Facebook and Social Media Update in Real Estate
Are you looking to market better on Facebook? We all know Facebook advertising is a great marketing tool, but how to do it and what it is?
On this article, we will discuss important things and update about Facebook. We will also discuss how to best position any company on social media, no matter if you're big or small.
Facebook and Social Media Advertising
For starters, we've never seen an advertising medium in the history of advertising that is more complex since social media. If you look at any of the previous advertising mediums like TV, radio, print and how commercials on each of those mediums have evolved over the past 50 years. It's actually pretty stagnant.
TV commercials are still about 30 seconds with the only thing changing being FTC regulations on what can and cannot be shown. The print is pretty much the same thing. If you look at how they have evolved in just the past 5 or 10 years, they're actually all declining significantly because social media is capturing those budgets. We can see more and more of the percentage leaving TV, leaving radio and going into social media.
Facebook is a social networking service founded by Mark Zuckerberg, it was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and gradually most universities in the United States and Canada, corporations. By September 2006, it was expanded to everyone with a valid email address along with an age requirement of being 13 and older.
In 2011, Facebook still have large reach for brands and companies on Newsfeed and the government had not placed any rules on social media. We can just go to Google and grab random pictures and post them on brand pages. There were no laws or FTC regulations. You could post literally pictures of the president and the pope, whoever you wanted and no one can legally say anything otherwise.
Today, it's a completely different story. The FTC has started regulating social media posts heavily for brands. In 2012, Facebook has acquired Instagram. Now, it's the 2nd most popular social media platform after Facebook.
As millennial have grown into the strongest purchasing power demo online, if a company doesn't have a social media presence, they're probably not doing anything right.
How can real estate brand capture new leads in today’s technologically advanced society?
According to a recent study by Mediakix, the average person spends 35 minutes per day on Facebook. As the realtor, it gives you ample opportunity to get in front of the right people with your killer Facebook ads.
Facebook is now a paid to play platform, which a lot of people don't realize. The only way to get your voice across on Facebook is with paid advertising. Also, the average user who gets the ad only spends 1.3 seconds per post when scrolling.
Scrolling habits on Facebook or Instagram is 1.3 seconds. So, that's how much time a brand or a company or a realtor has to capture someone’s attention. You have to be able to capture someone within a blink of an eye or you just wasted your budget.
In the past 3 years, Dr. Pepper and with Metro PCS has a few organic posts. If you look at Coke or Nike, they probably have a few posts up. But you can instantly tell which ones have pay behind them and which ones do not, because even with 10 to 20 million fans, if they are putting up an organic post, if maybe has 5,000 impressions or 10,000 impressions, Facebook is forcing brands to pay money to be on their site.
As a realtor, how do you compete with companies that are spending thousands of dollars a day?
One of the biggest advantages of Facebook advertising is the ability to target a highly specific audience or known as a custom audience. Custom Audiences are built from customer data you already have or can easily get—making it easy to reconnect with the people who have already shown interest in your brand. You can show ads that remind them of products they have visited on your site.
You go on Google or Amazon and search for a new pair of socks and the next time you hop on Facebook that exact pair shows up. It's not magical.
These websites tell Facebook, “hey someone just searched for a sock on our website, can we put up an ad on your page?” For that exact thing, they're like, "sure."
It's actually brand connecting with Facebook, telling their ad platform what you searched for on the site. Facebook allows them to place ads for things you already searched for.
Now, real estate may be a little different but you can definitely use Facebook targeting capabilities in the same fashion. You can also put up a simple ad target and probably get 10,000-20,000 impressions. It will cost a little more in the long run, but you're going to get people that are way more into with what you're trying to sell. You can target exactly what you're looking for.
For real estate, most likely you will use lead generation ad, but you can really do a whole variety of target objectives.
Facebook marketing is a cost-effective way to get more leads. To get results, you need to know how to get the most out of your social media ad budget by targeting or re-targeting custom audiences.
What are Facebook impressions?
The impression is when someone does impressions or reach on Facebook, that's how many eyes are seeing it. If someone has 10,000 impressions, that means 10,000 people sought at any point. The tricky thing is, Facebook will count it if even a third of the ad was on the page.
So if someone maybe stops scrolling when a third of your ad was seen at the bottom of the page, it's still accounting. But that's why when you get those full views, you really have to count on your content. Because content is king.
How to get more followers on social media?
If I post 10 times a day, why don't I have more than 100 followers?
Honestly, the cheapest kind of marketing is word of mouth. If you're producing great content, you won't have to spend a dime because people will be sharing your content on their channels. When you start creating your content and advertisements, you really need to think about what type of content to put up that is going to engage with people. It needs to be something that's going to be interesting. And if your content is really good, people will follow you. People will share your content with their friends.
The real question is, what type of content are you posting? If your content is engaging and interesting, your followers and audience will build themselves. But don’t pay much attention to followers, what you want to look at is the engagement. It’s much better to have a page with 25,000 followers and 10% engagement than a page with twice as many followers, 50,000 but only 3% engagement.
How to produce good content on Facebook and other social media platform?
Do I need to hire someone to film a 32-second video?
No, because even Steven Spielberg doesn't know what your fans like, only you do. If you provide value to your users, they'll want more. For example, if you create a series of 3 Instagram posts that shows your latest listings, people probably going to keep scrolling.
But if you create a series of 3 Instagram posts that are focused on simple kitchen remodels, like stainless steel appliances or colorful box backsplashes and a rolling island, and tell people if they spend 5k today, it'll increase their home's value by 15k tomorrow. People would probably going to follow your page and hope that you give me more tips and tricks like that down the line.
After that, if you post a listing, they wouldn't be upset and not going to be annoyed because you've already given them value in the past. So, if they take a moment to read your ad, they'll probably get more value in the future.
We always believe in the 80-20 rule; 80% of the time provide content that's interesting, engaging, fun, creative, and inspiring. And then 20% of the time, you can do your hard sell because you gave them 80% of the stuff they want or value. Now, if you're giving the audience stuff that they care about, they don't mind seeing your listing every now and then because you've given them stuff that provides value and not just trying to sell.
You always want to post new content. You really want to be sharing fresh and new stuff, not the same stories that people have heard for years.
Try to find new tips and tricks and new valuable information that you can provide people. Even if it's just following up with the current news in your industry and just sharing that information that's more valuable than just sharing the same old information that you've always had.
As long as you're getting new information or new ideas out to the followers seeing your content, the higher the chance you have people being interested. People would know that every day you'll be bringing them new stuff and not just random things that they don't care about.
If you look at the early to mid-2000s, blogs were the rave. Everybody had a blog, and everybody's reading blogs. Blogs were driving millions of impressions of traffic to their site and people put their ads all over blogs.
But now everybody wants video. People want to watch the Internet, they don't want to read the Internet. People do not want to read the Internet. It's the same reason why people watch a lot more TV than reading books. It's the same thing on the Internet.
When people are looking at YouTube videos online, they might spend 30 to 60 seconds on it. So you really want to try to capture someone quickly but have quality content that valuable that people want to use.
Even if it's just you sitting at a desk, you definitely want to produce good quality. Make sure you have good lighting and make sure it's short. Don't go into 45 minutes or an hour-long video that no one would watch.
You can create a video where you can use that as content on Facebook as an ad or as just regular content. Also, you can start building a library of content on YouTube and share it on any of your social platforms. Use that video as your actual ads on any social platform.
ROI on social media is completely different than most forms of marketing because you really have to think about all the value you're getting out of it.
Once you spend $100,000 on a TV commercial or $5,000 on a radio ad for 30 seconds, that content would never be seen again or never be heard again on that channel. On Facebook, if you grab one person as a follower, you will have them until they unfollow or until they purchase something from you.
Whereas most other forms of advertising you're looking at 10 seconds and people are tuning out or muting the TV or going to get a drink. But when people are watching YouTube videos or looking at social media, they are focused on that and that only.
So when people talk about ROI, it's really an interesting question because you can't say if you go spend $1,000 on Facebook ads, you're going to get 3 houses sold.
ROI is so different in social media because you never know what you're getting out of it.
But in the next 3-5 years, it will pay off great because you're building audiences that are going to see your content every single day. And even though you're spending $500 on Instagram and you're only getting 100 followers a day in return, while you're still growing an audience over time, the organic reach or amount of views you're going to get in the future for money you spent in the past is going to be far greater than any other advertising medium you could spend money on.
Also Read: Real Estate Agent Highlight: Adrienne Cera
What the next 3-5 years will look like for brands on social media?
It's going to be crazy in the next 3-5 years for brands on social media. They've had some problems recently in the news with politics so they're trying to rebrand themselves. They're trying to get less of that content on Facebook and more about family and friends. But the good thing about Facebook is that they own Instagram and WhatsApp -the largest messaging app in the world. They own these 2 apps and they are about to get into the hardware industry as well. They have a lot of stuff in the near future that's going to be really interesting for their company overall.
And for the Facebook social platform itself, if it might not be as big as people think. For real estate, 5 or 10 years from now, millennials are still going to be buying houses. But then Gen Z is going to start buying houses and they're not going to be on Facebook.
Your advertising budget alone is going to be shifting like how it's shifting from TV, radio, and print to social media. You're going to see in the near future, a lot of the advertising budgets on Facebook and Twitter are going to be slowly shifting more towards Instagram and YouTube marketing. That is where social media is heading in terms of advertising dollars.
What's the future of Facebook?
In the future, if you go to a kid who's maybe 12 or 13 and say, "Hey, um, what do you think about Facebook?" Their first response will be, “oh, that's for old people”.In 2004, a Facebook page was all the rave in college, but now for Gen Z, that's what old people are on, and they don't want to be there because they're all about snap chat.
Millennials will still be there, but they will start to go away and go more towards Instagram, YouTube or Snap chat.
According to a study, 1.45 billion people log onto Facebook every day. This makes Facebook ads a great, cost-effective tool when you want to promote your products to a wide range of people.
To market your business successfully on Facebook and other social media platform, you need to understand it's unique opportunities and how it differs from other media. Just as you wouldn't run a radio ad on television, you shouldn't market on Facebook the way you'd market in a magazine or on your website.
Hard-sell tactics - such as using advertising slogans, posting repeatedly about a particular product or service, or providing lists of products and prices in isolation from any related conversation - will result in other users 'unfollowing' you. They may even post negative comments about your business.
Get more details about this topic by listening on this podcast episode with Matt Anderson. On this podcast episode, Matt will discuss Social Media Marketing with a focus on Facebook, where Facebook is today compared to other social media platforms and where he foresees it in the future. He will share tips and benefits for all business owners.
Matt is a former Sr. Social Strategist for billion-dollar brands, he strategized their marketing budgets on social media that ran up to $40K per day, 50% of that budget was on Facebook. Matt currently manages brand sponsorships and campaigns for over 25+ YouTube creators, whose followings total nearly 100 Million+ subscribers worldwide.
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