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How to Advertise Your Home for Sale with Facebook

  • Tags: real estate marketing, selling property, how to

How to advertise your home for sale using Facebook

Cost of Using Facebook to Advertise Your Home for Sale 

How to use facebook to advertise your home for saleOption 1: DIY for free (don't pay for advertising)

Or
Pay for views or clicks. (You wouldn’t want to be spending less than $1 per day)

Note: many social media platforms don’t let you advertise unless you are a business and have a business account, which is why this article will focus on using Facebook to advertise your home.

Option 2: Pay a Professional

$50 to have someone design your ad
+ $30 -$200 per month
 
(Note: Some social media managers wont take you on as a client without a minimum guaranteed monthly spend)

Option 3: Use a real estate agent
 
Why does Facebook cost what it does?
There are lots of social media platforms out there, but for the purposes of this article I’m going to focus on the biggest and the best platform for advertising a real estate listing: Facebook.
 
Consider these facts published by Facebook:
  • Facebook has nearly 1.8 billion active users each month
  • In the US people spend 1 in every 5 minutes on Facebook or Instagram
  • People spend more time on Facebook and Instagram than the next 10 mobile platforms combined
 
With one of the largest and most engaged (addicted?) audiences in the world, it’s no wonder Facebook posted a $4 Billion dollar profit last year.
 
Why? Because one of the only ways to get your post seen by more than your friends and family is to pay for advertising, which we’ll discuss in this article.
 
Don’t want to pay? You can also get the word out there by finding some groups or pages on Facebook that will let you post an ad about selling your home. You could try property groups or local community groups. In Palm Beach, you could try something like the Palm Beach and Elanora QLD Community Facebook Page.
 
What will you get when you use Facebook to advertise your home for sale?
Post to a Facebook Group
When you post to a Facebook group, firstly the administrators may need to approve your post. If it is approved, the post will be public where it can be seen by the members. You don’t have any control about when the ad is seen, who it is seen by or how often it is seen (if you post to a group, it is likely the ad will only been seen once by group members unless it is liked or commented on – in which case it may be seen multiple times by group members and by the friends of people in the group if the group isn’t private). As more people post to the group, your post will move further down the feed. Some groups will let you repost your ad as often as you want, although I wouldn't recommend doing it too often or you'll start to annoy people who will then hide your post, or worse, report it as spam.

Aim to post your ad about once a week on a Facebook group page. I'd recommend posting a day or two before you hold an open home to generate interest and hopefully get some people to attend; and I would also recommend using new images each time you post to keep up interest and engagement with your post (instead of posting the same thing every week).
 
Posting on a Facebook group is like the online version of sticking a flyer up on the noticeboard at school. You stick it up and hope someone will see it. It can work, it can also get lost in the clutter. The best part is it's one of the only ways you can freely advertise your home for sale.
 
Create a Facebook ad
Creating a Facebook ad is your best option for getting your post seen. It is also one of the easiest and cheapest options you have to advertise your home.
 
With a Facebook ad, you can choose what kind of audience you want to target based on:
  • Facebook advertisingage
  • gender
  • geography
  • interests.
 
For example, you can choose for your ad to only be shown to people who live in the postcode 4221 and are interested in real estate.
 
Or you can choose for your ad to only be shown to people who live on the Gold Coast, and are between 30 – 60 years old.

Facebook gives you a lot of flexibility, so you can be as detailed or broad as you like (although if your audience is too small Facebook wont let your ad run).
 
You can choose the maximum amount of money you want to spend and how long you want your ad to run for. For example, you can choose to spend a maximum of $10 advertising your home over 5 days, or a maximum of $1000 advertising it for a month – it’s up to you and your budget. If you’re having an auction for example, you might want to spend say $100 over 2 – 3 weeks in the lead up to the auction date.
 
Facebook won’t charge you for what isn’t spent. The average ad will cost you $0.50 - $3.00 per click or per 1000 impressions, so if you want to spend a maximum of $10 over 5 days, and your ad is costing you $1 per click, your ad will stop running when 10 people click your ad or when 5 days is over – whichever comes first.
 
At First National Palm Beach, we run image and video ads on the properties we sell for anywhere from 1 – 3 weeks at a time for between $25 - $100 per week. That will get us around 1,000 – 3,000 video views, and/or a score of comments, likes and shares (and sometimes a few phone calls!).
 
Do you need Faceook to sell your home?
Yes, but not yet.
In the future, social media could be just as important to the real estate industry as realestate.com.au or domain.com.au. We are already seeing more and more real estate agents using social media to advertise properties, chatting with buyers on Facebook Messenger and some are even ‘going live’ on Facebook at open homes and auctions to build interest from audiences.
 
But social media marketing is a nice-to-have rather than a must have right now.
 
If you’re short on money and time (who isn’t!), I would prioritise getting a good ad on realestate.com.au or domain.com.au over a social media ad.
 

>>>Read the next article in this series on Print Media

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You may also be interested in:
How to Advertise Your Home for Sale with Facebook
palmbeachfn.com.au
First National Palm Beach
15 Palm Beach Ave Palm Beach, Queensland 4221
Phone: 07 5559 9600
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