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Real estate has claimed a tremendous presence on Facebook. The vibrant comment threads, lead collection strategies and general promotions you see every day are just a few examples of how industry professionals have leveraged this platform for business.
In February of this year, the social media leader launched Canvas, a new advertising tool that provides businesses with an effective way promote their brand and for agents — also share listings.
Canvas is designed to present content very much as an app would, with scrolling image reveals, swipe-able information and adjustable text fields, plus a 10-times faster load time than the average website.
Mobile-focused, the ad tool is heavily visual, a perfect format to showcase listing pictures. Maps could be added, along with images of happy families and bio and sales history information of agents or brokerages.
Real estate has a tremendous presence on Facebook.
Canvas also supports animations and video, and inserts call-to-action buttons for email sign-ups, “more information” forms and detailed listing landing pages.
The company is promoting it as “an immersive and expressive experience on Facebook for businesses to tell their stories and showcase their products.”
Sure, that language is little overdone, but it’s not untrue. The visuals and supporting text do spin a great message. A number of national brands are using it to push their wares.
How it works
Agents will need a Facebook advertising account to begin using Canvas. That only takes a couple of minutes to set up.
Building a “canvas” starts with Facebook’s Power Editor, essentially its ad management dashboard.
I play around in there quite a bit. It’s not awesome from an interface perspective, but it’s easy enough to manage your ad creation, monitor your spend and adjust your audience.
Oh, and Canvas ads can also do that cool thing where tilting the phone lets a viewer see more of an image. That would be a neat way to reveal the details of a great room or an expansive outdoor living area.
All that being said, Canvas isn’t just for advertising.
As of last week, Facebook has opened the rich media format for Facebook Pages and organic posts as well. The company reported that current average time spent on a Canvas post is 31 seconds.
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To get inspired, check out some of the samples of how big names like Target, Wendy’s and Netflix have taken advantage.
Have a technology product you would like to discuss? Email Craig Rowe.
