By now, everyone has experienced social media. The pinnacle of social media is Facebook. One of the early criticisms of social media marketing is that it is essentially spamming your friends. Posting the same thing every day is not going to make it more interesting.
There is a lesson to think about here…let’s switch sites.
Every month, MLS systems are estimated to send out 200 million emails to consumers notifying them of new and updated listings. I think most people refer to them as auto-alerts or auto-notifications. That number of 200 million grows larger when you include the number of notifications that go out through mobile apps, broker sites, agent sites, buyer tools, and even portals. Guess what? You are publishing the same thing every day! Oops.
Lets go back to social media…
The most effective way to engage an audience in social media is to curate your content. Experts talk about publishing strategies that include variation, emotion, etc. Advertisers do this too. Changing things up is a hedge strategy against ad fatigue. In parlance, it’s a campaigning strategy.
Lets go back to listing notifications…
Depending on the market, properties across America typically trade within a window of 120 days. Most of the time, the photos of the property and the description text remain static and unchanged throughout the listing term. The only part of the listing that changes is the price. How can we create a campaign strategy for listing notifications?
Think Differently…
WAV Group has written about the strategy of using price changes to trigger email alerts in the past. Lower the price by any amount and every system will trigger an email alert. The more price changes you have, the more direct marketing gets triggered to the people who have saved searches for the property you are marketing. This boost in audience impressions drives more engagement, or leads if you prefer. But the risk is spamming or lead fatigue. The audience will begin to ignore the effort if you do not switch things up a bit.
Use the Facebook Lesson
If you are going to use this strategy of price changes to market the property, think about what we know about social media spamming and advertising fatigue. Curate the information to keep it fresh. At the very least, be sure to change up the primary photo. By the way, experiment with interior shots; they often get more clicks than exterior shots because they look so different in a list view. Change up your description text too! If you curate your listing each week, you may be surprised at how much engagement you can drive to your listing.
Happy Online Marketing!
P.S. A note for SEO Geeks
When you are curating your listings, there are a few things that you should begin to do that will help with your search engine optimization. First, be sure and put keywords like property address in the titles of your images. Secondly, put keywords in the description text. Remember, you must not put anything in IDX comments that identify you, but you can put that information into syndication comments. Take advantage of that. Lastly, you know that search engine bots like fresh content. This strategy of curating your listings will feed that bot traffic with new indexing opportunities and give you a slight edge in SEO.
