In the second of my two-part series on real estate social media marketing, I look at why Facebook paid advertising is a necessity if you want to gain maximum exposure and build relevant audiences for your real estate brand.
Read part 1 first, Facebook marketing – how to reach more people for free.
Anyone who uses social media as part of their real estate marketing strategy knows that Facebook is by far the most effective social channel. But the days of being able to promote your real estate business successfully for free on Facebook have well and truly passed us by. In the words of social media marketing guru Mari Smith: “Organic reach is so 2012”!
Any reputable digital marketer will tell you that if you’re serious about your Facebook real estate marketing, these days you need to Pay to Play.
Facebook real estate is in short supply
If you think of spaces in the Facebook feed as real estate, it’s easy to see that there is intense competition for a very limited amount of space. 293,000 status updates and 136,000 photos are posted on Facebook every single minute – and that number is growing all the time. Facebook now has over three billion monthly active users. So the more connections you have, the less room you have in your News Feed for everyone’s posts to be visible.
“Competition for people’s attention is intense – Facebook users post 500 million Stories and 3.5 billion Reels daily across Facebook and Instagram combined.”
Facebook, therefore, has to give priority to the posts it thinks you will most likely want to see. There just isn’t enough space for everyone’s content to be shown, so posts from your friends and family are given priority over content from the brand or company pages you follow.
Most posts from your real estate agent Fan Page are unlikely to be seen by your followers, and reaching your fans is becoming harder as Facebook introduces more features to encourage us to pay to reach our target audience.
Warning: your real estate marketing content may disappear
Following a trend started by Snapchat and WeChat, Facebook moved different types of content into separate Feeds on both its website and mobile app. Facebook currently organises its content as follows:
The Main Feed (Home): is a “Discovery Engine” powered by AI. It mixes posts from your friends and followed Pages or Groups with a high volume of recommended content (roughly 30%) from accounts you don’t follow, but match your interests.
The “Feeds” Tab: Facebook introduced a dedicated Feeds tab in the shortcut bar. This lets you toggle between specific, chronological views for the Friends, Groups, and Pages you actually follow.
Reels (formerly Video): All video content, whether long- or short-form, is now unified under a single video experience called Reels. Reels are favoured by Meta and currently receive the largest distribution, i.e. are shown to more people than other types of content.
Explore on Instagram: The Explore tab remains a core part of Instagram, serving as the primary place for users to discover new photos and videos from accounts they don’t follow.
In summary, today, Meta uses its main algorithm to decide which Page posts are “high quality” enough to appear in your primary feed. With limited space in a user’s feed, the only way to reach people on Facebook and Instagram is to focus on quality content and spend a few dollars a day advertising these posts.
Why Facebook paid advertising makes sense
Organic reach for page content has still dropped dramatically. Today, you’re lucky if your posts reach 100 people without needing to pay. So it’s worth putting a few ad dollars behind your posts, which can quickly increase a post’s reach to 1,000 people or more in a matter of hours, and 15,000 to 60,000 in a week, depending on the content type. As mentioned above, Reels reach the most people because Meta favours video content.
Even if you don’t have much social media advertising experience, this is a realistic figure to aim for. Even better, the people who see your posts won’t be random – they’ll be a targeted audience who are highly likely to be interested in your real estate services or your client’s property.
“Putting a few ad dollars behind your posts, can increase a posts’ reach to several thousand people in a matter of hours.”
My team and I know how to get our real estate clients’ content in front of every homeowner in their area because we run Facebook advertising campaigns day in and day out. So if you are struggling to achieve my recommended results, contact me for training and support.
What’s the cost of paid Facebook marketing?
You may think boosting your Facebook and Instagram posts is an unnecessary cost, but it is still relatively cheap compared to many other forms of advertising. As much as we enjoy complaining about the cost of advertising on the real estate portals, in a few years, we’re likely to be reminiscing about how cheap it once was to advertise on Meta! Ad prices will rise over time as competition on Facebook from other real estate agents in your area increases – this is why it’s essential to create a Facebook ad budget as a priority now. You can start building your audience while prices are still relatively low.
“Create a Facebook ad budget as a priority. Start building your audience while prices are still relatively low.”
Your budget doesn’t have to be enormous. It depends entirely on how many people you want to reach. You can see an estimation of this figure before you publish your ad, so you can adjust your budget accordingly. Naturally, the more people you aim to reach, the more expensive your ad will be.
You will never reach 100 per cent of your target audience with a single ad, because the cost of your ad multiplies exponentially as you increase its reach toward the maximum target audience. So it’s essential to stick to an affordable budget and boost each and every post, so that over the course of a few weeks, everyone in your neighbourhood will have seen you multiple times.
You can’t achieve this level of exposure with printed cards through letterboxes, which is why Meta is such a popular advertising platform. The cost per person seeing you is just a few cents on Metta, whereas it’s dollars when printing and distributing, and you reach far fewer people.
Be savvy with your real estate Facebook marketing
As with all types of digital marketing, the aim of social media marketing is ultimately to bring audiences across to your website. Once on your website, you can use retargeting to follow them around and become familiar with them. Retargeting is the best way to turn website visitors into enquiries or subscribers so that you can also reach them with email and SMS campaigns.
It’s worth remembering that your audiences on Facebook, just like your audiences on search engines and real estate portals, are not your own – you still have to create appealing marketing messages and reasons to give you their contact details in order to convert them into contacts in your database. Relying entirely on social platform audiences is like building your house on rented land – the lease may expire, and the cost will almost certainly increase.
“Social platforms are like building your house on rented land – the lease may expire, and the cost will almost certainly increase.”
Spending money with Meta’s paid advertising allows you to pay to acquire new clients and subscribers – it’s essential to monitor your Facebook and Instagram campaigns and work out how much it costs you to bring each person over to your website, and then convert them into a subscriber or enquirer. You can also compare your Facebook advertising costs to other paid advertising campaigns you run to ascertain where your real estate marketing budget is best spent.
Get the most out of your social media advertising
If you don’t want to boost every post, but still want to get the most out of your advertising dollars on Facebook and Instagram, you should put money behind your most compelling content. Not “get a free appraisal” message, as that’s too desperate and what every other agent advertises, and I can tell you now it will yield no leads.
Instead, use educational content about listing a property or market updates. You can also be a good citizen and share insights about what’s great or what’s happening in your local community. This way, you don’t sound too salesy, and you have the best chance of seeing a return on your investment. In summary, make sure your high-quality content reaches more of the right people.
There’s also no reason why you shouldn’t share your content across multiple social platforms. Save your advertising dollars for Facebook and, at the same time, make the most of the free exposure currently offered by other social networks, such as LinkedIn, TikTok and Twitter.
The social media landscape is forever changing. It’s harder than ever to gain any kind of traction through organic reach. But Facebook and Instagram ads still have a relatively cost-effective ROI, as long as you make an effort to drive these leads to your website and grow your own audiences from there.
Don’t sit on the sidelines as Meta continues to evolve its features, content types and advertising platform. You should be making the most of current social media advertising opportunities to build your brand as a real estate agent, buyer’s agent, or any other type of real estate business or agency.
If you’d like to talk to me about paid advertising across the many digital and social media channels, I offer a free one-hour consultation. Book a time today, whilst the benefits of paid advertising are fresh in your mind!
