Step-by-step sharing on Social Media to Increase Home Profit

Without a doubt, the most efficient way to sell a home is listing on the MLS, since that’s where buyer’s agents search for prospective homes for their clients. HOWEVER, sharing your home listing on social media can provide an extra boost to help you sell quicker and for a greater profit. Below we’ll explain how sharing can pay dividends and how to make sure you’re optimizing the power of your post.

How sharing can increase take home profit on your home sale:

If you use social media tools effectively, you can tap into potential buyers in your network and community that may not be already working with a buyer’s agent. These direct buyers, may be willing to work directly with you rather than using an agent, and therefore save you 3% commission on the buyer’s side (when working with agents, generally you’re paying 3% on the listing side and 3% on the buyer’s side).

Offer an incentive to direct buyers:

To provide further incentive for these direct buyers, you can offer to cut the asking price 1-2% and that way you both save by avoiding the agent middleman. By leveraging social media this way and incentivizing direct buyers, you are tapping into part of the market that the MLS doesn’t capture – your personal network, which can potentially be the most profitable buyers out there!

Don’t be Facebook shy!

In this age of social media over-sharing, I’m generally cautious about what to post on Facebook, since most people probably don’t care what I ate for breakfast. But selling your home is one of those big life events where people understand the need to share and many times are more than willing to help spread the word. If you’re still hesitant, you have the option to limit who on Facebook sees the post or you can post directly to groups or lists.

Facebook – Steps for effectively sharing your home listing:

The process of sharing your home listing to Facebook is quite simple, as long as your listing website provides s
ocial media sharing links, as shown in this screenshot from ListingSpark.

Step 1 – click and view your Facebook post options:

Click the Facebook share button on your property page and the Facebook share pop-up window will appear showing a photo of your house, the address and a short description. You’ll also see a text area labeled “Say something about this”, a dropdown labeled “Share on your own Timeline” and a few other options towards the bottom.

Step 2 – choose WHERE to post:

To choose where you would like to post (your wall, a private message, another wall, etc), select the dropdown at the top labeled “Share on your own Timeline”. We’d recommend leaving it as is – to share on your own timeline – and you can further filter options using the features at the bottom of the screen. Then after posting on your wall you can repeat the process again but choose to share on friend’s timelines, in a group, on a page you manage, in a private message or all of the above (5 separate posts).

Step 3 – choose WHO to share with (Friends, Public, Custom Audience):

This step only applies when sharing on your own timeline. Select the dropdown at the bottom labeled “Friends”and you’ll see options to select who you’ll allow to see your post. We recommend sharing to the public, but if for some reason you need to limit who sees the post on your wall, you can choose any of the options described below. You can also use this to share with specific groups, which can be effective, so check out the “Custom” option or other lists of people that may appear at the bottom if you’ve previously created them.

• Public – your best option to reach the most people.
• Friends – only your Facebook friends.
• Only You – this option won’t do you much good besides testing how the post looks.
• Friends except Acquaintances –  “Acquaintance” is a label you can apply to Facebook “friends” that you’re really not that close with, which basically allows you to stop seeing their posts without de-friending them (especially nice for annoying over-sharers). In our case when sharing the house listing, this means those acquaintances will not to see your listing post if you choose this option.
• Custom – this allows you to filter more specifically: share with Friends of Friends, Friends of people you tag and other specific lists of people. It also allows you to exclude specific people you don’t want to share with.
• Other lists of people – preexisting lists that may include people from your previous jobs, schools, family, certain cities, etc. You can create new lists too, and send to those people.

Step 4 – comment and tag:

Once you’ve decided your target audience via the options above, don’t forget to add a comment and tag friends (and maybe add your city as a location or an emoticon showing how you’re feeling).

The All Important Comment: The goal of the comment should be to encourage your friends to spread the word about your house… “We’re moving! Please share this post and help us sell our house!”. Remember, the more your friends share, the more exposure to potential buyers.