Your potential clients are on Facebook, so it makes sense to advertise there. But before you promote your message to the social media world, make sure you avoid these common mistakes.
1. You don’t have a goal.
Your business goal may be to get more clients and earn money, but how will your advertising help you? Your ad goal needs to be specific and measureable.
For example, if you’re trying to get clients, the goal could be to get users to click-through to the “contact me” page on your website. Or your goal could be to build awareness of your business by getting more likes for your Facebook page. Both of those are objective goals that can be tracked. When you build a Facebook ad, the platform asks you to choose your marketing objective. Your ad goal drives that choice.
2. Your targeting is too broad.
Facebook’s targeting interface lets you choose specific demographics, behaviors, and interests to find the people you want to reach. So, who are you trying to reach with your ad? First-time homebuyers? Luxury sellers? The better defined your audience, the better your return on investment will be. The bigger your audience, the more expensive it is to reach all of them. Would you rather spend $500 to show your ad to a random 10% of a 1-million-person target audience, or use that $500 to put your message in front of 20,000 people who are likely to hire you?
3. Your ads have too much text.
Facebook limits the amount of text allowed in advertising images. The rules aren’t specific—and change periodically—but text-heavy images will either be rejected or your ad’s reach will suffer. Keep text on your ad images to a minimum to avoid trouble.
4. Your images are the wrong size.
Ads that aren’t the proper size will hurt your engagement rates, and it’s an easy problem to avoid. When you’re creating an ad, take note of the height and width Facebook tells you to use for the image.
Visit facebook.com/advertising for more guidance on getting the most out of your social media spending.
I loved the ideas and we’ll use them in our training. What I also would like to see emphasized is the TREC advertising compliance requirement. What I see most often are agents who post an ad or post on their personal page about a new listing or an upcoming open house and never identify themselves as an agent or mention who their broker is. Agents are opening themselves up to criticism and complaints to TREC by not following this simple rule.