NEWSSUPPLIER NEWSVictoria

How can agents effectively use social media marketing?

CEO of Real Estate Bookings Greg McCutcheon shares his top tips.

Leading an auction in front of over 2 million viewers isn’t something many real estate agents experience over the course of their career.

But, for Daniel D’Assisi at Noel Jones Doncaster, who was selected to sell the Block property of Sticks and Wombat, it’s exactly the audience size he can expect on Auction Day.

Real Estate Bookings who help connect databases with social media websites, property sites and real estate portals have been working with Noel Jones Doncaster to support them in this project.

How have Real Estate Bookings been working with Noel Jones to promote their involvement in The Block? And how successful has it been?

We’ve got a great working relationship with the Noel Jones team and are very excited to support the Doncaster office with the sale of Sticks and Wombat’s property.

Noel Jones has built up a good database of leads that buyers and tenants, investors and homeowners. We can use that database by connecting into social platforms such as Facebook to enhance reach and exposure for business like never before. Being able to connect from their database into social is extremely powerful in branding and lead generation.

Using advanced targeting, Real Estate Bookings has assisted growing Noel Jones Doncaster’s Facebook following by 20 per cent, all the while generating over 270,000 views, which resulted in over 6,000 people engaging with their content and close to 1,000 link clicks to the Noel Jones website in just under seven weeks.

Why is social media so important for real estate agents and businesses?

Social is extremely important. A lot of business have large databases with dormant buyers and sellers. We can bring them to life and help engage them with innovative digital marketing. It can freshen up their business and generate more leads and brand awareness for them via new channels.

What’s the best way to market yourself on Facebook?

The fastest growing segment on Facebook is the over 50s age segment.

Agents need to take a nurturing approach. They need to take a ‘softly, softly’ approach and provide value, engage and ask questions. You don’t just go straight onto social with a ‘sell! Sell! Sell!’ mentality. It’s about a whole nurturing end-to-end approach. It starts from Real Estate Bookings initial inquiry through to blog articles and other valuable content which that particular segment may be willing to consume.

With Noel Jones, we’ve been able to expand the reach of the campaign to 300,000 people, all targeted to core areas of business and homeowners. We have helped them get that control of voice online and provide them with strong brand awareness and the ability to start to convert some leads.

Is it inevitable that agents will need to start using social media and more effectively?

If 17 million Australians are on Facebook today and the average user is on it for 2 hours a day, I can’t see any business in the future that’s not on social channels possibly having a good business. That applies to all sorts of agents: putting your head in the sand is not going to work

What are some things to avoid doing on social media?

You do need to be careful in how you promote yourself on social media. You need to nurture, add value, grow the audience and be social about it. It’s not about putting a billboard up and saying ‘hey, look at me’. Don’t get obsessed with vanity metrics. It’s about generating a valuable following and delivering great content. To be successful moving forward, it’s not an overnight success story. You’ve got to have content planning, there’s a lot of thinking behind it. We helped a lot of business get on Facebook and Instagram. They’ve approached us because they know how important of an element it is in their business.

How much is too much? Is there such a thing as social media overkill?

We see a fair amount of agents putting out the same stuff all the time, sharing blogs that are written by a third party website when they could’ve actually written some things themselves and drive traffic to their own websites.

There’s a lot of lazy social media going on. Regurgitating the same generic stuff doesn’t give you an identity and cut through. You need to monitor your marketing and measure it and set goals. You need to think of the relevance of posts to audience – Are people engaging with it?

You don’t need to do 7 posts a week, maybe 2-3 highly angled posts that are highly crafted and well thought through. Sometimes we see agents and agencies outsourcing social or getting office administrators or personal assistants to do a post during day when most of the audience is not online and at work and in meetings, so it’s better to post it after 7pm each night rather than in the day.

How important is it to have a plan?

For Noel Jones and The Block marketing, we had a three-month calendar and we had the whole team come into the office and show them what’s coming up. We have thought about it, engaged with the audience, thought about brand awareness, add now we are moving into the listing and marketing phase and closing through to auction. Planning ahead was important because if things change, it gives us flexibility.

Does social work for everyone, from big business to boutique agencies?

We are working group-wide with Noel Jones. We’ve got copywriters getting some really cool articles together. For example, as each room is revealed [in The Block] we have articles on trends in the kitchen. We work with large corporates, medium enterprises and small markets in regional and coastal markets, providing a more lifestyle type approach.

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Azal Khan

Azal Khan was a in-house features writer for Elite Agent Magazine.