It's pretty clear that in the forum of social media domination, Facebook has become one of the biggest platforms for advertisers to take advantage of. With nearly 1.9 billion monthly worldwide active users, Facebook has been able to build access to customers at enormous scale. This means that marketers can reach pretty much anyone, anytime, anywhere.
But most Realtors aren’t taking advantage of Facebook as a paid advertising platform to build their brands and capture more leads. Are you a Realtor who has thought about using Facebook advertising, but have been afraid to pull the trigger?
Read on to understand 3 reasons why Facebook Advertising is a great complement to your marketing strategy as a Realtor.
For better or worse, Facebook is addicting and a magnet for people’s attention. According to the New York Times, the average Facebook user spends about 50 minutes per day on a social media site.
That is a staggering number considering the following excerpt from the same article:
Maybe that [50 minutes per day] doesn’t sound like so much. But there are only 24 hours in a day, and the average person sleeps for 8.8 of them. That means more than one-sixteenth of the average user’s waking time is spent on Facebook. The average time that users spend on Facebook is nearing an hour. That’s more than any other leisure activity surveyed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, with the exception of watching television programs and movies (an average per day of 2.8 hours). It’s more time than people spend reading (19 minutes); participating in sports or exercise (17 minutes); or social events (four minutes). It’s almost as much time as people spend eating and drinking (1.07 hours).”
Now just think about the fact that Facebook has roughly 162 million users in the United States alone. That means that you have an opportunity to reach roughly half of the entire US population through the Facebook Advertising platform.
If there are tons of people on this platform and they’re spending a material part of their day on the platform why aren’t you doing more to expose your brand and your services to these users?
Direct mailers were great because people check their mail every day.
TV ads were great because millions of people watched TV daily when they came home from work.
Radio ads were great because you could get marketing messages in front of people during their morning drives.
Now people spend 50 minutes of their day on Facebook, so what are you doing to capture their attention while they're on another media platform like Facebook?
Many real estate professionals fail to understand the enormous data that Facebook provides marketers. Let’s start off by talking about why Facebook is so valuable.
On the surface, it may seem like a place to post cat videos, humblebrag, or connect with others, but Facebook really is a huge repository of demographic, interest, and behavior data on ALL of its users (yes, it has found a way to sort, categorize and roll-up data on nearly 2 billion people).
Basically, everything you do on Facebook becomes a data point to Facebook about your preferences. Facebook then takes that data and allows advertisers to go in and target people based on their demographics (e.g. age, sex), interests (e.g. the pages and “things” they like), and behaviors (e.g. likely to move, rent, etc).
The articles you like, comment on and share. The pages that you like. When you fill out your profile with your age, birthplace, etc. that is tracked and aggregated as data. When you update your status to say that you’re “moving” that is tracked and aggregated as data.
More recently (around early 2015), Facebook began partnering with companies like Acxiom, which collect marketing data on consumers to start providing more insights to advertisers that fall outside of social information (e.g. what you like, share comments on) to get more “deep” data on Facebook users such as income, net worth, etc.
This has effectively expanded the type of targeting you can now do on Facebook, which only makes it an even more robust marketing platform for targeted, paid social advertising.
So as a consumer, Facebook isn’t really “free.” You’re actually giving up all of your marketing-related data to Facebook so that they can turn around and sell it to advertisers to target you based on these interests. Brilliant business model right (and a good reason why Facebook generates nearly a billion dollars of EARNINGS each quarter)?
But as a marketer, you’re really leaving a lot on the table by not taking advantage of all these robust targeting features. It’s sort of like buying a mailing list for a direct mail campaign but also knowing the demographics, interests, and behaviors of the person whose mailing address you just purchased.
Let’s take a look at some of the numbers that show that Facebook advertising is great for the Real Estate industry. When we evaluate the effectiveness of a campaign, we typically evaluate Click Through Rate (CTR - which shows what % of people are clicking on your Facebook ad), Cost Per Click (CPC - which shows what you’re spending to generate a click on a Facebook ad) and Conversion Rate (CVR - which shows the % of people who are converting - like signing up to join your email newsletter after clicking the Facebook Ad).
In the Wordstream Blog, they performed a study of their Facebook Advertising clients and received some really interesting data as it relates to the Real Estate Industry. We’ve summarized the pertinent findings below:
What this is telling us is that real estate-related Facebook Ads generate a roughly 10% higher Click Through Rate at a slightly higher cost per click. So people click on Facebook Ads more than average, but the cost for these clicks is slightly higher.
This may have something to do with the fact that the conversion rate is also higher for real estate-related Facebook Ads (by over 1%!), which makes these clicks a little more valuable.
This is generally telling me that it's a little more expensive than other industries to advertise on Facebook if you’re in Real Estate, but that advertising generates a higher than average conversion rate.
Not all industries are good candidates for Facebook Advertising, but looking at this data, it's telling us that Facebook is a pretty good place for Realtors to place ads to connect with potential customers.
This isn’t going to hold true forever though. Inevitably, as more real estate advertisers come into the Facebook ecosystem, your cost per click is going to rise.
This happens with all digital ad platforms; the cost to entry when a specific industry isn’t using the platform starts off low, but as more entrants come into the advertising platform, the cost will start to rise.
This is why it's really important that real estate professionals need to take advantage of Facebook advertising now! This cost will rise and you want to take advantage of all the lead generation from Facebook advertising before the cost to advertise gets too high!
Are you thinking about using Facebook advertising to support your real estate business? If you are, what’s keeping you from pulling the trigger? We’d love to hear your feedback!