How to use Facebook and LinkedIn to market your business
Social media can help you build your brand if you’re active. Being active doesn’t mean publishing the occasional piece of promotional content. Instead, you should publish content people actually want to read. You also need to engage with users on the platform.
For example, a real estate agent could publish:
- Their property listings
- Helpful tips on selling a property
- News on the current property market, like whether prices are trending up or down, how much stock is available and what the rental vacancy rate is
The real estate agent could also participate in community groups and engage with other group members’ posts.
Writing interesting posts and engaging with users takes time but is otherwise free – unless you outsource it. For example, Hunter & Scribe can write the social media posts for you and schedule them, so they’re automatically published. We specialise in writing for property professionals, so can source and write newsworthy posts too.
Social media marketing can be very effective in the long-term, but is not a get-rich-quick-scheme. It generally takes years to start generating a significant number of leads from social media, because it takes a long time to build a following and establish your credibility. So it’s important to persevere even when you’re not getting a great response.
People often use social media platforms as search engines, so having informative and helpful posts should eventually pay off.
The more followers you get, the easier it becomes to attract more, as the social media platforms tell your followers’ friends about your page.
Paid marketing
When you use paid advertising, you can target your ideal client, which makes the advertising more effective.
TV and radio ads go out to everyone, most of whom wouldn’t be your ideal client. In contrast, platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn let you target users based on their devices, occupations or hobbies (assuming they filled in their profiles correctly).
Social media platforms also let you target people’s behaviours so you can select your desired outcome, whether it’s followers, likes or website visits.
Both platforms show you the real-time results of your paid ad. So you can see who is reacting to your ad, whether it’s positive, and if it’s being successful. This lets you change your ad before you’ve wasted too much money.
But it can also be expensive, especially if you target a finite population in prime time.
For example, users on Facebook have multiple interests – a person who wants to sell their home may also enjoy gaming. So Facebook could just as easily serve them an ad from your real estate agency as ads from gaming companies. Chances are, Facebook will favour the advertiser with the highest spend, so unless your agency outspends the gaming companies, your ad might not appear.
LinkedIn similarly will allocate the ad to the highest bidder. The advantage of LinkedIn is your ad doesn’t have to compete against hobby interests. The disadvantage is you’re competing against businesses with large marketing budgets so your cost per outcome could be much higher than on Facebook.
