to get started in using paid digital advertising to help market your property.
3 paid digital advertising platforms
1) Display ads
Display ads are the paid advertisements that appear in front of users on website pages in the form of graphics. Unlike text-based ads, display advertising relies on elements such as images, audio, and video to communicate an advertising message. Display ads are commonly referred to as banner ads, but they don’t always take banner form. They can come in all shapes and sizes, and can appear anywhere on a webpage.
Benefits: Because digital ads are visual, they can be customized with your logo, message, images of properties, or an offer to help increase brand awareness. You have the ability to use graphics, video, and audio to really stand out and highlight your properties. Display ads also allow users the ability to target a specific audience. You control which sites they appear on, which geographic area they appear in, and which demographic or niche market they appear to — all valuable tools for the real estate marketer.
2) Sponsored social media posts
There are sponsored posts plus other ad opportunities like Facebook like campaigns, website click ads, and lead ads.
Social media is a natural place to begin if you’re looking to get into paid digital advertising, particularly for the real estate industry. A good starting point is Facebook. The social media giant’s social ad revenue was more than $9.16 billion in Q2 2017 alone. And it doesn’t stop there. Twitter brought in $548 million in social media advertising revenue in the same period, and Snapchat is expected to reach over $895.5 million in ad revenue in 2017.
More specifically, three of the most useful types of sponsored social media posts for real estate marketing are:
- Facebook Like Campaigns: These campaigns are aimed directly at increasing the number of likes for a Facebook page, targeting people who might be interested in your brand and the posts you share on Facebook.
- Facebook Website Click Ads: These are ads that point people on Facebook to your website, or even the listings for specific properties.
- Facebook Lead Ads: These ads allow users to request information, estimates, or newsletters without leaving Facebook. Requiring fewer steps of prospective leads increases conversion rates.
Benefits: Running paid social ads allows you to reach a large audience at a low cost. You pay based on the type of ad you’re running. For example, if you’re looking to drive brand awareness, you’ll incur a CPM (Cost Per 1,000 Impressions). And not only are the ads relatively inexpensive to run, they’re not expensive to create. You get all of this plus the ability to target your specific audience, reaching people that are interested in learning about the properties you have to offer.
3) Google AdWords
Google AdWords places your website as one of the top results on a search engine results page (SERP) when a user searches for certain keywords of your choice. When a user clicks the AdWords link or calls your business using that link, you incur a charge (pay-per-click). Otherwise, impressions are free.
Google’s most recent update involves changes to the so-called “3-pack,” or the listing of three related local businesses on a search results page. Many users rely on the 3-pack to discover businesses in their area that offer the products and services they are seeking. This is particularly helpful for users searching for local real estate. And real estate copanies get the benefit of many additional leads and investors when they appear in the 3-pack.
Benefits: The biggest benefit of Google AdWords is its speed. You appear in a top spot in a user’s search results, meaning you are one of the first things a user sees when searching for a specific location or property keyword. That’s another good point: Google AdWords allows you to focus on people who are searching for what you have to offer, so you don’t pay for a bunch of wasted impressions — particularly valuable in real estate marketing, where geography is key. AdWords also gives you real-time reports to track your ad’s success. A dashboard shows information related to each campaign, such as the ads clicked, keywords entered by website visitors, cost of clicks and much more.
Related posts:
- How Pay-Per-Click Helped This Property Get 54 Leads
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Learn How Content Marketing Increased Real Estate Sales by 37% in 90 Days
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Using Content Marketing to Market and Sell Luxury Real Estate
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Top 10 Real Estate Marketing Posts 2017
Here are Fronetics Real Estate’s most-viewed real estate marketing posts from the last year.
2017 was an exciting year for Fronetics Real Estate. We officially launched our brand, and website, in September. But despite our relatively recent kickoff, FRE is an entity born out of a longstanding expertise in real estate marketing. We have been working with residential and commercial real estate clients for many years under our parent brand, Fronetics.
It is that expertise that we aim to provide for the readers of the Fronetics Real Estate blog. This year, the following have been our most-viewed posts.
Top 10 real estate marketing posts
1) Using Content Marketing to Market and Sell Luxury Real Estate
In real estate sales, you want people to find your properties, like what they see, and ultimately be moved to purchase. In other words, you want to attract visitors, convert visitors to leads, and convert leads to deals. Innovative luxury real estate firms are finding ways to leverage digital tools to guide more buyers down that path to purchase. Read more
2) This Is How Often Real Estate Companies Should Post on Social Media
With social media networks changing daily, it’s hard to keep up with where to distribute content, much less how often. Countless studies have attempted to solve the social-media-frequency equation. And while audiences vary across price points and regions, best practices give us some general guidelines. Here’s our assessment of social media posting frequency. Read more
3) The Metrics You Should Be Measuring in Real Estate Marketing (Hint: Not Vanity Metrics)
Whether renting a new property or launching a social media campaign, we look for instantaneous numbers that will affirm we made the right choices. But here’s the problem: not all metrics are created equal. So-called vanity metrics are measurements that have no bearing on your bottom line but can give you an inflated sense of success. Read more
4) Learn How Content Marketing Increased Real Estate Sales by 37% in 90 Days
Consider this case study of a leading real estate marketing firm who chose to use digital and content marketing to shake up their traditional marketing approach. After just three months of beginning a digital and content marketing program, the firm recognized significant gains in web traffic, social media engagement, and brand exposure. Read more
5) This Is the First Thing You Should Do in Real Estate Marketing
Content marketing is one of the most effective ways to elevate your property’s reputation in the market, reach prospective buyers or tenants, and increase occupancy. Yet while many real estate marketers are using content marketing, not all feel their efforts are successful. Why do so many organizations feel they are failing? Simply put, they do not have a documented strategy in place. Read more
6) Real Estate Firm Grows Sales by 300% through Content Marketing
this case study about a prominent real estate marketing firm in one of the most competitive markets in the U.S. When traditional tactics weren’t bringing in the kind of business needed to sell 1,500 new-construction homes in a new planned community, the firm turned to a new content marketing program to increase web traffic and build brand awareness. Read more
7) Social Media Can Be a Strategic Weapon in Real Estate Marketing
The real estate industry is built on relationships, partnerships, cooperation, networks, and communication. Being social is a key part of forging a successful real estate marketing strategy. It’s time for the industry to embrace the tools that social media platforms offer. Read more
8) Paid Digital Advertising: A Beginner’s Guide for Real Estate Marketers
By investing in paid digital advertising, you can boost the reach of your posts, display ads, and videos. Pair quality content with a comprehensive digital advertising strategy, and you will be in a position to drive more traffic, create more brand visibility, and sell or lease more properties. Read more
9) 6 Signs It’s Time to Consider Outsourcing Your Real Estate Marketing
Real estate companies are increasingly open to outsourcing real estate management because it allows them to focus on their core competencies while improving effectiveness. So why not apply the same rationale to bolster your marketing efforts? Don’t be afraid to look outside the box for the marketing tools you need to succeed. Read more
10) 5 Tips for Building a Successful Real Estate Social Media Marketing Program
Social media is an excellent tool for real estate marketers to communicate with residents/tenants, build brand awareness, gain market intelligence, and even identify prospective tenants or buyers. Particularly if the latter is your focus, it’s easy to celebrate every follower you earn as a marketing success. But it’s important to remember that a social media follower doesn’t necessarily equal a buyer/tenant. After all, participating in social media is not only about earning a large following; it’s about building relationships with those people. Read more
Runner-up posts:
- 4 Tools for Determining the Best Time to Post on Social Media for Your Property
- Start Your Property’s Social Media Program in Six Steps
- These are the Busiest Day of the Year for Real Estate Searches
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