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Free or Inexpensive Ways to Use Social Media to Promote Real Estate

I’ve moved from Wisconsin to Florida and I have a very unique lakefront property on Lake Winnebago in Neenah, WI that I am trying to sell.

I know Social Media is effective and is far reaching. Therefore, I’m curious to see if Social Media can prove effective to sell the home.

• My Realtor (@TifaniAndCo) – although I had gotten her direct postcards for years after chatting with her on Twitter and meeting her at a local TweetUp I decided to hire her to sell my Lake Winnebago Vacation Rental property.
• Since then….two of my tenants have bought houses with her as their Realtor

I’m not sure if she’s sold other homes as a direct result of Twitter but in this instance we know for sure she’s had two (and soon, hopefully three, when my place sells).

What am I doing on Social Media to try to sell my place?

I wish I could say that I took the most important step first. Setting up the proper tracking system. I didn’t set it up properly before implementing my various social media campaigns but do have it in place now. In my case I have found GetClicky to be the most detailed, inexpensive reporting option available.

For me, because I have my own website and blog for this property it was very easy for me to implement these social media outlets and be able to track my own results by directing all traffic to my own, unique URL.

Since I didn’t have it installed prior to launching the following social aspects I did miss some early statistics.

Inexpensive Ways to Promote Your Real Estate on Social Media:

• TweetLister – free for a basic account, which is all I need. Allows you to add a few pictures and will automatically tweet your ad (through your own Twitter account) with seven different frequency options. In my case I have opted to have it tweeted out every three days.
• Vflyer – Basic accounts are free. Though not a social media outlet but there are several benefits of using their service to create your advertisement for Craigslist and once created they allow you to do Facebook Share or Tweet it out as well.
• Facebook MarketPlace – free to post an ad and allows pictures
• Facebook Ads – not free but you can control how much is spent

What GetClicky Results I love

What I want to know and track: (there is a lot more but these are the most important to me for this particular site)

1. Where traffic is coming from
2. How they are getting there (specific search phrases, etc.) so that I can tweak my existing keywords or use those keyword phrases in blog posts
3. What they are looking at on the site
4. If they download either my Rental Proforma or my List of Updates (I presume those parties are possibly more interested because they downloaded the PDF(s)

Here are just a few screenshots of the endless list of statistics available on GetClicky: (The yellow highlight represents what I am most concerned with on this particular campaign)

What I’ve learned in about 30 days

1. When creating a Facebook ad make sure to direct visitors to a specific URL. As this was my first Facebook ad I had no idea the option was available until about 10 days into it when I went to tweak the ad. Where the visitors went the first 10 days? I have no idea.
2. Craigslist is incredibly close behind Facebook with incoming traffic. It’s free and easy to get high rankings in Google depending on your keywords (if location matters, fill it out the location box)
3. I should have started Tweetlister sooner and will continue to experiment with time of day, etc. that I have the ad auto-tweeted

Is this all worth it? I’m not sure yet as it is too soon to tell….and so far only one showing as a result of all of this (from a Craigslist ad) but I have had several inquiries via Facebook Marketplace.

Would I like to sell my home with social media? You bet! What a great success story that would be for me and the clients I serve.

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