Using Facebook Live for Your Real Estate Open House

The idea of using Facebook Live for a real estate open house is nothing new. Marketing-savvy agents have been using Facebook Live for some time to promote listings, create brand awareness, and attract business. It helps them reach busy potential buyers who can't attend many open house events, as well as those who are out-of-town and planning to relocate. Facebook Live brings your narrated property tour directly to their screen, at home or while they're on-the-go. They don't have to make any time commitment other than setting aside time to watch your property tour.

Agents are even finding it can help them close some clients. This article will show you how to get started taking advantage of this powerful marketing tool which will continue to serve you into the future.

Creating a Facebook Business Page

If you don't have a business page on Facebook, you'll want to set that up first. This guide from Facebook will help you set it up. You'll need a personal Facebook page to do this, so set that up first if you don't have one.

It's really important to put your best foot forward on your business page. Much more than just an online brochure, you need to maximize opportunities for capturing new leads, engage your visitors, and have a solid platform for advertising. You'll find some tips and recommendations here for putting together a real estate business page that has the right professional polish.

Preparing Your Online Real Estate Open House

Promotional Posts

In the days leading up to your live event, you'll want to publish posts on your business page to get the word out. These posts will need a quality photo of the property which could be anything that will make a good impression on potential buyers – interior or exterior.

Once you've chosen a photo for your promotional posts, you need to use a graphic editor to add the date and time to the image. Canva is a free tool that's perfect for this task. Canva even offers free templates for creating social media graphics.

With your graphic ready, you just need to write a quick blurb for your posts that will get potential buyers excited to see more about the property and attend your online open house.

If you want to reach more people in your area outside of your followers on Facebook, you can try using Facebook ads to promote the virtual open house to a much wider audience. Since you can spend whatever you want on Facebook ads, there's very little risk in experimenting and Facebook ads are simple to set up.

Planning the Property Tour

Preparing for your tour of a property is very important. You don't want to just improvise on the spot. Plan the flow of the property tour and identify the important points and features you want to speak to and share in your broadcast. You might even want to write a script for yourself to make sure you don't leave anything out and do a practice run or two before the event. In your narration, make sure you include the same information that you normally would in an in-person open house, such as insights about the community and local schools. You'll get better at doing these over time, but the important thing is to start!

Get (yourself) in your videos. It allows us to showcase who we are as people and build a "know, like and trust" and that's what clients are looking for.

I always do 30 minutes because 30 minutes will allow you to give a 15-minute walk-through and 15 minutes to answer any questions. Typically, I'm getting 600-900 views. I'm engaging the audience.

Jesse Peters
Sales Associate
RE/MAX Executive Realty
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
Using Facebook Live for an Open House – REALTOR® Magazine

Go Live

Using Facebook Live is very easy. Start with learning the basic features and controls on your phone or tablet, then do some practice sessions to get comfortable with it. Having the confidence in operating the features will make your first online open house go much more smoothly and you'll be less nervous.

After the event, you'll even have a link in Facebook for sharing the recorded video to your website or social channels.

The biggest hurdle is building the confidence in yourself that you can do this. Pretend it's just like a normal real estate open house. After you have done a few, you'll wonder what you were so nervous about. You'll be really excited about the added exposure as you watch your audience size start to grow over time. Practice makes perfect!

To view the original article, visit the iHomeFinder blog.