Selling real estate with social media is a great opportunity for real estate professionals. When you’re in real estate, you’ll use just about any tool you can in order to get more homes in front of more customers and more people showing interest in purchasing or renting a property. Yet, many real estate professionals have been slow to implement social media strategies in their businesses.
For those who are in the group of real estate professionals that are hesitant about social media’s ability to help you perform your job better, these 3 reasons why social media platforms are useful for real estate agents should put some if not all of your concerns to bed.
#1 You can reach a lot of people
When I say a lot, I mean a lot. For just $10 boosting your post on social media, you can reach over 10,000 new people, depending on your location and targeting settings. This is quite an affordable messaging channel.
This reason is often re-butted with “well all my listings are on domain.com.au and realestate.com.au so I’m pretty sure that people are seeing my listings”. This is true. 100%. People are seeing your listings. However, in order to do this people needed to decide to open up realestate.com.au or domain.com.au on their phone or computer and browse the listings, of which some of your properties may have come up. The problem is that people don’t look through EVERY property. They use search filters to refine the properties they are looking at to match what they think they are after – but that doesn’t mean a listing you have isn’t exactly what they are looking for.
The benefit of social media platforms is that you can PUSH these messages across to your audience. They are on social media looking for something to inspire, distract or entertain them, and your property showing up in their newsfeed may do exactly that.
#2 People use social media for due diligence
You may have a fantastic network of customers, partners and more that have been very good in terms of new business for you. However there are always those people within that network who won’t blindly follow a referral, or people who haven’t been referred to you, who will check out your website and social media to assess your ability to sell their home.
Seeing that you are using social media to promote properties (and seeing engagement on these posts), can show these prospective clients that you know what you are doing in the digital arena.
Plus, continuously posting on social media allows for subtle extensions of your network through brand awareness, and increasing the people who can say that they have ‘heard of you’, and perhaps more likely to act on a referral given by your network.
Finally, presenting not just your properties but your brand professionally will help your audience understand who you are and how you carry yourself/your brand in the real world.
#3 You can play the long game
Social media requires consistent, high quality and interesting content for your users. As a result, you are allowing people to take their time to make a decision. Unlike many other businesses which can offer sales prices, real estate agents are in the services game which is where it can be a bit trickier to pull such a marketing manoeuvre (and most likely to leave you looking cheap and untrustworthy). Your prospective clientele may take 6 – 24 months to make a decision to sell their property, so social media is the perfect communication form to get your brand on the shopping list for a future sale.
Wanting to know how you can make the most of social media for your real estate business? Check out this article we wrote, giving you our top tips for social media!