It seems like everything can be sold with the help of social media today, from fashion and fast food to mobile phones and financial services.
So the question many people in property, as well as house owners themselves, would like to know the answer to is .... can you sell a house or flat using social media? (Or let a house or flat for that matter.)
There are lots of reasons why selling property on social media is a great idea: Social media has a huge potential audience today, so it would seem like an obvious way to reach potential buyers. Social media makes it easy to use images and video and create a real splash. You can interact easily with your audience on social media. There’s even the chance that your house could go viral on social media and be marketed to millions of people.
Social media marketing also offers the potential to be free, or certainly very low cost compared to conventional marketing.
So what are the ways you could sell a house on social media?
You could put details of your property for sale on your Facebook. You could even create a separate Facebook page for a house using a business listing. You can list it on Facebook Marketplace.
You could create a Twitter page for your property .... and tweet about it all day long.
You could put some really cool pictures on Instagram, or maybe Pinterest. (And make your house look even better than it actually is!)
You could make a great video tour of your house and post it up on YouTube.
It all sounds like a fantastic way to sell your house by reaching a huge audience and showing your house in the best possible way. Not only that, but it is a method ordinary householders can use themselves. They don’t even need to go through an agent to do it.
But does selling a house on social media actually work?
The simple answer is no, not really.
And here’s why:
People generally don’t look for a house to buy (or rent) on social media. At least not yet.
Yes, they might notice on your house for sale as they’re browsing for the latest local gossip, or checking out new fashion tips. But the chances they are going to actually take time to search for a new house there and buy it are currently low, very low.
There’s a question of trust and credibility apart from anything else. Spending £19.99 on a new top you see promoted on social media is one thing. Spending £500,000 on a house you found there is quite another.
And the added snag is, just how do you know which social media your potential buyer uses anyway and so choose the best place to advertise it in the first place?
Instead, here’s what people tend to do when they are really looking for a house to buy:
They either search for it on a property portal like Rightmove, Zoopla or OnTheMarket.
Here’s more about Which Is The Best Property Portal?
Or, if they’re more conventional, they stop by or call the local estate agents’ offices.
In other words, social media isn’t a great way to SELL a house or flat as yet. Not necessarily because it isn’t a very powerful media. But because buyers just don’t see it as a way to BUY a house .... yet. The market might well be there online, but the demand isn’t.
Do you know anybody who has actually found and bought a house using social media? No, neither do we!
But ‘yet’ is very much the thing to bear in mind here. Because property marketing is very much something that the social media companies would like to be involved in. It’s very much a market, like many markets before it, that they would like to disrupt. So all this could change in the not too distant future. Social media could become the way to sell a house in future.
One last very important point. Just because social media probably isn’t a way to sell a house yet doesn’t mean it isn’t a way to MARKET a house.
Once a property is listed with an agent, or listed with a property portal, social media may very well help in generating interest and generating traffic for that listing. Many estate agents already do just this. Although it’s still very difficult to assess what value that brings to the whole process. It’s just, at the present moment in time, social media is almost certainly not a reliable way of actually finding that buyer and getting that sale.
