Check It Out: Actual Real Estate Leads via Facebook
I’ve seen some pushback lately about the value of social media as a lead generation/sales tool, and Facebook more specifically. I’ve said before that Facebook isn’t right for every business, but here’s proof that you can generate leads — real estate leads, in this case — via Facebook.
My wife posted this Facebook status update a couple weeks ago.
I don’t want to blow this out of proportion; neither one has become a client yet, but it sure looks promising. And no, this kind of thing is awfully rare — my wife isn’t landing new leads with every status update she posts.
But hey, you can actually get (real estate) leads via Facebook.
My wife is using Facebook in a very non-traditional way … all through her personal account, while basically ignoring the business page we set up. One of these days I’ll write more about what she’s doing if anyone’s interested.
Yes, Matt please do write on how your better half uses Facebook in a very non traditional way.
Matt- I’ve had some success with our real estate fan page this year as well. We had two listings that both came from FB and a buyer lead that came from FB as well. (3 closings this year.) Two of these were actually referrals from “fans” but they definately were tied to FB.
I use our FB page to promote our listings, our recent blog posts, and to curate helpful links that might be of interest to our fans. The posts that seem to get the most interaction are photo albums of professional photos of our listings and pictures of SOLD signs after we close a sale.
Traditional wisdom is not to overpromote listings, but our fans seem to love learning about listings and seeing the photos.
Good to see that people are responding to quality information, Geordie. And I’m not surprised about the photos. Heck, I click on your Twitter photos because I know the houses/properties up there are gorgeous, even though we’re not looking to buy/move. 🙂
Generating just one lead is not accurate to measure. And we need to know how long time we take in order to generate one lead.
We may take a year to generate a lead on Facebook, but we need only one day on Linkedin.
Your post is not accurate in measuring the effectiveness of Facebook in generating leads.
Facebook can work for real estate lead gen… Like any communication channel to that matter.
The real question though is what you are doing with your leads now?
We’ve seen so many folks in real estate focusing too much on lead generation while leaving lead conversion totally behind. This is true for other industries too, but in real estate especially… Many leads not ready to buy right now and need to be nurtured for months. Ask yourself these questions:
Do you connect with your leads right away (even 30 minutes delay is not ok)?
Do you provide them relevant information that are interested in?
Do you have a system that does it consistently?
If your answer to any of those questions if NO, then the chances are you’re leaving serious money on the table. You do need a system to do it consistently and a lot of patience to grow your leads.
Conversion is certainly important, Tom, but I’d disagree with your suggestion that a 30-minute delay is not okay in contacting leads. To the contrary, we’ve found that smothering people immediately when they sign up for home alerts or create an account for full MLS access isn’t a good idea. Home buyers often like to be left to their own exploring for a while and then initiate the contact when they’re ready. It’s definitely a tight balancing act, though, I’ll give you that.
Matt, thanks for sharing your experience. It’s always interesting to see what other people are doing and what’s working or not.
I still believe calling internet leads quickly works though. MIT did a study on internet leads that showed “The odds of qualifying a lead in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 21 times”. If lead is contacted after 30 minutes, chances drop even more dramatically. There are few reasons for this:
1) Their level of interest is the highest when they submit a form. Event 30 minutes later, they may think about a million other things.
2) There is a good chance they are available to talk at the moment.
3) They will remember you (it’s not often someone responds with a phone call in a minute after online inquiry).
4) “74% of all buyers and 76% of all sellers will work with the first agent they talk to” – NAR study.
Sure, some people may not be happy about your phone call, but you get a fair number of those anyway. It’s a numbers game here, you need to catch a responsive lead which is quite hard, but definitely worth the effort.