EACH year we hold interviews for our student placement roles and we ask: “If you were selling this office building, how would you market it?”

Previously, the responses would have been a board, brochure, newspapers, company website and property websites. In the last few years, the immediate reply is ‘Social media – Instagram, Facebook and Twitter’.

Most individuals and businesses have some sort of social media presence, whether this is LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), Facebook or Instagram (among other platforms that come and go).

The ability to open social media on any device, at any time and location, provides us with an enormous and diverse audience to engage with that we previously wouldn’t have had the opportunity to.

Commercial agents have only recently begun to get to grips with social media. Residential agents are having huge success on social media, evidenced by the comments and tags every time a property is posted, which in turn leads to enquiries and viewings. Prior to this, enquiries would have only come from anyone who had seen the board or who had been specifically looking on property websites.

However, we are aware that commercial property is a different animal. Whilst everyone looks for a house to buy or rent at some point in their lives, not everyone looks for commercial property, therefore commercial agents have to be a bit more savvy.

Social media platforms offer several ways to promote posts, i.e., strategically using adwords, hashtags and tailoring the parameters. By doing this we are able to precisely target who we want to see the property, e.g., certain industries, demographics, interests, behaviours, and even job titles.

Following a post, we can then view the social media analytics to obtain real time information on post engagement, listing and website visits and conversions to emails / calls. This offers several benefits – on-hand information for client reporting, the instant ability to tailor the marketing based on results and insight on how to deploy the marketing budget most effectively.

In general, social media is a cost-effective way of marketing properties and raising brand awareness, both locally and globally. By posting regularly, ensuring our content continues to stay in newsfeeds, we are hitting viewers directly and even if it is only an immediate scroll past, we’re still developing subconscious brand awareness and listing views.

The traditional methods of marketing are all still necessary and play an important role, however, social media can be used strategically to enhance and complement these traditional methods.

Preparing the marketing collateral, writing posts and posting regularly to keep audiences engaged can be time consuming, however, given the wide-ranging captive audience, cost-effectiveness, targeted advertising and analytic tools, it is ultimately worth the time and investment to develop your business’s social media presence.

:: Lynn Taylor is associate director at Lisney