How to Increase Lead Generation with Facebook? | Ultimate Guide
Get high-quality buyer and seller leads on Facebook with organic and targeted Ads
Like it or not, social media is integral to generating business leads. The real estate leads Facebook can offer are unique due to the platform’s place and role within social media. Currently, Facebook leads in entertaining, connecting, and helping people do business. Its 2.7 billion monthly active users comprise 74.17% of all social media users. Let’s learn how to increase lead generation with Facebook.
This does not mean realtors should use Facebook as a venue to find people who are looking to buy a house. The traditional sales pitch, mainly on social media platforms, is ineffective.
People log on to Facebook to be entertained and see what’s happening with their friends, not to be sold to. Please do not treat your friends on Facebook like they were purchased from a leads harvester. They chose you as their friend. Be one.
Organic Lead Generation
Content marketing and social media marketing are not unknown. No longer a blue ocean strategy, the majority of marketers are comfortable with a variety of platforms. Realtors have plenty of savvy competition, generating leads by producing valuable information. The competition is tough. Therefore, many realtors take paid measures to get ahead of their rivals.
Although paid marketing campaigns work, we do not recommend relying on them alone. One still needs to have a solid content and social media marketing base through organic leads. Once there, they can boost their campaigns with paid marketing.
For those still beginning to learn the ropes of social media in real estate and Facebook, we have gathered a list of ideas to employ for organic real estate lead generation. This is a starting point. With some inspiration and creativity, realtors can develop their own ideas and sift out all the real estate leads Facebook has to offer.
Read More: Facebook for Real Estate 2020: The Ultimate Guide for REALTORS®
Focus on Inbound Marketing, Not Solely on Engagement
People love getting likes and comments on social media, which makes sense. This increases engagement. However, many agents who fail at using Facebook successfully for their business focus too much on getting likes. Stop going solely for likes and engagement. Go for relevance. A click-through to your website is worth more than a few likes or comments. Focus on creating value. Whatever you do, remember that:
Your number 1 goal on Facebook is to get people into your emailing list.
Read More: How to Use Your Market Update Video on your Facebook Newsfeed
Share Valuable Content
Your job on Facebook involves helping your audience. Promoting your services and listings is tempting, but as a general rule of thumb, for every ten posts you share on social media, eight should share content that benefits your audience.
Value is Audience Focused
Content and social media marketing require realtors to market through content that appeals to their audience. It should be beneficial and entertaining.
You might wonder what is in it for you. Well, you will be helping your audience while proving yourself to be an expert in real estate. When you create value, you increase the likelihood of your audience rewarding you with their business later.
Join Facebook Groups
Facebook groups provide users a way to connect to, interact with, and contribute to others with the same interests. Members of Facebook groups share content related to the group’s topic and try to help one another.
By joining Facebook groups, you will find people with the exact needs and interests. You can grow and cultivate your social network.
If you want to learn about Facebook ads for real estate from scratch, you can read our article about Facebook ads for real estate
Using Groups to Your Advantage
Groups are not designed for realtors to find real estate leads on Facebook. People with common interests may be from the same neighborhood, city, etc. But this does not mean that they want to be sold.
Unless the group’s name clearly states so, members are not there to be sold to. Instead, most are there to find information. Your job is to join groups where your target audience is and then contribute. To be courteous and helpful.
Share valuable information. This should be information they search for online, not “information” that leads to a sales pitch.
If group members have questions, go ahead, introduce yourself, and help them. Prove you are the expert who can be trusted with your great answers. You can offer further help if they are interested in telling them to feel free to contact you should they need further assistance.
By contributing to Facebook groups in a constructive and supportive manner, you present yourself as a reliable and helpful agent who can be trusted to produce the same level of help in business.
Hunt Real Estate Leads on Facebook by Keywords
Sometimes, narrowing your focus is as easy as finding the proper keyword search, easyagentpro.com has suggested a nifty trick to find real estate leads on Facebook.
People these days tend to share their life on social media. This certainly includes buying or selling a house. And as Facebook tends to include a wider variety of friends and family in demographics, this is even more true on this platform.
This fact can be used by realtors if they know how to find these posts among the 350 million posts that are shared every day.
Using Keywords To Your Benefit:
All you need to do is search for: [Your farming area] + [Keywords indicative that the user is likely to move].
Possible Keywords:
- House hunting
- Buying a house
- House buying
- New House
- Moving
Then, set the search results for “POST.”
Alternatively, you can search for the keyword and narrow the location by the “Tagged Location” search options.
You might be tempted to use keywords like “open house” and “selling a house” as you think they would be used by users searching for open houses or selling their homes. But to make this trick work best, you need to use keywords exclusive to the home buyer and ensure other users, like agents, are not using them.
It is not far-fetched to think that an agent would share a post on Facebook with the keyword “open house” in the description. Your search phrase will look like “West Vancouver buying a house.”
This will take a little bit of time and patience as you come across agents and realtors promoting their business, but if you use the right keywords, you will eventually be able to find some real estate leads on Facebook.
With practice, you will also improve as you find more exclusive keywords people looking to buy a house are using.
Create Facebook Groups
This one is similar to the point mentioned at the beginning of this section. However, here you are, creating Facebook groups and adding people who have sought your help or inquired about listings. These qualified real estate leads on Facebook won’t mind being sold to. They are the ones who requested assistance.
Here, you can promote your active listings, just-sold cases, coming-up properties, etc. It won’t hurt to post some educational and informational content to add value to the group.
Posting something on Facebook will show up on your friends or your group members’ news feeds. If they comment on or like the post, their friends will be able to see it.
If the post shares valuable enough content, more and more people will be able to see it, attracting more people to join your group or add you as a friend. Who knows, maybe your post will be so interesting it goes viral!
Go Live
Using Facebook Live allows realtors to improve one of the most critical aspects of their brand: Trust. Getting personal with your audience has always been one of the most influential factors, as has how strong a connection you create with your audience and to what extent they trust you. After all, people will not do business with people whom they don’t trust or, even worse, are not familiar with.
Facebook Live is a feature recently added to the platform that allows users to host live video broadcasts to their friends. The one great thing about Facebook Live is that your audience can have real-time interaction with you.
They can ask questions, state concerns, and establish a more personal relationship with you. Your job as a realtor is to address their issues and concerns and try to be as helpful as possible.
The Live Open House
Another case where Facebook Live can be beneficial is hosting virtual open houses. You will need to host such events on your cellphone as you will move around the house and show the property to the audience. It is a little bit harder to pull off as you will need to take care of the quality of the sound in case you get far from the phone. It works best to assign someone to tell you what your audience is talking about in life so that you can provide comments and answers.
People love virtual open houses. And they have proved especially useful during the pandemic (which has forced people to stay home). It is more convenient for you as well. When you host a virtual open house, it is done once, but many people can watch simultaneously. Furthermore, after you finish the broadcast, you can save the video and share it on your timeline so others who did not make the live version can watch it later.
Encourage Referrals
When consumers pay for a product or service they have not used before; they trust past customers’ ideas and comments more than what the owner/producer of services and products says.
This is called social proof, and it plays a vital role in how a service or product does in the market. That’s why user reviews or testimonials are so critical.
The real estate leads Facebook provides are heavily based on social proof. Ask satisfied clients for permission to use their glowing testimonials on your Facebook business page.
Seller Real Estate Leads with Facebook Ads
Finding seller leads in real estate is more complicated than finding those looking to buy a home. However, those happy in their home right now might one day decide to move into a bigger or smaller house for different reasons like downsizing for retirement or upgrading for a newborn. When that happens, it is too late to start gaining their trust and turning them into clients. They might use Zillow or other platforms to sell their property or find a client.
Therefore, to get those seller leads, you must make them remember you. It would be best if you were on top of their mind for the day they need your services. They will be your clients before they can think of others.
Home Valuation
The best marketing offer agents have to generate seller leads is home valuation. It appeals to many people, even those who have not considered selling their homes. After all, one wouldn’t mind finding out how much he or she can sell their home for, even just out of curiosity. Once they find out the answer, selling their home becomes more vital, and they become unqualified leads.
Home valuation ads on Facebook targeted to a landing page on your website can help you get home-selling prospects’ contact information. Invaluable information that makes up most of what agents need to do business.
Your Roomvu agent profile offers a home valuation feature on the main page. You will get the contact information of visitors who have clicked on your ad for home valuation with no effort.
Go with Games
Facebook is used for business on a massive scale. However, people do not log on to it to read about real estate; most do not. This makes promoting your real estate business on Facebook hard if you go with direct sales. By default, generating leads for sellers is more complex than for buyers. To work around both issues, here is an excellent idea being employed by some realtors.
You essentially share a post featuring a prize for a sort of competition (like guessing the price for a listing). The prize will cost you money, but in return, it will motivate people to take the post more seriously and comment on it. You might wonder how this can generate real estate leads on Facebook.
Here is the deal: audience engagement increases once you put a prize on the game. People start to share, like, and comment on the post. Now you need to send a direct message to each person who has commented on the post. Why? Because many are probably interested in real estate.
Empowering Sellers
A key factor in generating seller leads is gaining their trust. Using old-fashioned methods and lines like we buy your house with cash will not help you much. What you need to do in Facebook Ads to generate some seller leads is to offer help with the selling process. Like offering to help them make the most money selling their home and making it so that people can opt-in by a landing page where they can submit their contact information like their email address.
Now you have some seller leads for yourself, and you are almost sure they are interested in selling their house or are thinking about it. Once you have their contact information, you can nurture them through follow-up emails.
Buyer leads with Facebook Ads.
Generating buyer’s leads is more accessible than seller leads as every agent in your area is probably looking for home sellers resulting in the cost of home-selling keywords’ clicks soaring. However, home-buying keywords are still not the blue ocean you wish for.
Banks also target such keywords to attract home buyers and turn them into customers. So the competition is pretty high. Therefore, to win those prospects and turn them into leads, realtors need to bid higher than the competition and, as a result, need to set aside a considerable budget.
But you wouldn’t be reading this article if you were willing to splurge on Google ads for buyers’ leads, would you? Probably not.
The alternative to the fierce Google ads competition is Facebook ads, as they are relatively cheap. What’s even better is that the targeting feature of Facebook makes it pretty easy to narrow down your target audience and aim at those willing to move to your farming area.
Here are some tips to remember while using Facebook ads to target home buyers and generate real estate leads Facebook has to offer.
Incorporate a Helpful Offer in The Ad
Homebuyers do extensive research online before buying a home. They usually surf the internet to find information about the neighborhood they plan to move to and check out the properties available. There are many topics a home buyer might be interested in, such as:
- Insider information about the community and its vibe
- A list of local amenities and facilities
- Information about the local schools
- How to get a mortgage?
- Listed homes available in the area and their price range
- The costs and hidden costs involved in the buying process
- Recently sold homes in the area
- Most popular and highest-rated realtors (ignore this one-off for the sake of this article)
What your ad offers should answer some of these questions to appear valuable and helpful. Otherwise, why would anyone click on it?
Make Your Ads Highly Targeted
Facebook Ads Manager allows businesses to narrow down the audience of their ads to the very specific niche they aim at. Incorporating these features will minimize the number of irrelevant audiences and increase your conversion rates. Go through different metrics and choose the best options in your niche criteria.
- Geographic area
- Age
- Income
- Behavior
- Interest
- Demographics
Make Landing Pages the Destination of Your Facebook Ads
Getting clicks and traffic from Facebook ads is great, but what you do with these leads matters most. It would be best to define a specified path for the leads that drives them forward in your sales funnel, although it does not mean trying to sell to them right there.
It would be best if you had landing pages to facilitate the process and make things simple and easy for the leads. Landing pages are particular pages on your website with one specific and defined goal: providing visitors with free and valuable information in exchange for their contact information.
The three main types of landing pages:
- Home Search
- Home valuation
- Free Content
All these three landing pages offer visitors valuable information. You will give them away for free, but consider them an investment that will pay off later. Their conversion rate, benefits, and drawbacks differ, and you should choose them based on your needs and your potential to implement the landing page.
For example, a home valuation landing page will require you to spend some time and provide the visitor with appropriate answers regarding how much their house is worth. This is extra work, and you need to spend your valuable time. On the other hand, you might go with an instant home valuation, which automatically gives a rough estimate for the property in question.
360 Videos / Multiple Photos
Most real estate ads on Facebook include a single photo of the property. That sounds enough for most realtors, but buying is a complicated process in which customers initially recognize a need. After going through many stages of analysis and assessment, they finally make a purchase decision.
By using ads, you are at the first step in getting your audience’s attention, and a single photo may not even get you started. A single photo may not even appeal to excitement and look like another boring ad.
To make your ad appeal to your audience (assuming you have done your homework and have your target audience chosen correctly), you need to make it appealing. The online space is packed to the brim with single-shot photos. It would be best if you offered something different. How? Providing them with valuable information gives your audience a clear idea of what the listings look like.
A 360 video or photo allows the audience to explore the house thoroughly, something a photo will never be able to achieve. This enables them to get an idea of the house’s overall look and lets them decide if they need to see more (contact you). A single photo often fails to generate enough interest and will not make it worth the money you have paid for the ad.
Go with Carousel Ads
When you pay to advertise listings on Facebook, counting on one photo of the property does not make sense. Assuming you reach your target audience considering buying a home, including more photos of the property gives a clearer idea of how the property looks and increases the chances of ad clicks and eventual clients.
Another essential tip to remember that applies to all the photos you use in your real estate business is to always focus on quality photography. It may seem convenient to grab your phone and take a couple of shots while you are at the property and then share them as a part of your marketing efforts or even Facebook ads. However, sharing low-quality, out-of-focus images can do more harm than good.
It is always wise to invest in professional photography for your real estate business to leave a great first impression on your target audience through Facebook ads. Poor-quality photos with your phone’s camera won’t make it worthwhile and, even worse, will deter prospects who would contact you to inquire about the property had you used better shots.
High-quality Carousel ads allow you to present more than one property in specific neighborhoods. When your audience browses through different photos in one carousel ad, they are likelier to like something than checking out single photo ads.
Promoting Posts vs. Constructing an Ad
When thinking of using Facebook Ads, agents have two options to choose from:
- Promote a post
- Create an Ad
Although they both serve agents with promoting business, they are slightly different. Promoting posts seems more organic and does not make the audience feel they are being sold to. It provides valuable content and empowers the reader, creating trust and connection. Promoting a helpful post that has gotten many likes and comments acts like social proof and leaves a great impression on readers, making them trust the agent.
On the other hand, constructing an ad tends to have a more significant immediate impact and translates directly to campaign goals. Choosing the promotion type (boosting or creating ads) is like choosing between long-term and short-term outcomes. Depending on your social media strategy, you can choose either. In the ideal scenario, a combination of both produces excellent results.
roomvu Facebook Automation Calendar
To help real estate agents with their Facebook marketing, we have created a solution that aims to take care of both the content and it across Facebook. It is as easy as pressing a button.
Agents need to keep it consistent with accurate and valuable content to make it work on social media. We all know that it is not an easy task. Even if you find time for social media, creating content that caters to the needs of your customers needs a lot of skills, time, and accurate data. roomvu’s all-on-one calendar takes care of them all.
Join now and start your social media presence today. Wait no longer. As every day passes, you miss your chances of getting leads on social media!
Takeaway
Facebook is the king of social media, at least for now. People log on to Facebook to unwind, relax, and see what their friends are doing. However, there is some serious business going on on the platform. Like SEM (Search Engine Marketing), social media marketing offers both organic and paid lead generation portions, which can be employed to promote business.
It does not matter if you choose organic leads; either way, stay away from trying to sell your business directly to your audience on the platform. Even through ads, make your post valuable by including information that addresses the needs of your audience and helps them.
3 Comments