Why is Facebook So Important for Real Estate Social Media Marketing?
You might have heard a few people complain over the last few months about the decrease in reach their posts have had on their Facebook pages.
If you’re following a social media posting schedule, in which monitoring your insights is important for understanding how much of your audience you’re reaching, then you might have seen a drop in reach and, therefore, a drop in engagement and traffic to your website.
Facebook has made several changes and updates to their algorithm. The Facebook algorithm is basically a fancy way to describe how Facebook decides what to show in users’ news feeds.
Before we talk about the changes, let’s talk about why Facebook is one of the top five social media sites to master and use for real estate social media marketing.
- As of March 2016, there are 1, 440, 000, 000 users on Facebook
- That number is a 12% increase from 2014 to 2015
- People spend 640,000,000 minutes on Facebook each month
- 1 million links are shared every 20 minutes
Facebook’s News Feed
Facebook’s news feed is designed to deliver the right content to the right people at the right time. There are thousands of stories waiting to show up in the news feed at any given time, which is why Facebook has developed an algorithm to determine what to show. Initially, the algorithm determined what was shown in news feeds based on:
- How often you interacted with a page, post, or friend who shared a post
- How many likes, shares, and comments a post received from your friends and Facebook at large
- How much you interacted with this type of post in the past, including the format (link, photo, video).
- Whether or not the post is being hidden by other users
With all of these variables, business pages in the past still had decent organic reach and therefore more engagement. In 2013, Facebook made an algorithm change which they admitted would cause a decline in organic reach for businesses. The online marketing world went into panic and, after a while, just assumed that this was how it would be going forward without considering that Facebook would continue to alter their algorithm on a regular basis.
Rightfully so, many businesses were outraged, because they had already spent hundreds or thousands of dollars growing their followers and platform now to be told that their posts would be shared with a smaller percentage of their audience.
Facebook then released a document outlining how brands could more effectively target their audience—those who have liked their page—through Facebooks ads and still be more effective with their marketing budget. Businesses were still upset that this didn’t address the issues of them having to pay for the majority of their fans to see their posts.
In 2014, in an effort to improve the user experience, Facebook once again altered their algorithm based on founder Mark Zuckerberg’s own experience where he saw a post about a co-workers birthday over a post about the birth of his niece. Due to this, posts that receive a ‘congratulations’ in the comments automatically receive an increase in organic reach.
Facebook’s algorithm has continued to change many times with the most recent change occurring in March 2016. Competing with live stream platforms such as Periscope, Facebook has now rolled out Facebook Live videos. They began rolling it out for iOS in December and for Android at the end of February. Now that more and more people are engaging with video and watching live video, they are adjusting how to rank them in the news feed. At this point in time, Facebook Live Video is ranked higher in the news feed when those videos are live compared to when the video is no longer live. This means that if you’re on Facebook Live from your business page, you’re receiving preference in the news feed.
Facebook has learned that—on average—people spend three times more time watching video live compared to when it’s not live, even if they don’t react to or like the video. While they don’t say that pages will see significant changes due to this update, it presents an opportunity for higher news feed rank while live.
What do the algorithm changes and Facebook Live Video mean for real estate marketing, and what types of posts will improve your reach?
What the continued algorithm changes mean for real estate agents and real estate businesses that have Facebook pages is that you have to be more intentional with your posts in order to achieve the highest organic reach without paying to boost a post.
You’ll have to experiment with link posts, video posts, photo posts, and Facebook Live to determine what gives you the most engagement and reach. If you don’t already monitor your insights on your Facebook page, have a look at them. The best times to post depend on your audience and you’ll see the times of day when you get the most engagement.
Generally speaking, posts where you share a link directly typically get the most clicks and posts where you share a photo and then add a link in the posts typically get more engagement (likes, shares) than link clicks.
Facebook also gives preference to some publishers before even looking at engagement, because they’re considered a trusted source. So, if you’re sharing content from different online news sites, have a look at which ones receive the highest reach. You might find that it’s better to share real estate market news from one particular site as it seems to perform better.
Timeliness is important, so if you blog about or share something that becomes big news, Facebook may increase your reach if your fans haven’t seen it. If you’re one of the first ones to post, you might be able to ride the wave.
Facebook also shows ‘trending topics’ in the right hand side of the news feed. If you post about these topics, it can increase your reach, but timeliness is also important here. If a topic has been trending for hours, you likely won’t see a difference.
Now, it’s more important than ever to follow a social media posting schedule and to have a strategy in order to get your content seen and to drive traffic to your website.
If you’re regularly posting the right content at the right time, chances are you can continue to ride the momentum, so you keep your reach up and grow your audience in the process.
Should you continue to use Facebook for real estate marketing?
Facebook still remains a valuable platform for marketing, but like any platform that isn’t your own, you’re subject to changes that might harm your business should you depend on them entirely. You’ll have to make that call, but a good strategy is always to leverage what’s popular, to be where the people are, but to ultimately drive the traffic back to your website and find a reliable way to generate leads and capture emails.
Have you noticed a change in your Facebook reach? Do you still regularly use Facebook for real estate marketing? Let us know in the comments.
For more helpful real estate tips and information like this, check out our blog. You can also follow us on Facebook.
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