Facebook Live Marketing Tips
Facebook Live (and live video in general) is becoming a major marketing channel for real estate agents. In this episode Doug and I provide Facebook Live Marketing Tips on everything from content to technique. Listen below:
Facebook Live for Real Estate Take Aways
- Avoid Reversed text – Many live streams include people wearing shirts with text, and this text is often reversed because of the mirror effect of the selfie camera. There is actually a setting that will flip the video and correct this. Use it!
- Lighting still matters – Make sure that the lighting is good enough to highlight what you want.
- it’s more than just listing walk throughs – this is a huge opportunity to allow prospective buyers and sellers to get to know you through video. Show them!
Facebook Live Marketing Tips Podcast Transcript
Adam Small: Hello and welcome to the Real Estate Marketing podcast this is Adam Small and with me is Doug Karr.
Douglas Karr: Hello sir.
Adam Small: How you doing today Doug?
Douglas Karr: I am unbelievable good.
Adam Small: I believe the unbelievably but then you kind of trailed off on the good like you weren’t really sure, like you could have gone with angry or …
Douglas Karr: No, no angry.
Adam Small: Okay.
Douglas Karr: I’m a gentle giant.
Adam Small: I see. Another Real Estate Marketing podcast today and lately one of the things I’ve seen a lot of agents working on using, trying to use is Facebook live.
Douglas Karr: Yes.
Adam Small: Great tool, great opportunity I think. A lot of different things you can do with Facebook live. Wanted to talk about that, see what your thoughts on Facebook live marketing tips are to begin with I suppose.
Douglas Karr: I love it. I struggle with it personally because I really like high quality and so if you really want to do Facebook live and be a professional and for everybody listening I have an agency so the expectation for everybody is that if I do something it’s going to be done perfect.
Adam Small: Right, right, right.
Douglas Karr: And so setting up like lighting and sound and having it in the right place, and making sure that I have a good strategy and everything else, it’s a lot of work. And so, I tend to shy away from it.
Adam Small: Just because of the amount of work that you put into it.
Douglas Karr: Yeah, just because of the amount of work that I, but I watch people every single day. I watch Facebook lives every day where people are doing a great job.
Adam Small: Right and they’re not putting all that working effort into it.
Douglas Karr: They’re not, no.
Adam Small: Some of them are just using the camera on the back of their phone.
Douglas Karr: Yep.
Adam Small: In order to do it and it looks great, sounds great, right?
Douglas Karr: Yeah.
Adam Small: Because really the intent of it is immediacy and the here and now of getting a certain message out, right?
Douglas Karr: Yeah. I mean you can use it for that type of thing, like if you had some kind of event that was happening and you wanted to give people … it’s like that private, what do they call it? The backstage pass.
Adam Small: Right.
Douglas Karr: And so you have this marketing that you’re doing out on your site and everything else and email and stuff and it’s all curated and written well and everything else. But Facebook live gives you an opportunity for someone to get a glimpse into your personal life or the events that you’re going to or whatever.
Adam Small: Right, right.
Douglas Karr: The other half is people do, do a great job of almost using it like a podcast where they schedule a Facebook live on a weekly basis or whatever and they’re building momentum, and building followers and everything else, and that’s pretty cool too.
Adam Small: Right. One of the ways that I’ve seen it used fairly effectively from a real estate perspective is with open houses, right? Instead of it being an actual open house the agent will walk through with the camera in their hand and talk about each room like they would if they were escorting somebody through an open house. You know?
Douglas Karr: Yeah.
Adam Small: And that can be done very effectively as long as the agent makes sure to just follow some of the basic tenants that you would do like when you’re taking virtual tour pictures or something. Put the toilet seat down, make sure the mirrors are clean, make sure the room’s are clean.
Douglas Karr: Yeah.
Adam Small: You know, that sort of thing. I’ve seen some really great walkthroughs and I’ve seen some pretty poor ones too, so they do require a little bit of forethought when you’re going through them just to make sure that you’re laid out right.
Douglas Karr: Oh yeah. You know you probably see this, I think the biggest mistake that I see a lot of people do is they go, “Oh, I’m going to do a Facebook live,” and they pop up Facebook live and they go live and they go, “Hey guys, uh, uh, uh.”
Adam Small: And they have no idea what they’re going to say or do, right?
Douglas Karr: Or they spend 15 minutes doing something that could take 30 seconds.
Adam Small: Right, right.
Douglas Karr: I’m sure that great virtual tours are the agent she’s already or he has already thought about how they’re going to map out the house, what direction they’re going to do, what views are the best.
Adam Small: Right, well and they only provide enough to get somebody interested.
Douglas Karr: Right.
Adam Small: So that somebody will come out and have a look. They don’t point out the hole in the roof over here or the fact that there’s a little bit of mold in the corner of the basement. You know stuff like that.
Douglas Karr: Right.
Adam Small: They want to get somebody out there to look at the house because somebody may look at the house and then go, “Yeah, you know I don’t mind that hole in the roof that’s an easy fix.” Or, “Through a little bleach on that mold in the basement and we’re good to go.”
Douglas Karr: Yeah.
Adam Small: So they do require some thought and planning.
Douglas Karr: I agree.
Adam Small: Making sure that you’re addressing the things that you want to address and that you’re getting the points across without bumbling through it and taking 15 minutes to say something that could only take 30 seconds.
Douglas Karr: Cause what happens with me is the people that I know, and they’re people that I like online, but when I watch two or three of their videos and five minutes into each of them I still don’t know why they’re doing it …
Adam Small: Where they’re going, what they’re saying, yeah.
Douglas Karr: I just stop watching them altogether.
Adam Small: Right.
Douglas Karr: And they might have had a great one but I didn’t subscribe …
Adam Small: Well that’s the shorter attention span that we’ve run into these days.
Douglas Karr: Yeah.
Adam Small: Yeah, you want to make sure that you are succinct and you’re getting to the point.
Douglas Karr: We don’t have shorter attention spans.
Adam Small: I’m sorry I wasn’t paying attention.
Douglas Karr: We just have more choices.
Adam Small: Oh, okay, okay, okay.
Douglas Karr: Yeah.
Adam Small: We’re more decisive about where we’re going to spend the time, right?
Douglas Karr: Yeah, I can spend time looking at something else instead of listening to you babble.
Adam Small: Right, exactly.
Douglas Karr: Yeah.
Adam Small: One of the things that I see with Facebook live in particular is people are often using their phone, the front camera on their phone so any sort of writing or something on their shirts will actually come across reversed.
Douglas Karr: Yeah.
Adam Small: Right. And there’s a setting that you can hit that will fix that so that you come across properly. So I would recommend that anybody that …
Douglas Karr: Is that a Facebook?
Adam Small: It’s a Facebook thing, yeah.
Douglas Karr: I didn’t know that.
Adam Small: Yeah. And there’s a setting in the Facebook app where it’ll basically mirror the image and make it come out right if you have writing on your shirt or something, like a lot of people wear shirts with logos on them or something like that. And a lot of times the text is backwards because it’s like looking in the mirror because of the way you’re holding that phone with that camera on it.
Douglas Karr: Yeah. That’s great.
Adam Small: Yeah, there’s a setting in there and I’ll see if I can’t hunt that down and maybe put it in the description of how to use it. And you can do that it will flip the text around so that it shows up properly. That’s one thing that really bothers me when doing Facebook live is seeing that backwards because it’s just like, “Look guys …
Douglas Karr: Cause you know it’s possible to fix it.
Adam Small: Right. Don’t want to feel like I’m looking in a mirror all the time and seeing the wrong person. You know?
Douglas Karr: Yeah. You spend enough time in the mirror.
Adam Small: I don’t know how to take that Doug.
Adam Small: What are some other things that you might add about Facebook live Doug?
Douglas Karr: Well I think you and I have done a really good job every podcast on really telling the real estate agents to tell people what to do next.
Adam Small: Right.
Douglas Karr: And so that’s the thing is if you’re doing an open house make sure you tell everybody the street address, and the date and time, and everything else, and where to go.
Adam Small: Right.
Douglas Karr: Whether it’s a link, or whether to follow you on Facebook and find it, whatever you can direct people to, to do next always make sure that you’re telling them to do that. And then …
Adam Small: So it’s a lot like other marketing.
Douglas Karr: It is.
Adam Small: You still have all the same marketing elements to it, right? You still need to put that call to action in there, you still need to have a clear and concise message.
Douglas Karr: Yeah.
Adam Small: You want to make sure that you’re not doing any more than necessary to get that message across or distract from other things, right?
Douglas Karr: Yep. And then the last thing I’ll just throw out is kind of maybe a warning cause we’ve gotten burned a couple times by Facebook and that’s that as businesses we’ve built up pages and built crowds and everything else and then all of a sudden Facebook pulled the rug out from under us and started to make us pay to get our content seen.
Adam Small: Right, right.
Douglas Karr: My warning is just that, hey while this is free it’s great but remember it may not always be here. At one point or another there might be so much video content that Facebook is going to start charging.
Adam Small: Right.
Douglas Karr: I saw a recent change that they’re going to do is they are going to let you do video across multiple pages and personal.
Adam Small: I saw that as well. Yep.
Douglas Karr: And so I just feel like what they’re doing, that’s piling up the videos as well.
Adam Small: Yep.
Douglas Karr: And so once there’s a ton of video content think about Facebook is basically going to become a channel like YouTube where you’re going to have things to subscribe to. I can see over time that the good shows they’re going to start separating the audience from the person unless they start paying.
Adam Small: And I think that goes back to a basic tenant that you’ve talked about all along, which is make sure you own the audience instead of somebody else.
Douglas Karr: Yeah.
Adam Small: When you’re using Facebook unless you’re driving people back to your website and their subscribing to your blog or your whatever you’re doing, your podcast, that sort of thing then Facebook ends up owning the channel.
Douglas Karr: Yeah, and I think now is the time to hit it, right?
Adam Small: Right.
Douglas Karr: Go use Facebook live, test it out, try it but keep trying to push those people back to subscribe to your email list or your text club or whatever.
Adam Small: Right.
Douglas Karr: Get them in.
Adam Small: Right, exactly. So okay cool. So three things to take away when doing Facebook live and I guess they could actually apply to YouTube live, which they don’t call it live, they call it something else. I can’t remember off the top of my head here. But one would be, make sure that you’re prepared to do the live session.
Douglas Karr: Yeah.
Adam Small: And then my little one was make sure you flip that text around on your shirt. And then make sure you own the audience.
Douglas Karr: Yeah.
Adam Small: Great.
Douglas Karr: Good tips.
Adam Small: Yeah, any final thoughts?
Douglas Karr: No, you know again, make sure you’re not in a closet where there’s a lot of echos and everything else. You always want good audio even with video.
Adam Small: Right.
Douglas Karr: I think we’ve had a couple of podcasts on audio but you can get a good cheap Lavalier mic for your phone even.
Adam Small: Exactly.
Douglas Karr: For $10 I think on Amazon.
Adam Small: It depends on what you want, I got one it was $50 or something like that.
Douglas Karr: Yeah.
Adam Small: Which, it works great.
Douglas Karr: Yeah.
Adam Small: So I’m not complaining about it. So I think at the high end you could spend $50, $60 and come away with a really great microphone.
Douglas Karr: Yep.
Adam Small: All right cool. Well, thanks for listening. If you like what you hear make sure to subscribe, like us, that sort of thing. If you have any questions want to learn more you can check us out at agentsauce.com or contact us at info@agentsauce.com. Thanks and have a great day.
