So you’ve got your manufactured home sales center on Facebook. That’s awesome! But…you’re not sure what you need to say and what you need to post.
No worries, we’re here to help. Here’s a few tips to help you publish your first posts on social media to get the customers rolling in!
Use Professional Images
They say ‘a picture is worth a thousand word’, and we couldn’t agree more. But what 1000 words are your images saying? Are they saying what you would want a customer to hear?
Look at your images through the lens of your customer. How do they look? You want them to look professional, clean, and inviting. Your pictures need to create an environment in the home that makes potential buyers feel like they want to live there.
That means: 1) no crooked images, 2) no unfinished marriage lines, 3) staged homes, 4), good lighting, and 5) plenty of color.
Here’s two sample photos from 2 different manufactured home retailers. Which one do you think will sell more homes?
These two photos show the same room in the same house, but they paint a vastly different picture. Which photo would make you more likely to buy a home?
If you’re not a photographer, that’s ok. There are plenty of resources out there. If you go to Google, there are TONS of websites that help you with tips regarding staging and photographing your manufactured home. Click here for one.
Another solution is to ask your manufacturer if they have any high quality photos for your social media accounts. Oftentimes manufacturers will have promotional photos for you to use in your advertising.
Take Videos
If pictures are worth a thousand words, videos are worth…a million? Don’t check our math, but do grab your phone and shoot some candid videos to post on social media.
You can put a lot of content in videos, AND you can feature benefit the home – just as if the customer were standing in front of you. Facebook also prioritizes videos over photos in newsfeeds, so your video will get more exposure.
Check out the engagement on different posts types below. You can see video leading the charge!
Here are some ideas for videos that you can create today:
- A home coming/leaving the lot. People like this.
- A new customer coming into their home for the first time (get permission first though)
- Time lapse of a home on the road from the lot to the home site
- Time lapse video of the construction in the factory process
- Feature benefit a home
- Q&A with the sales staff – put together all the questions you get, and answer them all on camera
Worried about being on camera? That’s understandable, but the only way to get better is to practice. Your first one probably won’t be very good, but we can guarantee your second will be better than the first, and the fifth video will be MUCH better than the first.
Disrupt the Newsfeed
Every day, there are 350 million photos uploaded to Facebook and 85 million status updates. And the average user spends only 38 minutes per day on the platform.
How do you reach manufactured home buyers in such a short amount of time with so much information being thrown at them? You make more noise than the other folks.
To start off, make the first line of the post noticeable. Most people will not read an entire post, but they will read the first line, so it better be good. A good strategy is to call out your audience in some way that will grab their attention.
For example, you can say “Are you looking for a new home?” If someone is looking for a home, this will resonate with them and they will stop scrolling to see what you’ve got.
And to make it better, throw in some emojis. They may seem a little silly, but they will grab people’s attention and make them slow down to look at your page.
Short Paragraphs
At best, you’ve got 1.5 seconds to grab someone’s attention as they’re scrolling through Facebook. This isn’t much time to say much of anything, so you have to make it count.
Don’t treat your posts like magazine articles. You don’t want paragraphs – you want brief snippets of 1-5 sentences. Just look how short this section is. Boom – point proven. : )
Have some variety
If you’ve been following us, you’ve probably heard us say that Facebook post performance is all about engagement. The more people engage, the more people see the post. And if more people see the post, the more likely you are to sell a manufactured home.
Seems simple right? Put up posts that get the most engagement, and you sell more homes.
Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Great post performance does not necessarily equal an increase in leads and sales. Post performance means that people engaged with the post, not that they are going to buy what’s in the post. Some may, but some may not.
For a real-world example, go look at Chevrolet’s Facebook page. The C8 Corvette posts get the most engagement BY FAR. But they don’t post about it all the time. In their last 20 posts, they only mentioned it on two of them. Why? Because they’ve got a lot of products, and they can’t focus on just one.
The same is true with a manufactured home retailer. Your high end mod and multi section posts will always outperform the entry level single section homes. But you cannot forget that there are LOTs of buyers for single section homes, and you need to highlight those homes on your page.
It can be tempting to only post your best, most expensive homes, just because they will inevitably get the most engagement. You need to avoid this. Post all of your homes, so that Facebook users can see your entire product line.
Be Social
It’s called social media, right? That means you should actually be social. : ) Make sure you’re answering questions, engaging, smiling, and helping out your followers in any way you can. The more social you are with your followers, the more likely they will be to do business with you.
Facebook wants to create a good experience for the user. And if you help them with that through social engagement, Facebook will show your page and posts to more users. And that’s good business.