According to recent Facebook Audience Insight Data, there are now 40 million adults in the UK actively using the platform – that’s 71% of adults. Like it or not (excuse the pun) the site has huge potential for estate agents. So why are most agents assigning the role of managing their business pages and posts to office juniors and treating their presence as a tick box exercise rather than taking it seriously? Now you probably think I’m the last person that should be preaching to you about taking Facebook seriously, but lets just concentrate on the facts for a minute – the 40 million people using the platform represent a huge number of households in the UK. I would say it has huge potential in terms of new and future business opportunities, and estate agent turned Facebook guru Paul Long agrees with me.

“Facebook is predicting 4-6 months in advance what people are doing. And the actual ability to identify people who are moving is very strong - I mean there are plenty of data points that they are using and I think this is something that a lot of agents don't understand. Facebook is looking at your chats in messenger, the videos your watching, the websites you're going on and profile updates so it's quite easy for Facebook to work out if you've had a child or if you like a certain brand for example. They can then put all of this data together and really work out what you are going to do next.”

When it comes to advertising on Facebook, the more specific you are with your targeting the cheaper your advertising costs – so the total opposite to advertising on Google where key search terms come at a premium. Paul continued “Facebook rewards you for engagement. So if you're targeting engaged data - they've seen you before, they've liked your posts and they've watched your videos - then the cost of getting in front of those people again is very low. A couple of pounds a day will get you in front of a lot of people that are engaged with you. So talking about cost, you can probably do some serious damage in your area running 2 or 3 campaigns and probably spending about £300 a month. You could make a big difference if you know what you are doing."

Now that we’ve established that Facebook advertising is genuinely affordable, where do we start? Creating ‘Look-a-Like Audiences’ is a great place to start. This is where you can upload a list of contacts and Facebook will match data points relating to these contacts and generate a list of similar people, or ‘look-a-likes’ so that you can then target them with your advertising. So long as the data is yours and you haven’t bought it then you aren’t in breach of GDPR regulations apparently. Paul continued “Look-a-like audiences is where if you upload your clients into Facebook, Facebook will actually match 2000 data points on the original list and then it will remove the original list so those people won't actually be in the new look-a-like audience. You've then got a powerful audience to put your brand and content in front of - people most likely to engage with it. These people are similar to your current clients so will probably want to do business with you. It’s very powerful."

In terms of creating engaging content, videos get the most clicks. We shouldn’t be using links to YouTube videos though – Facebook’s own video application is best. Paul continued “Facebook and YouTube pretty much don't like each other - they're direct competition so you need to be uploading your video up into Facebook so that anyone who watches your video you can re-target it. If you just put a YouTube video up into Facebook then you lose all of that ability. But also there are so many other things, you know you talked about look-a-like audiences. Effectively if anybody watches all of your videos and they're watching 95% you can create a look-a-like audience for people watching 95% of your videos and you're going to get back the people who are most likely to watch the rest of your videos that you bring out who are also people that are moving, selling or becoming a landlord.”

There is no doubt that this is powerful stuff, or can be if used currently. So what are the most common mistakes agents are making before we commence our quest for world domination through Facebook advertising? Paul commented “The most common mistake is using the Boost button. It can work in certain cases - it depends how you've got it set up but if you're just hitting the Boost button and selecting Age and Location you're going to waste a lot of money and Facebook is so much more powerful than that. A lot of agents need to just get to understand the basics of Facebook - it's very powerful. All the targeting is there, you know you can target people who have got an interest in Rightmove, Zoopla, house hunting, buying a house, been on a mortgage calculator - there are hundreds of data points you can target and then you can go as far as excluding as well. You can exclude estate agents if you don't want them to see your advert and people who have recently moved - you know you can really narrow it down to the right people.”

In conclusion, with portals attracting people who know what they want there and then, and Facebook’s powerful algorithm that predicts future business opportunities, you certainly shouldn’t have a quiet month if you cover both bases!