Social Media Can Supercharge the Marketing of Real Estate Listings

[Published July 23, 2015, in the Jeffco editions of the Denver Post's YourHub section and in four Jefferson County weekly newspapers]

By now we’re all familiar with how social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram and more) have transformed society, so it only makes sense that it has transformed the practice of real estate.

If you decide to sell your home and have your own Facebook account, you’d be wise to post that news on your Facebook page (with a picture and link to a webpage) and ask all your “friends” to “like” the post so that their friends see it.  Tweeting it will reach yet another audience, and so on with those other social media platforms on which you have a presence.

You may be thinking, “Wow, this makes listing without a Realtor even easier!” but keep in mind a few important considerations.

First of all, no matter how many “friends” you may have, it is likely fewer than your listing agent’s friends on Facebook and connections on LinkedIn.  And without listing your home, you’ll face all the other limitations and problems of being “for sale by owner.”  There’s a great article posted on Inman News about the “10 Reasons Why FSBO’s Fail.” I can’t post a link to it due to copyright restrictions, but you can read my summary of that article, with attribution to Inman, at www.JimSmithBlog.com.  It’s the best argument I’ve seen in print against going it alone in the current “seller’s” market.

Another reason for employing a Realtor with a social media presence, like one of us at Golden Real Estate, is that we have business pages on Facebook. Only a business page can “boost” a posting, which means to pay for it to appear as a “sponsored” post within hundreds, thousands or even millions of other Facebook users’ news feeds. 

At Golden Real Estate, we spend part of our marketing budget on “boosting” the postings of our new listings and even our open houses.  Facebook makes it easy to select who sees these sponsored posts by age, location and their personal interests, based on other pages they have “liked.”  Read more on how this can be done on my blog, along with the other posting about FSBOs.