Facebook Insights: A useful Tool for Realtors

Looking for a house used to begin by circling classifieds in the house section of the newspaper but now, buyers are looking on social media to help them on their search. In fact, according to one study, 94% of millennials and 84% baby boomers are looking online for their future homes.  It’s without a doubt that realtors need to have an online presence to succeed.

One-way realtors can succeed at social media is paying attention to their metrics. According to Forbes, measuring social media metrics is one of the top ten marketing musts for realtors. By checking and understanding some simple metrics they can learn what is working and what isn’t working for their audience. This will guide their activity to better improve their performance.

Kristy Fabiani with Revel Realty Inc., Brokerage is a new Realtor. Within a few months, she has already established herself with two transactions. Currently, she is primarily using Facebook to market to potential buyers and sellers and already has grown a community of 231 followers organically.

Since she is in the beginning of her career Kristy is paying close attention to what is working and what is not.  While chatting with Kristy she tells me that she strives to look at her page metrics at least once a week but always investigates her page alerts that are automatically sent to her phone. She is actively looking her Facebook metrics to help her guide her future posts.

In Facebook, business’ have built in metrics, called Facebook insights, that provides you with a significant amount of information about how your content is preforming as well as information about your audience and so much more.

There is a lot of information that one can gather from Facebook insights, so it is important to look at your organizational goals and match it up with your social media strategy.  For Kristy, she is looking at reach and engagement. Her goal is to get her listings seen by as many people in hopes of that she can match up her listing with the buyer. Reach is a simple metric that tells you how many people saw your post. Engagement with her posts such as likes, comments and shares, helps reach more people.  Since Kristy is looking to increase visibility watching her reach and engagements are a great way to measure her efforts. “Every share and like is a step in the right direction,” Kristy notes.

Kristy has been experimenting with paid boasts as well as trying out different kinds of posts, such as providing quotes, personal photos as well as polls asking for feedback and her videos and photos of current houses she is listing. After she posts she watches what content is working.

Through her metrics, Kristy is learning that videos are performing well. For example, she recently posted a house listing using a video of images. Looking into her insights, she sees that this was one of her top posts, reaching 1452 people organically and her engagement was also one of her best performers, having 25 shares and 7 comments. This property sold. Going forward Kristy shares that she aims to do more live videos while at client properties as well as videos showcasing the houses. “This content is working” she informs.

Although at the start of her career as a realtor, Kristy is already proving great success. By taking the time to incorporate metrics into her strategy, Kristy can better serve her clients. She is learning what posts are working and can adapt her content to reflect this.

Lessons for Others

You can’t improve what you don’t measure.

• Have a goal in mind, focus on one or two areas, tracking doesn’t need to be complex especially at the start
• Schedule time to continuously check your metrics so you can see how your posts are working for you and adjust your content accordingly
• Experiment with different content and look for the successful posts and try to duplicate what is working

If you have concerns as to the accuracy of anything posted on this site, please send your concerns to Peter Carr, Program Director, Social Media for Business Performance.

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