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Support sales and build your brand

Caroline Steer imageIt may not come as a surprise to many of you to hear that the UK is obsessed with property: you name the topic and it’s in the papers daily. What is interesting is that recent research has shown that 63 per cent of people browse property websites when they aren’t even looking to buy.

Social media imageWhen it comes to social media, that figure is a probably a lot higher. It’s not the first place that people go when they want to buy a property but it is a great way of casually viewing stock, whether to compare properties to one’s own, fantasise about a dream home or look into values in another area.

Social media isn’t really about selling, it’s about creating awareness, building your brand and using it as a vehicle to drive traffic to your website.

Tap into Twitter Hours – local areas and interests have dedicated ‘hours’ and engagement levels go through the roof!

I’m not an advocate of purely publishing sales messages because, let’s face it, how likely is it that someone will see a house on Facebook and decide to purchase there and then? It’s far better to publicise yourself as experts in the area with a wide range of product so that you are at the forefront of people’s minds when it comes to going through the buying/selling process.

However, there are ways to support your sales teams and assist in driving sales in your social media efforts.

Here are a few ways you can use social media to the best effect.

BOOSTED POSTS

The world of social media advertising has absolutely exploded in recent years and it’s a cost-effective and simple way of marketing to a specific audience.

Via Facebook, you can upload a link and image of the property as you would a normal status update and then simply press the ‘boost’ button. Boosting posts increases your audience massively and you can choose who sees it too. Choose the location (down to 5km), interests (what might the average buyer of this home also be interested in?), age and gender and add the budget and timeframe. We have seen website clickthroughs cost as little as 1p and generated 5000 web visits in a week!

TWITTER HOURS

If you want to target a local area on Twitter, tap into ‘Twitter Hours’. A large variety of local areas and different interests have been dedicated a special hour on Twitter where engagement levels go through the roof. If you do a bit of research you can find #EssexHour #NewHomesHour or #GuildfordHour and hundreds more, where tweets on a specific subject are more likely to be engaged with by an actively interested audience.

VIRTUAL VIEWINGS

For something a bit quirky, but actually very practical, why not hold a virtual viewing? If you have a property that has had a lot of interest, you could set up a date and time for potential buyers to view the property from the comfort of their own home or mobile. Both Facebook and Twitter have live video functions. Organising viewings can be very tricky with people’s working hours. So an initial tour over the internet for example, during lunchtime, is convenient for buyers and also far more productive for you as multiple potential buyers can look at the property simultaneously.

FEATURED PROPERTIES

Rather than posting every property from your website into social media (a surefire way to lose the engagement of an audience), why not create a regular feature? Perhaps ‘Home of the week’ for those great properties that you can’t wait to recommend, ‘Fantasy Friday’ for dream homes or ‘Personal favourites’ from a sales person add a little bit of fun to proceedings. Make sure you include an image, a link to the listing and a quick summary of why the home has been selected. It stops your feed from becoming dreary and demonstrates the great properties you have on file.

SALES STAFF PROFILES

I’ve heard it said many times that you buy into a person, not a product. And, although with property the product is very important, you want people to walk away having had a positive experience and recommending you. Publishing photos and blogs from your sales staff, demonstrating their field of expertise – be it a local area, negotiation, customer service – can put you head and shoulders above the competition.

It pays to think long term to keep leads coming in, and adding the personal touch is a great way to go about it.

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