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By Ben Greenwood
Social media is still a relatively new marketing medium and while many businesses now agree that it is something they should be doing, many either still don’t or worse, do it badly. While there are many social networks that can be utilised by businesses, Facebook is potentially the most powerful, especially for estate agents.
There are two ways for estate agents to use Facebook – they can use it as an advertising platform via Facebook Ads and they can create Business Pages through which they can communicate directly with potential customers.
The former method works very much like Google Adwords. Businesses can create an advert, put it live and pay only for the clickthroughs. Where Facebook arguably performs better for businesses is how well it can be targeted to certaini groups of people.
It is possible to target by location – so a Manchester letting agent or estate agent could target Manchester specifically, or a wider area such as the North West of England. That means the advert would appear to everyone who lives in the area chosen. Even more, if the Manchester estate agents wanted to target a certain demographic – first time buyers, for example, they could specify that the advert only appeared for people living in Manchester between the ages of 21 and 30.
Not only does this ensure the advert appears in front of the right people, it reduces the potential cost of the advert through unwanted clickthroughs from the wrong people.
While Facebook advertising can be almost uniquely targeted it is not the best tool for building brand awareness and generating confidence in a business’ services, thus pushing sales. A Facebook Page, on the other hand, can do that very well if it is set up and managed correctly.
There are several ways to use a Facebook Page. One is as a customer service channel, asking questions, responding to answers, responding to customer queries and issues and giving customers advice and information. This is a particularly good way of not only building brand awareness (as every comment and discussion will appear on that person’s wall and be visible to their friends) but also good customer relations and reputation.
In addition to using a Facebook Page as a customer service channel, a small amount of promotion is acceptable. In the case of estate agents and letting agents, this could be a particularly desirable property, a new property that has come available or a real bargain property, for example.
Finally, a Facebook Page can be used to share information and the latest news. In the case of an estate agent, this could be new landlord regulations, news about the agent themselves, house price news, rental value news – really anything property related could be published and discussed.
What businesses – estate and letting agents included – need to remember is that using social media is about engagement. If they don’t engage with their audience, then they won’t grow that audience. In addition, promotion of their social media presences must also be done in order to create an audience in the first place.
About the Author: Ben Greenwood is writing on behalf of Shepherd Gilmour,
estate agents Manchester
. You can
find their Facebook Page here
.
Source:
isnare.com
Permanent Link:
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