Social Media – Build your own or Pay As You Go?
If you are only after results from social media such as brand awareness / leads / website traffic and other business positives, then you can use what has already been done over creating your own. Let me explain…
There are two great ways to grow your brand on social media, one is that you create your own presence and work on building and engaging your own audiences. This option will most probably take a great deal of effort, time and sometimes money. The benefits of creating your own presence on social media is that you are in control of the audiences you have built, you decide as and when you communicate with them by way of posts / updates / messages.
The other option is that you form relationships with those on social media who carry the audiences you wish to target. This option will save you time though most certainly cost you a lot more in money. Unless you are using this option to drive audiences to your own social media accounts, then you must consider that using other social media user accounts to drive enquiries to your business will likely mean that once you have stopped paying then the enquiries will dry up also.
Pay As You Go social media for estate agents is a fine option if you wish to get results quickly and haven’t the time to invest in growing an organic presence. You should also consider that not only can you partner with and sponsor users who hold audiences that would be attracted to the services your estate / letting agency offers, you can also offer to purchase them.
“It is amazing to think that soon it will be twenty years that I have been using social media. Over that time I have created and sold many accounts / pages / groups usually to businesses. When I have sold a business, of course comes with it the applicable social media accounts, though I have also been approached to sell accounts and groups based on their theme / audience size. Do not be afraid to adopt the idea of buying what others have created if you are looking for a quick fix as it will give you instant results even though it might cost you a decent amount of money to achieve.” Christopher Walkey founder of Estate Agent Networking
If you are wanting fast results from social media and the pay as you go route sounds tempting, and within budget, then below are some tips and ideas for you to consider:
- Research relevant keywords on social media platforms and see which user accounts / groups / pages appear in the results. Browse through these results in detail checking the popularity of the group, activity / content and who owns them. Do not confine your searching to property, any local groups will likely carry local audiences thus potential targets for your agency
- Connect and join with them to explore what opportunities there are for you to let the members / followers know about your agency (do consider that most decent accounts and groups on social media will likely be targeted frequently and will delete your promotional posts or even ban you). Think about sharing useful information over direct marketing, ‘Five ways to increase the value of your home’ is far better received over ‘Three bed semi priced at £399,950’.
- Approach the owners of ones you have picked out to be potentially great to own and see what possibilities there are for sponsorship / partnership and even a take over. If there is a great mortgage advisor on TikTok giving daily updates on the latest deals, why not think about sponsoring them?