At the Estates Gazette (EG) inaugural Property Marketing Summit conference on Thursday 26th June 2014 there was a panel session comprising John Williams (Head of PR and Social Media at Knight Frank) and Andrew Williams (Director of FTi Consulting) who tackled the subject of the effective use of social media in property marketing.
Highlights from the presentations:
Knight Frank
- Despite the domination of Rightmove and Zoopla as content aggregators – Edward Foley (Twitter account for Winkworth in Wimbledon with 8,000 followers) shows that the cult of the personality is important
- The KFH London Property Market blog http://www.kfh.co.uk/londonpropertymarket/londonwide/factors-ensure-price-premium-properties-capital is notable for its evergreen content and no-sell approach
- The Sewell and Gardner blog http://blog.sewellgardner.com/ was partly responsible for this agent receiving the letting agency of the year award
- For occupiers, @JLLNews Twitter account is highly rated (33K followers)
- Hatton Real Estate commercial combines a video blog and reputational social media http://www.hattonrealestate.co.uk/Commercial/blog
- Land Securities Zig Zag campaign on LinkedIn was an effective use of the medium http://www.landsecurities.com/london-portfolio/london-property-portfolio/the-zig-zag-building-and-kings-gate
- The key things to remember when using social media are:
- Listening, Storytelling and Engagement
- Direct selling doesn’t work
- You can provide a customer service response in a minute
- For localism, you must listen during a planning application
FTi
- “Follow the customer and converse with the readers”
- There is a digital information gap and a social divide in the City (although some REITs are good there are 48 not using Twitter at all)
- There are some good examples of “socialising financial results” – British Land demonstrates insight in its use of Twitter, Hammerson in Marseilles was a good campaign http://www.hammerson.com/property/shopping-centres/les-terrasses-du-port-marseille/ and the Land Securities blog is good http://www.landsecurities.com/media/corporate-blog
- People who follow you on LinkedIn have self-selected themselves and are already engaged
- Often, it is the “behind the scenes” features and videos that attract most attention and interest
