There is no doubt that social media has now become a huge part of people's lives and even businesses and industries, just like real estate. More than providing a platform that connects friends and families, the potential of social media in helping industries improve in one way or another is also becoming more evident. But how is the real estate industry keeping up in terms of taking advantage of the power of social media? Nick Bendel of Reb Online reports on how the industry should improve on this aspect.
Impact Communications Australia, a social media consultancy social status and PR agency conducted an analysis on how real estate agents and firms fair in their utilization of social media. Based on the said report, a significant number of agents can actually improve more on their local marketing specifying the need to post the right contents at the right time.
After studying 560 real estate Facebook pages and analyzing 53,111 posts, Friday turned as the popular time for agencies to post their contents between 9am and 11am - even though the said period has a low audience engagement rate.
Monday turned out to have the peak engagement between 9am and 12pm. Tuesday comes second between 5pm and 8pm, Wednesday 5am to 8am, Thursday, 1pm to 4pm, Friday 5pm to 8pm, Saturday, 1pm to 4pm, and the lowest is Sunday between 1pm to 4pm.
Most of the posts contained 70.6% images and this is considered a low rate given that "including authentic images in a Facebook content strategy is imperative to success", according to the report.
"Images accompanying articles increase the average views by 94 per cent, and photos increase the average Facebook audience engagement rate from 0.27 per cent (plain text) to 0.37 per cent (for photos)," it said.
The report also included the type of material that the pages used as well as the corresponding engagement rate for each based on the top 10 real estate pages that were included in the analysis.
News had the most engagement rate of 7.19% yet it only consisted 8% of the pages' posts. At 25%, property information was the major content in the posts and has 3.36% engagement rate, while promotional material made up 21% and delivered 2.27% engagement.
The average Facebook fans of the participating agencies is 775, however this is only considered a "brand vanity metric" that does not directly affect successful business from Facebook.
"While growing a fan base is important, at the end of the day engagement across 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," it said.
