Likes, Comments and Shares Oh My! The marketing strategy team at Nancy Yang’s REMAX Results saw the answer of how to grow Nancy’s sphere of influence. It was staring straight at our faces from our fingertips — Revive The Dusty Facebook Page.
Facebook has over 2.5 billion active monthly users, with the growing demographics of new users being 50 years old and older. Each of us are quite active on our personal pages, but taking a step back Nancy’s professional page needed to be revamped.
Nancy, like many real estate agents, fell into the trap of hiring a third-party marketing service that auto posts her daily professional page with odds and ends of real estate facts. Taking just a couple of minutes of data analysis, we found that there were few engagements from these types of posts.
Not Just Video … But Live! Video
There’s the popular saying that goes ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’ and now an addendum to that saying ‘Video is worth a thousand pictures.’ It didn’t take long for us to admit that we love video, our children love videos, namely YouTube. Increased bandwidth has made video streaming and content creation a mere fantasy just a decade ago.
Video is also dynamic, versus a static photo. Video adds a relationship factor of ‘know, like and trust’ because of sound and personality; and when you’re dealing with a house transaction you need quite a bit of know, like and trust.
So we spent a few weeks watching tutorials and learning from some of the best online marketers such as Neil Patel, Amy Porterfield and Wes McDowell and implementing their strategies. Want to know the #1 rule? No one cares what you look like, people only want to see value.
So, we bit the bullet, grabbed the smartphone and pressed the Live blue button. Needless to say, the first video was a learning experience. Before making the video, we thought of the most pressing or popular questions people would want to know regarding real estate. Using Google Trends and ‘People Also Ask’ on the search engine results page really gave us a good framework.
Added little features such as subtitles, that Facebook auto-generates for you, and custom thumbnails really helps grab the viewer’s attention.
Taking It To The Next Level: Collaboration Not Competition.
This is where we believe we are taking our Facebook page in the right direction. Facebook strength is that it connects us to the next person, and the next and the next. Being a realtor is also about connecting to clients and other professionals in this web-like industry. It truly is about building a relationship.
So, what does that mean? In all of our videos we take great measure to mention and tag another person of interest in a positive light. We then privately message that person for their permission and if they want to share the video on their feed.
Here’s a real example. With over 15 years of experience, Nancy has a great Rolodex of professional contacts. One of the first things a buyer needs before seeing homes is to get pre-approved. So, in one of our videos we talked about Loan Brokers vs Bank. Nancy mentioned three great loan officers she works with. We messaged the loan brokers and they were more than happy to get coverage and the tag … and shared on their page as well.
Where COVID-19 Fits in All of This
Needless to say, almost everybody we know has had a direct lifestyle impact from the COVID-19 pandemic. My head is still spinning at how fast everything unfolded.
As quickly as the news came out, we used that opportunity for a Facebook Live! to inform Minnesotans of the drastic changes to help reduce the spread of COVID-19 from the Minnesota Association of Realtors. The biggest change for instance was the suspension of holding open houses.
We also took the time to inform viewers of pending sales and steps to take properly list or see homes with the new precautions.
Our average views per video are about 400.
Taking It One Step Further
Because of the video content creation and being more comfortable in front of the camera and because of the limited showcase of houses, we thought we could use online technology to its greater potential: virtual house tour!
Nancy scopes out houses that are popular with her potential buyers. She then asks the listing agent for permission to do a video, virtual tour of the home. With video editing we properly disclose the house, the listing agent as well as tagging and sharing the video. From then on we hope to both capture not just our own audience but the listing agents audience as well. A win/win from using online marketing strategy.
We, at Nancy Yang’s Remax Results Team, know that this is challenging, but we also know that challenging things usually yield great results. We live in such a fantastic time where so much information can happen so fast and we intend to use all the tools that can help us, help our clients.
