A social media consultancy firm in Australia recently conducted a study of more than 500 real estate Facebook pages and reported that according to their findings, real estate agents and agencies are not doing social media the right way.

A lot of real estate agencies have been incorporating search engine optimization to their websites. In fact, for US-based real estate websites, Zillow and Realtor, they even made a blog or news section for their websites in order to communicate better with clients. Moreover, the more their clients share their articles, the more page views the websites get. And the better they are ranked on search engines such as Google and Yahoo.

However, this is different from how Facebook and other social networks are being used by the real estate agencies. According to REB Online, the report found out that agents, and agencies as a whole, has been posting the ‘wrong content at the wrong time.’ Such report was initiated and released by an Austrialian social media consultancy social status and PR agency, Impact Communications Austrialia.

According to the firm, they have analyzed a total of 53,111 posts from 560 real estate Facebook pages. And the analysis of the said data found that the most popular time of posting any content is on Fridays between 9AM and 11AM, despite having minimal engagements. And that the best time that would give them peak engagements are from 9AM to 12PM on Mondays, 5PM to 8PM on Tuesdays, 5AM to 8AM on Wednesdays, 1PM to 4PM on Thursdays, 5PM to 8PM on Fridays, and 1PM to 4PM on Saturdays and Sundays.

Articles with images are also most likely to increase the average page views by 94 percent. Moreover, photos increase average audience engagement to 0.37 percent.

Some of the tips given by the firm on the report are as follows:

- A smaller number of fans with high engagement is more valuable to a brand than a large number of fans with little or no engagement;
- Create conversations that are of interest to your target Facebook users and empower them to do so as well;
- Content should always educate, entertain or help your target audiences; and,
- Businesses should ensure posts are accompanied with human-like commentary or insight into the content shared

What are your thoughts about how real estate agencies handle their social media accounts? Are they really not that well-versed as to these platforms?