A few months ago, I wrote an article about Social Media and the impact it’s starting to have on the real estate industry.
Since I wrote this article, we’ve sold a property for $950,000 (which was a record price for this particular suburb) and the buyer came directly from one of our targeted campaigns on ‘Facebook’.
What’s interesting is that this campaign attracted more than 35,000 views (specifically targeted to buyers in a geographical area) that were known to Facebook to be searching properties on the major real estate portals.
Of this number of views, around 10% actually watched the property video for a period of at least 30 seconds (and from our research, we’ve discovered that if they watch it for at least 30 seconds, around 40% of these people will watch it through to the end of the video (which was around 4 minutes)….that’s almost 1500 people that likely watched the entire video.
From the statistics Facebook provides us, around 500 people ‘liked’ the video (that’s genuine ‘likes’…not paid ‘likes’ (for those that know what this means), approximately 300 commented on it or ‘tagged’ someone else into the video and around 150 ‘shared’ the video with others.
Keeping in mind that one single ‘share’ means that this video could have infiltrated someone’s entire network of friends (which is a figure hard to estimate but from our research, likely to be approximately 500 people) and it’s easy to see how this form of marketing is very cost-effective right now (and I stress ‘right now’ as we believe that ‘Facebook’ marketing costs will multiply by at least 5-10 times within a few years).
The entire cost of this campaign was a little more than $200 (which I paid myself since Facebook is still a little ‘experimental’ at this stage and from the eyes of a property owner, a marketing medium which is a little ‘out of the box’.
We compared this with www.realestate.com.au … the main source of leads for real estate agents in Queensland….
The cost of the campaign here was around $1450 and from the figures provided in the back end of their website, this property attracted approximately 1600 online views (which was around 350% more views than properties in this area normally attract).
We believe that many of these views were likely a result of buyers seeing the home on ‘Facebook’ and then researching it on www.realestate.com.au to see more of the home…so our conclusion is that the ‘Facebook’ campaign likely contributed a reasonable percentage of these views on www.realestate.com.au .
Now I’m not here to be an advocate of ‘Facebook’ and bag www.realestate.com.au but there’s no question that marketing property in today’s digital age requires a little more thought and effort than just simply loading it onto the internet and waiting for a buyer to come along.
I haven’t yet mentioned www.domain.com.au and due to the fact that this site is owned by ‘Fairfax’, it’s long been the website of choice for buyers in Sydney and Melbourne (with www.realestate.com.au running a close second).
In our market, we’ve noticed that www.domain.com.au is slowly gaining ground on www.realestate.com.au and we believe that this is due to a number of reasons…
- www.domain.com.au has made a concerted effort to push into South-East Queensland with large scale advertising campaigns in the media
- www.domain.com.au generally leads the way in new innovative technologies to its’ site and mobile devices and as a result, seems to be particularly popular with buyers in their twenties or younger.
- www.domain.com.au has (funnily enough) the largest online presence on ‘Facebook’ than any major real estate portal in the entire world (with www.realestate.com.au running in third position on a global scale).
So there’s a few good reasons why any seller should (in our opinion) consider a presence on www.domain.com.au .
From our statistics, we attract around 65% of our online enquiries through www.realestate.com.au and around 25% of our online enquiries through www.domain.com.au .
Our own website (surprisingly) brings us around 8% of our online views and we market any property (at our expense) on 14 websites that bring us a combined total of the other 2% of online enquiries.
So back to Facebook…
Why is ‘Facebook’ so important moving forwards and why would any agent bother with it if most people that shop for properties view the major online portals?
This is a fascinating question and to answer it, an agent needs to have a complete understanding of how www.realestate.com.au works and how ‘Facebook’ works.
Next week, I’ll share with you how we attracted the buyer to the property mentioned above and why this couple were never going to see it on a major real estate portal.
It’s an interesting case study so as always, Happy Listing & Happy Selling until then.