When most housebuilders think of social media they immediately associate it with brand awareness rather than sales. It’s not entirely clear what the return-on-investment is for a tweet, after all. But it’s time to remedy that.
A study by IDC found that 75% of B2B buyers and 84% of C-level/vice president executives use social media to make purchasing decisions. When social media lead generation tools are done right, you can land in front of the eyes of perfect prospects – ready to buy a home.
The cherry on top is that social media is a cost effective way to generate new leads, bringing new potential customers into your sales funnel without spending a fortune. But it’s important to choose the right channels. For example, lead generation tools for LinkedIn are best suited to business-to-business marketers, since there’s minimal conversation on buying new homes or moving home for customers on there.
With that in mind, we’ve focussed on the top two social media lead generation tools for housebuilders to use: Twitter and Facebook.
Facebook lead generation tools
Facebook lead generation tools are especially smart at targeting specific leads with the specific homes you want to to sell to them. And the data you can capture for each prospect is astonishing. Facebook had a massive 2.19 billion monthly active users in the first quarter of 2018. With most people spending more time on the social network than they do socialising face-to-face, it’s the ideal place for housebuilders to find their target customers.
If you’re creating frequent, quality content (see our lead generation strategy guide for more on this) that’s genuinely valuable to homebuyers, Facebook is one of the best social media lead generation tools to share it. Paid-for posts allow you to bump up the visibility of articles to capture email addresses. You can give users the information they want on new homes and your company gets leads in return.
Top tips for using Facebook lead generation tools:
- Engage. Facebook’s algorithms favour content that has heavy engagement, which means likes, comments and shares. The faster a post is engaged with, the more likely it’ll appear on users’ feeds. Ask questions, chat to users and answer any queries in a timely fashion to boost your engagement.
- Go for paid ads. Aside from sharing articles, Facebook’s traditional paid adverts can result in nearly three times as many leads for businesses. Users simply tap your ad, which generates a pre-populated form that can be sent through to your house building firm.
- Join groups. Extend the conversation outside of your brand page by joining relevant property groups where potential customers may go for information. As long as you’re not overtly salesy, these are brilliant places to answer group member questions with a useful service, tool or product.
Twitter lead generation tools
When it comes to Twitter, engagement is crucial to be seen. In this analysis of big-name housebuilders, 11 out of 15 had a Twitter presence, but only one out of the 15 were actually engaging with their followers. The number one reason users take to Twitter is to find something new and interesting. Perhaps it’s your guide to budgeting for a new home that catches their attention. Or a tweet sharing a brand new development in their local area.
Listen to the conversations that are happening on the social network and join in – dropping your services, product or tool into exchanges to help turn tweeters into prospects. If they’re free, even better. Where homebuyers are concerned, our online valuation tool and budget calculators provide perfect lead generation opportunities. Simply embed them into your website and share them with potential customers to both help them out and expand your list of leads.
Top tips for generating leads on Twitter:
- Ask questions and run polls. This is one of the easiest ways to bring potential customers into the conversation and find out what users want, so you can respond to their pain points with tools such as budget calculators or a mailing list sign-up to receive new home alerts in their area.
- Keep it short (with a CTA). Twitter may have lengthened it’s character limit, but it doesn’t mean you need to use it all up. A concise tweet with one specific message and a CTA (call-to-action) is more powerful than sharing multiple things. For example: “Moving home? Our free budget calculator will show you how much you can spend in minutes: [link to your site]”.
- Retweet and reply. Housebuilders should always reply to tweets to maintain a strong Twitter presence. From customer praise to helpful articles related to home-buying, curating your Twitter feed with relevant information looks better than constantly sharing your own branded content. You’ll attract more followers to turn into leads by being responsive.
