Struggling to sell the house you just listed? Social media has a couple of solutions for you!  There are a lot of things you can do to market the house online. Today, I’m going to break down 10 tips for using social media to sell a house.

1) Real Estate Farming Facebook Page – Social Media To Sell A House

What if you could get a bunch of people to like a Facebook page dedicated to real estate near you? That would be amazing!

Home buyers are looking for homes in very specific locations. You can easily create special Real Estate Farming Facebook pages designed to get likes only by the people interested in owning property near you.

Look at this Facebook page “Modern Homes San Diego”:

Can you believe those numbers?

Most Realtors struggle to get over 491 people to like their personal Facebook page! And Modern Homes San Deigo on Facebook has that many people who’ve engaged with their post. That’s impressive.

Here’s how you can use this strategy to promote your listings and sell more houses:

1) Create a Facebook page that merely shows BEAUTIFUL properties near your location

2) Post to it daily following this social media schedule

3) Occasionally post images and links to your listing when you need have one to promote!

You can also link to your blog content through these pages and see significant results! If you need a Real Estate Logo or real estate slogans to get started, check out our free guide here.

2) Create A Home Buyers Waiting List Through Your Blog!

One of the best ways to sell a property quickly is to build up a list of buyers wanting property in that particular area. There are several ways you can do this! The best way is through real estate blogging. You can drive traffic through your social media channels to your blog. And then put a sign-up button on the top of your page that asks people to join your waiting list!

In addition to having a button, you can use active lead capture to add the process of building an email list of interested home buyers. The addition of this button does two big things for your business. Firstly, it gives you an added advantage during your listing presentations. You can bring up the fact that you have a list of buyers at your disposal.  And that you can instantly notify hundreds of people that the property is available. Secondly, it sends the right social signals to any buyer.  Home buyers that join your ‘waiting list’ understand that you’ve also attracted other buyers to you.  Having a waiting list will help create a level of comfort with your business and builds trust in you.  You also get the permission to notify them directly of properties in the area!

3) Pinterest Local Groups

Pinterest marketing for Realtors is an enormous opportunity currently for using social media to sell a house. The network drives a lot of visitors and traffic to real estate websites. When you want to market your properties, however, the key is creating local boards. I suggest creating or joining a Pinterest board dedicated to your community. The goal is to get as many people to follow that board as possible. One strategy for doing this is to create a board and then invite people to ‘collaborate’ on it.

With this method, people will be able to help you add pins to the board. The Pinterest board lets you build up a digital community of people located near you that you’d eventually like to sell properties to. Then when you have a listing, pin fantastic photos to that board that link back to your listing. These pictures will be seen by a large number of Pinterest users in your area!

Look at the people following this Pinterest board near Dallas! You can do this:

4) Pinterest Local DIY, Events, Teams

It’s great to create a Pinterest board related to homes. But think of how much bigger your audience could be if you owned a board about local DIY, events, teams, etc. There are so many other news-related items that are loosely connected to real estate. You can post images about these, build up a community of followers, and then sprinkle images that link to your listings when the time is right.

This strategy will yield a much higher following in a short period of time.  As long as you keep it local, your listings will be shown to the right people.

5) Facebook Ads

Facebook ads aren’t just for getting seller leads! You can also generate interest in your properties with these ads. Here is my step by step guide for setting them up: Facebook Ads For Realtors.

Honestly, I’d focus on generating buyer leads rather than sending paid traffic to a particular property. I’d spend money getting people to opt-in to a home buyers guide or cheat sheet. This typically yields much higher conversions on paid traffic. You can use a squeeze page like this if you set up ads for buyer guides:

This type of informational squeeze page typically performs much better.

6) YouTube Video Tours

YouTube video tours are a great way to present the property to people browsing online.  I recommend making a video with an app like Magisto. This video app automatically mixes your short clips together to make interesting videos.

Next, your goal should be to get the video to 100 views. To do this, you’ll have to market it. Here are 5 ideas or places for you to market your videos:

1) Your Blog

2) Facebook Pages

3) Email Friends, Family, Past Clients, and Neighbors

4) Twitter

5) LinkedIn Posts with the Video embedded

After your video has over 100 views, it will start showing up highly in Google searches. This will help your video marketing even more. Remember to include strong calls to action with the video! Also, once the property sells, change the calls to action towards your other properties in the area, your website, and your buyers waiting list! Real Estate Marketing is really powered up by using Youtube videos currently!

7) Pinterest Ads

Pinterest just released their new advertising platform. And clicks are SUPER cheap. I’m currently getting clicks for less that 15 cents. You can pick 1 or 2 of the best images for your new property and pay for clicks to a squeeze page for that property.

You’ll want to pin several images of your property, and then head over to: Ads.Pinterest.com. Next, you’ll click the red promote button on the top of the screen. Finally, you’ll be able to set the demographic settings after selecting the pin you’ve already made.

The demographic settings aren’t as intensive as Facebook. You can really only choose major cities as geographic regions. But given the low cost of the clicks, this really shouldn’t matter too much.  You’ll be able to drive paid traffic directly to your properties squeeze page just by filling out a simple settings page.

Here’s the settings page:

8) Twitter Cold Calling

I talked about this in my Twitter guide for Realtors, but if you want to succeed on Twitter you have to reach out to people. This is just like cold calling! You come up with several scripted tweets and send them to people who express an interest in buyer soon. This will get you directly in front of clients looking to buy real estate in the near future.  Here’s a quick video showing you how to automate this Twitter system:

9) Twitter Local Hashtags

When it comes to selling your property, local leads are at a premium. You can use Twitter local hashtags the same way small business use Walmart’s parking lot! Walmart predictably gets around 500,000 people to it’s store every single month. That’s why you see so many small businesses located near Walmart.

The same thing goes for local hashtags. Is there a high school sporting hashtag? Is there a hashtag for a big local business? Do local events have hashtags?

Of course they all do!

You can time your tweets to go out when these people are using these hashtags and get more eyes on your real estate because of it!

10) Google Plus – First Page Hacking

Google Plus is mostly dead. The platform hasn’t seen any major improvements and Google recently cut-out the authorship part of it’s algorithm. However, there is one huge advantage to having people follow you on Google Plus.

Your posts show up on the first page for everyone that follows you.

That’s right! You can be on the first page of Google for almost any search if you first get people to add you to their circles. I get people to add me to their circles by adding every single contact that emails me to my Google Plus page. I find that eventually most of them follow me back. It will take you some time to build up a large following, but the rewards are pretty great!

Look at this, people that have me in their circles are seeing EAP on the first page of Google for very competitive keywords in under 6 months of work:

BONUS TIP: 

So, how many of you use open houses to sell your properties?

Most likely a fair number of you!

In addition to having open house sign in sheets, you can take these open houses online!

With Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest, you can engage with the visitors of your house. And make your event the most popular one in the neighborhood!

Did you know that you can even live stream events on Meerkat now?

This means you can live stream your open house for anyone to see!

The ideas are endless.

The best social media platforms for real estate agents in 2020

When it comes to social media for real estate agents, there are some clear winners (and some pretty big losers). But for every app, there’s someone championing it as the end all be all for marketing. Here are some things to consider before investing your time in a new platform.

As much fun as social media can be, when we’re considering social media for real estate, we have to look at what really adds value. Often, we’re looking at statistics for this information. Funny thing about statistics: we can (and many do) manipulate them to tell others whatever we want them to know.

By omission, primarily

For instance, NAR, in its “Digital House Hunt” publication, put some study statistics in graph-form. The text accompanying the graph claims that “31% of home shoppers who take action on a real estate site are age 25-34, surpassing all other ages.”

Sadly, most of us won’t bother to do more than glance at the graph before rushing off to polish up on our “how to attract millennials” knowledge.

And, that’s a problem

Because when we look closer, and strip away NAR’s arbitrary age groups, we learn that 54 percent of these survey respondents are older than 35 and 33 percent of them are older than 45.

Which, by the way, validates NAR’s other claims that the median age of a homebuyer is 43 and the median age of a seller is 44.

Whenever someone throws statistics at you, it pays to remember Disraeli’s words of wisdom: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, da%#ed lies, and statistics.” This statement definitely applies to social media for real estate.

If you don’t, you’ll be wasting your valuable time on social media sites that make no sense for the average real estate agent.

The new year is a time many agents are reevaluating their marketing – what works, what doesn’t. Hopefully, digital marketing will be on that list.

So, today, let’s dive deeper – past the flashy numbers – to determine how effective these social media platforms are for the real estate industry.

How to digest the statistics

Even the smallest social media site has an impressive number of monthly users and most will knock your socks off with the statistic showing the platform’s snappy growth in popularity. But be careful thinking this growth will directly benefit you in using social media for real estate.

For instance, that 300 million-plus people use SnapChat every day is impressive, but it doesn’t tell you the real story (you can find that, below).

Before making the leap, get the answers to the following questions:

• How many of the platform’s users live in the U.S.?
• Where do these users live? Cities, suburbs? If you’re looking for listings you want to target suburb-dwellers, primarily, right?
• How old are they? Unless you’re going after only 35 percent of the buyer pool, first-time buyers aren’t your holy grail. Remember, the median age of a buyer is 43 and the median age of seller is 44.
• How much money do they earn? The typical homebuyer makes $88,800 and homes sellers, by and large, have a median household income of $103,300.

From these statistics we can come up with a plan – a bit rudimentary, but a plan nonetheless.

Buyers agents should look for social media platforms with the following characteristics:

• A large number of U.S. users.
• Largest share of users includes those 45 years of age.
• The typical user makes around $88,000.

And here’s what listing agents should look for: 

• A large number of U.S. users.
• The largest share of users are at least 40 years of age, but older is better.
• Users have a median household income of at least $90,000, higher is better.
• A large pool of suburban users.

So, how do the various social media platforms stack up when it comes to digital marketing for agents?

Facebook

Total Number of Daily Active Users: 1.37 billion, according to Statista

• Of these, 214 million reside in the U.S.
• The largest age group in the U.S. that uses Facebook is between the ages of 35 and 54 (56 million).
• Nearly three-quarters of Facebook users earn more than $75,000.
• The number of users who live in urban versus suburban areas is almost evenly split.

When it comes to Facebook, there is simply no reason why all agents shouldn’t include the site in their digital marketing mix. What other platforms are useful for social media for real estate?

Instagram

Total Number of Daily Active Instagram Users: 500 million

• Of these users, 25 percent reside in the U.S. (source)
• Nearly 60 percent of the platform’s users are age 18 to 29 (90 percent of users are younger than 35).
• The largest proportion of users (38 percent) earn less than $30,000 per year. However, 37 percent say they earn $75,000 or more.
• Nearly 40 percent of these users live in urban settings (only 28 percent live in the suburbs).

The most-widely touted Instagram statistic is the one detailing its “explosive” growth (100 million users in a six-month period, two years ago). This should mean nothing to you unless the new users’ ages, income and other demographic information is included.

“Instagram is a tricky one for a business,” according to Cogent Communications digital strategist, Emily Hunt. Without the assistance of a stylist or pro photographer, “your feed has the ability to rapidly devalue your brand and make it look slapdash,” she warns.

Since Instagram is such a labor-intensive digital marketing tactic, and the demographics aren’t ideal, put this one on the back burner as you watch its progress. There are better networks to consider for social media for real estate.

LinkedIn

Total Number of Monthly Linkedin Users: 250 million (LinkedIn doesn’t specify the number of daily users, according to Fortune.com)

• More than half of LinkedIn’s users reside in the U.S. (53 percent).
• The primary age groups who use LinkedIn are those between 30 and 49 years of age (27 percent) and 50 to 64 years of age (24 percent).
• Forty-four percent of Linked users earn more than $75,000 in a year. According to LinkedIn, 41 percent of millionaires use the platform.
• LinkedIn’s location (urban, suburban and rural) numbers are elusive, at best. The closest we could find is that “About 1 in 3 internet users who live in an urban environment use LinkedIn,” courtesy of brandongaille.com.

Although LinkedIn is most effective for B2B marketers, here’s something to consider:

Real Trends, in its 2016 Brokerage Online Performance Study, took a deeper dive into “the social side of traffic generation,” and — no surprise here — finds that Facebook returns 97 percent of social-generated traffic.

But, LinkedIn came in second, followed by Yelp, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram. All but LinkedIn, by the way, were statistically insignificant, with well-below 1 percent of traffic generated.

Since all the demographics line up perfectly for the real estate agent’s consideration, though, it may be worth your time to occasionally post your real estate wisdom on LinkedIn. Looks like this one is a good bet for social media for real estate.

Hey, CEO’s buy and sell homes too.

Pinterest

Total Number of Daily Active Pinterest Users: 110 million (source)

• 75 million users reside in the U.S.
• Although the median age of a Pinterest user is 40, the majority of active pinners are younger than 40, according to Omnicore. The agency also finds that “Millennials use Pinterest as much as Instagram.”
• While half of Pinterest users earn $50,000 or more per year, 10 percent earn more than $125,000.
• The largest group of Pinterest users live in the suburbs (34 percent), but city dwellers are close behind at 30 percent.

Pinterest, like Instagram, is a labor-intensive social sharing platform. If you like what you see in the demographics, plan on a steep learning curve and huge blocks of time to get your boards where they should be.

Then, plan on remaining active if you want viewers.

SnapChat

Total Number of Daily Active Users: 173 million (source)

• Eleven percent of SnapChat users (33 million) reside in the U.S.
• Nearly three-quarters of SnapChat users are younger than 34. Of this group, 45 percent are between the ages of 18 and 24. NOTE: The usage rate among American internet users, age 12 to 17 years old, is 83 percent.
• We could find no income statistics for the average SnapChat user. But, keep in mind, most are college students, so what they earn isn’t much.
• Information on where users live (urban, suburban or rural settings) is elusive.

Unless you’re looking for top-top-top of the funnel prospects, SnapChat is a waste of time. Since it’s growing, however, keep an eye on the site’s demographics if it’s of interest to you.

Twitter

Total Number of Monthly Active Users: 330 million (source) (Twitter doesn’t disclose the number of daily users, but analyst James Cakmak estimates it at around 125 million)

• Only 21 percent of Twitter accounts are based in the United States. This represents about 67 million users, according to Omnicore.
• The largest age group who uses Twitter is between the ages of 18 and 29 (37 percent of users). Twenty-five percent of users are age 30 to 49
• Twitter users’ income is pretty evenly spaced, with 19 percent earning between $30,000 and $49,000, 25 percent earning between $50,000 and $74,900 and 26 percent earning more than $75,000.
• The typical Twitter user is located in an urban setting

Reading the daily news might lead one to assume that the average Twitter user is older. Nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, the typical Twitter user is a young female urban dweller.

“High-school-aged teens are the most active age demographic on the social network: a full 42 percent of online youth aged 15 to 17 use Twitter,” according to Christina Newberry at Hootsuite.

If you are targeting urban teen girls (“far and away the largest demographic segment,” according to Newberry), Twitter is ideal for you. Likewise, if you hope to attract clients who live in Brazil, Japan and Mexico, by all means, jump on Twitter.

If, on the other hand, you’re an agent who understands that if “you list, you last,” put Twitter on the back burner. Older Americans aren’t, by and large, using it. If you want to use Twitter as a part of your social media for real estate, see Tyler’s 9 Must-do’s for Twitter.

Key  Social Media for Real Estate Takeaways

Take the users’ earnings claims with a grain of salt. It’s widely known that self-reported income is inflated (a tendency known as “social desirability bias.”) Look at Twitter users, for instance. Teenage girls dominate the site, yet the highest reported income is in excess of $75,000. It takes a lot of babysitting jobs to earn that kind of money.

The key takeaway here is that when researching where to spend your time with digital marketing, ask yourself the following questions:

• Where is my target audience?
• Which of these platforms will return the largest investment of my time?