Use Facebook Ads To Market Your Real Estate Listings

If  Facebook were a country, it can be considered the 3rd largest country in the world in terms of population as it has more than 400 Million users & still growing,. This would mean the popular social networking site would rank somewhere between India & the United States as per latest stats from Wikipedia.

(image from wikipedia)

So it doesn't come as a surprise that a lot realtors, agents & other businesses are tapping the potential of this ever growing social network to promote their listings, products and services.

However, while thousands are joining the bandwagon & try to leverage their presence in Facebook, it seems a great number of sales agents are spamming the network 'til kingdom come & expect to get instant results!

Well, if quick leads are what you're after, then there's only one sure fire way to do it. Pay for it!

Unknown to many real estate people, Facebook advertising is easy, relatively cheap & does bring in results. Within 15-minutes & just a few US dollars, you can advertise your properties without spending a lot of time & effort.

Of course, Facebook is no magic bullet but a properly executed campaign will bring great benefits to the advertiser. Combined with other paid (Google Adwords, banner advertising, etc.) and non-paid activities such as article writing, forum & blog posting, social bookmarking,video marketing, etc. you can get your listing noticed by your target market faster than ever.

So how does Facebook paid advertising work?

 First, you need to setup your Facebook advertiser account at http://www.facebook.com/advertisin

Second, create a new ad campaign for your property listing by supplying the required data during the instructions carefully.

At this stage this where you need to optimize your ad in order for your prospective clients to discover & get attracted to your ad / offer.

Leveraging Facebook's user data (yep, your personal data as well as other activities inside the social network - likes, dislikes, etc.), you can drill in on your specific target market. Information such as location, demographics, hobbies, etc. can help you narrow down who you want to target.

Here's how it looks like:

 At this point, you will also need to set up your advertising budget and mode whether you are going for Cost Per Click (CPC) or Cost Per Thousands of impressions (CPM).










You also need to fix your daily ad budget as well as your maximum bid for each click or per thousand of impressions and guess what? You can post an ad for just $1/day!

Of course, this goes without saying that if you need more clicks & prospective clients, you will have to increase your maximum bid as well as your daily ad budget.

I will discuss in a future post helpful tips in targeting your advertisements. For now, you just need to get the basic process of creating a Facebook ad.

Btw, one cool thing about Facebook Advertising is that you can add photos to go along with your ad so you need to be very careful & deliberate in choosing relevant and attracting images to support your message.


Finally, once you have complete the process by entering your credit card details for billing purposes, you ads now are good to go. 


Just remember, you can pause or stop your ads anytime or even set a schedule to start & end your campaign.

So there you go, you have successfully created an affordable ad campaign for your real estate listings.

Good luck and happy selling!!

Essential Items Your (Real Estate) Website Should Have

I've been asked often by colleagues (mostly the older ones) from the industry on what essential things their websites (or planned websites) should have in order to be successful in getting buyers interested with their listings. I always get surprised by these queries as I am not exactly the techie type though I do have several years experience with using the internet to sell properties than most of them. In any case, I share few useful pointers even if I ended explaining to them what those meant as a huge majority of them don't even know what SEO means.

So here's my short list of tips which is not really everything (to be more accurate about it, there tons of very useful and free stuff & tutorials out there on the web) but at least will give them the proper mindset:


1. Search Engine Friendly / Easy To Search - make your site easy for search engines to index. More than 90% of all property searches starts with search engines and unless google or yahoo or bing can easily find your site and make it to a searcher's query, your site might as well be considered as non existent.


2.) Photos - People who visit a site are looking for listings, properties, reviews. Unless you have relevant & nice photos, don't ever expect people to get excited about your listings. You can load pictures directly to your site or have them hosted on a photo sharing sites such as Flickr, Picasa & Multiply and free real estate advert sites just use the photo links to have them appear on your site or blog (see sample below from Ahyer.com):

3.) Complete Property Information - At the very least your site must have basic information of the house or property such as: exact location or address, no. of bedrooms, T&B, Lot & floor area, date constructed (for house), price (if possible), etc.

4.) Information / Inquiry Capture Mechanism - Whats the point of getting people pumped up with your hot offer when they don't have the means to contact you. Email address, telephone numbers, office address (if any) are very vital. You can easily get contact data by inserting a web form either for your newsletters or property inquiries. Just be sure to tell your visitors that you will not under any circumstance, sell or rent out their email address. If you hate spam, so do your visitors.

5.) Analytics - How do you know your marketing is working or not? The only way to do that is to have stats so you can measure your marketing success or failure. You don't have to cough out serious money for this as awesome tools such as Google Analytics are free! All you have to do is create an account.

6.) Videos - Pictures are nice but videos can do much much more. Videos engage viewers more than still photos. It also presents the property in a more realistic light which can enhance your credibility as well confirm to out of town prospects that your listings are real .
 
If you don't have one or some of these features, I highly recommend you add these to your site as you may be missing out a lot of potential property buyers. As mentioned earlier, there are a lot free stuff out there in the internet and all you have to is to use your trusty search engine to find these tools.

Now if you want something serious, you can also consider investing powerful systems such as 1 Buiness System. I bought & using one myself. This website system has a great package that you may need to set up a powerful real estate site as it's a complete suite. It has:

• A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system which allows you to management existing & new leads & customers. It tracks and even records all their interactions with your site. Pretty cool huh?
• A very easy to use Content Management System (CMS) which basically the ability to update your site with new content/information, photos, videos or new pages. You don't need to be a programmer or have code skills to do this. If you know how to use MS Word and other word processing application, you are good to go!
• Forums & Blogs - you can create as many blogs and forums as you want! Real estate clients have specific needs and wants & the key to success (as you have already known) in real estate is about communication, interaction and conversation. What could be more cool than to create a forum and blog for your clients so they can have a voice? :)
• Email Marketing Campaigns - You can launch highly targeted email campaigns to your existing clients & prospects on your email list!
• Search Engine Friendly features - I am no SEO expert but it has lots of stuff that you can tweak &  making it easy for the search engines to index your content and real estate listings
• Other features that you may or may not need: Ecommerce (sell stuff online such as real estate training ebooks), Analytics (you need this!), etc.

       To see if this system is for you, why not take this baby out for a spin at 1 Business System.com. Try out all the features (after all, its free so why not make good use of it) and see if it meets your needs. You can unleash your creativity here.


      If you have other ideas to grow this list of real estate website tips, please post a comment.

Advertise On Facebook For Free...But Hurry Before The Offer Goes Pfffft!

Yep, you read that headline right. You can advertise for free using the world's largest social networking site, Facebook.

A bit on Facebook advertising
For those still new on social network advertising (like me), you can post ads targeted to Facebook members using the network's database of 400 Million members (including mine and yours if you have an account). What makes this medium so powerful in my view is that you can choose both demographics (age, sex, location, educational level, job description, etc.) as well as psychographics (lifestyles, likes, dislikes, etc.) and even their membership in the different groups.

I have launched my first ever ad with Facebook the other day and I have no complaints so far with the results. I got 15 clicks in just 2 days, which is not bad given given that I had only 20,000 impressions (I chose the CPM per thousand of impressions instead of pay per click). Now that may seem too low for you but if you used a budget of only get this ---- $1.30/day...now that's a very high return as I am promoting the site builder I wrote about - yes, I am a believer now, so much so that I signed up as an affiliate. ( I will post more on the progress of my site using the Ezprofitresults system)

Btw, here's what my ad looked like:

Realtors and real estate agents who want to launch targeted ads should try this and evaluate if it is worth it.

Free stuff
Ok so here's the free stuff. Occasionally, Facebook and its partner sponsors give out free advertisement coupons / codes to the public as part of their promotions. Well, it so happened I stumbled on this blog: www.seoflexmedia.com last night and it gave away a $50 ad coupon for Facebook. So I tried the code and you know what...it worked!! I now have an extra $50 ad credits I can use to promote my stuff and properties.

Since I am so happy with my find, I am paying it forward...the free stuff and hope all of you benefit from it the same way as I did.

So here's the code:           FB-SES-NY

Remember you need to create your Facebook advertisement first and put in your credit card details (you will be deduct something like a $1.00 for registration and space purposes) before you can activate your ad and use the promo code.

Don't worry, if you redeem the promo code for your ad placement, Facebook will not deduct it from your credit card (you may use a debit card as well as long as the issuers are Visa, Mastercard, Discovery or American Express).

Please do give it try and let me know the results. The advert code does have an expiry (mine is about 60 days) and you can only use that to place ads in Facebook.

Happy Selling!!