I am Jeff

While I’m not a huge fan of marketing your listings on Facebook to begin with, I definitely wouldn’t do it this way:

I received this message tonight from a local agent (whom I’ve technically never met), and decided it would make a perfect example of how to avoid a potentially embarrassing situation.  You see, by sending this listing out as a message to all your friends you run the risk of someone leaving a comment that you may not want others to see. What most people don’t realize is that when sending a message out to a group of people, the “reply” button is automatically replaced with a “reply all” button.  Therefore anything someone thinks they’re sending back to you as a private reply instantly gets emailed to everyone else on that list.

Imagine if your client was one of the people in that list (because naturally you want to show them you’re actually marketing their property) and someone sent a message back saying something along the lines of “I toured that dump yesterday, and it smelled like there were dead raccoons under the floorboards”.  Think that may be an embarrassing situation that could have been avoided?

My preferred method of marketing listings on Facebook: show or tell something interesting about the home.  Here’s a good example from another local agent:

There’s a couple things going on here.  First, it’s not your typical automated syndication directly from Postlets.com. The agent actually wrote up a blog post of her own about the property and linked back to her blog. She benefits by getting the link and traffic back to her site, which has potential lead capture built into it using a good IDX platform. Visitors may find one of her other listings, or begin using her property search and convert into a lead. You never know…

She also put some thought into the little commentary above the post, letting her friends know what is so interesting about this specific property, and why it’s worth taking a look at. So many times I see things like “check out my new listing” or “open house-sunday-1-3pm”. Those messages aren’t really that compelling.

I think in the end, it comes down to knowing your audience, and figuring out the best possible way to connect with them. Social media is a great way to connect, you’ve just got to put a little more thought into it instead of just blasting your message out to anyone who will listen.