Social media is a fantastic tool to market and sell property, but it won’t replace the experience and expertise of real estate agents, Novak Properties Director Lisa Novak says.
Speaking as part of Transform 2020, Lisa says just because you can Google your symptoms when you’re unwell doesn’t mean you will make a good doctor.
“These days we can get onto Google and work anything out, but we don’t,” she says.
“We go to the specialists. That part is never going to be replaced.
“There’s a whole lot more that goes into listing and selling a property than simply going and putting it onto Facebook Marketplace.
“There’s a whole heap of negotiations, and at the moment, we’re in the midst of a very tricky market where it’s critical that we use the experience and the knowledge that we have to be able to pull these deals together and to be able to get the highest price for our vendors.”
However, Lisa says social media such as Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn are fabulous platforms to market property , generate interest, and find buyers.
She is an industry leader in the field, and here she shares her top tips for selling on social media and how you can combine it with more traditional marketing methods.
- Start with a teaser. It might be a photograph or a catchy line of text that hints at what is to come but doesn’t reveal too much. The idea is to catch people’s attention and make them want more.
- Instant media, not social media. The timeline for selling via social media moves quickly and within 24 hours of releasing the teaser, you should follow up with another image or a short video. Reveal a little bit more about the property but still keep most of your cards close to your chest.
- Keep it short. Release a longer video showing the property in more detail, but remember to keep it under 90 seconds. Social media is fast-paced and your audience doesn’t have a big attention span.
- A big mistake. The big mistake agents make with social media is giving people too much information. Don’t paste all the text from your portal listings to social media as your audience won’t read it. It creates information overload and people switch off.
- Invite buyers to engage with you. After providing your audience with your short, sharp “golden nuggets” of information on the property, invite your potential buyers to engage with you and seek more information via calling, emailing or messaging you.
- Don’t forget your database. Selling via social media doesn’t mean you can forget about mining your database for buyers. This is still important and you should always be looking for opportunities to match buyers and sellers.
- Zero dollar marketing strategy. This is Plan A and it involves launching the property on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn with no cost to the vendor. Most of the properties sell, although there is no guarantee.
- Property portals. This is Plan B and it involves marketing the property on portals such as realestate.com.au with polished photography, floor plans and perhaps a video.
- Repeat social marketing. Put each property on social media multiple times. A big mistake agents make is only advertising the home once. Coca-Cola wouldn’t run a television ad once and expect people to buy their products and it’s the same with real estate on social media. Keep pushing it out there.
- Act immediately. If a potential buyer slides into your DMs, they don’t want to wait 24 hours for a reply. In society today we often choose what we want from Uber Eats based on how quickly it will arrive, not by what we feel like eating. People’s expectations today are that they want it and they want it fast.
- Be consistent. The biggest key to building your following on social media is consistently posting content. Being consistent with anything is hard. Consistency with social media involves between three and five hours a day.
