Targeting on Facebook

With any type of advertising, the more relevant your audience is to your advertising objective, the better your results will be. Facebook has a multitude of targeting options that you'll want to take advantage of, and I'll be discussing each of these options in more detail when we create our first advertisement. But it's important that you take a minute to familiarize yourself with the options available to you and think through what specific criteria you'll be using.

The most obvious option for you as a real estate agent is location. With this, you'll identify cities, towns, and even neighborhoods where you want to do business. For example, you can show your ad to people who are within ten miles of your real estate office or wherever you are trying to grow your business.

Next up, we have demographics. Here you'll choose the audience based on criteria such as age, gender, or education. Remember, all things do not apply to all people, therefore depending on how much time you want to invest, you could create a different ad to appeal to each different demographic. Now those are fairly broad, so let's take a look at some specific targeting options.

This is what makes Facebook advertising so effective for you as a real estate agent. With interest targeting, you can reach people based on their interests, hobbies, and pages they like on Facebook.

This is where you want to be strategic. Social media is all about interaction and shared interest. To make your social media work, you have to enjoy talking about the same topics your followers are interested in. If you love lacrosse, it will be easy to talk about lacrosse. If you love surfing, then you will love talking about surfing. If you try posting regularly about lacrosse and surfing but you do not authentically enjoy them, it will become tedious, lose authenticity, and became impossible to maintain. Remember that you will have a easier time selling to people who are like you, can relate to you, and share a interest with you.

That being said, there are two things you'll want to remember when targeting interests as a real estate agent.

1) You want to talk about real estate, but you do not only want to target real estate as the interest. If you target people who are interested in real estate, then chances are you will be advertising to other real estate agents, not to potential clients.

2) Target an interest that you yourself enjoy talking about. If you do, you will have a much easier time creating content, and you will enjoy the interaction! Your enjoyment of the topic will shine through, making it easier to open up lines of communication with the people you are targeting, and hopefully segue into selling real estate.

In short, yes, target something related to real estate, as that is what you are trying to sell. But try to think a little bit broader than that, and combine it with something targeting one of your other interests.

Facebook uses a combination of data points-everything from comments people leave to websites they've visited-as a way to provide very accurate interest targeting. You can even target based on behaviors and life events.

Moving on, the next targeting option is connections. With this, you'll reach people who are connected to your page, event, or application, as well as their friends.

Now, another really powerful feature is the custom audiences targeting option. As you become more and more advanced with your Facebook advertising, you'll want to take advantage of these custom audiences. You will be able to create audiences based on your own customer data, which includes emails, phone numbers, or user IDs. You can upload a list of email addresses, and then Facebook will identify their Facebook account and show your ad to them.

You can customize ads for people who signed up for your email newsletter or purchased a property from you before. It's all about maintaining that interaction with people, so that when the need for a real estate professional comes up, you are easily accessible.
The other option is to put the refrigerator magnet on their door and hope that they do not lose it. Facebook targeting is not only more effective then refrigerator magnets, customized note pads, and pens, but it is also more affordable. Oh, and did I mention that this is also much more trackable then those old tchotchkes? Gone are the days of just sending things out because you are supposed to and hoping it works. Hope is now replaced by statistics. Become the modern real estate agent!