Thinking of selling your home in 2021? Here's how social media marketing is changing the game

Gone are the days where your marketing campaign was simply a for sale sign out front and listing the property on the two major real estate portals. With the rise of social & digital media, agents have the ability to put your property in front of thousands of the right people instantly.

How does this benefit a homeowner?

As agents we have “databases” & we can do some amazing things with these. We can bulk email, bulk SMS and most importantly, we can input our database in the backend of Facebook, create specific audiences and use those for target marketing on social media.

For example, an agent can upload all their buyers from their CRM into the backend of Facebook who are looking to buy a particular property in a particular suburb.

How does that benefit a homeowner?

By creating a targeted ad the agent can promote your property on digital platforms which appear in front of the very people who will be interested in your property or people like them. Unlike the major portals where you have to wait until a buyer goes online looking AND gets to see all your competition.

The next point to consider is the buyer who is not yet looking to purchase but it’s on their radar. You know, kind of like when you go to the service station, you go to pay for petrol and you see a mars bar. You didn’t want the mars bar two minutes ago but now you're interested.

These are the buyers you are missing out on by not effectively marketing your property on social media.

Agent profiles

Some agents have built incredibly large profiles on social media so much so that a simple post on their platforms could in fact, sell your property.

How does that benefit a homeowner?

To advertise on the larger portals can cost an absolute fortune. Depending on different tiers, you could be looking at anything from a few hundred dollars to thousands. That’s without print marketing. An agent with a good social media strategy who knows what they are doing most likely won’t even charge you for a post on their platforms or promoting your property on stories at open homes. These agents have built a standing within the community and similar to having a list of emails they can market to, these agents have a "digital database" available.

Does my agent need to be a social media guru?

No, you employ an agent to list, sell and negotiate the best price for your property. There are a lot of agents out there who have social media marketing down pat and are getting great results. Many agents have a marketing team who are across social media or, there are companies like ours that are owned & operated by real estate agents.

When selling a property it’s crucial to have a game plan. In 2015 I became the first agent in Australia to successfully list and sell real estate through Facebook. From then on my strategy when selling a property was to showcase the listing on my social media profiles for a week or two prior to going officially “on the market”.

How does that benefit a homeowner?

It does a few things.

1) Once you have gone "live" the opportunity to correct any issues is almost too late once a campaign is underway.

2) It's great to get buyer feedback on the presentation and indicative pricing on the property.

3) The buyers coming through will be pre qualified by the agent so you can rest assured they have the finances in place and are ready to proceed if they are interested.

4) You can avoid large marketing costs if a buyer is found in the premarketing stage.

Social media doesn’t work in my area?

While that might be true, it does work in others. We are contacted all the time by agents in the Southern Highlands, Newcastle and Central Coast for example who want to tap into that Sydney market and try to find a buyer. The same goes for agents in Sydney. We are also contacted by agents here in Sydney for their home sellers looking to buy in other areas. So it works both ways. We do a lot of work with buyer agents who have clients looking to buy property as well, and find social media marketing is great to source properties.

How much does social media marketing cost & is it worth it?

I’m going to be completely biased here and say that it does. There are so many elements to marketing your property on socials that you wouldn’t be aware of. Let’s look at a few;

1. Through our targeted ads we can put your property in front of the very people who will be interested in it, without showcasing your competition. Your property won't just go up in a spray and pray approach, using our proven techniques we will design a campaign to suit.

2. With retargeting tactics that we have, imagine a buyer coming through your home and then constantly seeing it popping up on their social media all the time. If you do have competition you want your property remaining at the forefront of their minds.

3. You have an interested buyer who sees the property online and also notices the comments and likes the property gets from other viewers. Could this start a social media auction scenario I wonder?

4. With the sharing and tagging option a viewer can tag a friend online who might be interested in your property but hasn’t seen it yet.

5. There are Facebook groups dedicated to local areas. Bondi Local Loop or the Potts Pointers where members of those groups have a real keen interest in the suburb. At the time of writing this article the Bondi Local Loop has over 106,000 members and Potts Pointers has over 10,000.

6. This can also be used as a technique to given extra strength to the vendor. I've used it im my career where we I've shown a property premarket to very interested parties and expressed in no uncertain terms, the owners are selling and this property WILL go on the market officially in the coming week or so, so put your best foot forward.

One other point to consider is what if I secure even one buyer who has seen your property on social media who shows up to auction or to an open home which puts heat on another buyer and gets competition happening. With some auction bids around $100,000 increments, it’s a small price to pay.

Costs can vary depending on length of ad campaign and daily limit for example, however, in 2021 it's the most cost effective medium to market your property for maximum exposure.

Australian Social Media Account Statistics

• 71% of the overall Australian population have active social media accounts. That’s 18 million people Source

• 85% of the eligible (age 13+) Australian population have active social media accounts, Source

• 33% of Australians state they use Social Media when looking for information about a brand. Source

• Active social media users grew in Australia by 4.3% over the 10 month period Apr 2019 to Jan 2020, this is more than 3.5 time the population growth in the same period. Source

• 98% of Australian users access social media via a mobile device. Source

• There are ~1.3 mobile connections for every man, woman and child in Australia . Source

• Australians spend an average of 1 hour 47 minutes per day on social media, and this has been increasing slowly over the past 8 years. Source

• Australian’s have one of the lowest number of social media accounts per person in the world (and average of just 6.2 per person. This should be compared to Japan (3.5) and India (10.0.) Source

• 52% of Australian’s use Social Media as a source of news. This is just below the worldwide average of 55% (Source, Analysis: Genroe)

• 30% more Australians trust their social media news sources than those in the USA but only 73% as many Australians trust their social media news sources than those in The Netherlands. (Data Source, Analysis: Genroe)

• Australians are concerned about real or fake online news at about the same rate as those in the United States. (Source, Analysis: Genroe)

If you are thinking of selling a property in 2021 get in touch with us and we help get you more buyers, more views and hopefully a successful outcome.

You want your property to be seen where buyers are hanging out.

Nic Fren

Licensed Real Estate Agent

Founder of Bespoke Media Management