3 ways to generate more open house business using Instagram

It’s a beautiful Sunday afternoon, signs are out, the house is open, the lights are on, the refreshments have been placed, and you posted the perfect selfie on Facebook inviting people to come visit you; yet you spend 3 hours sitting in your seller’s house, browsing the Internet, reading, and doing some housekeeping on your emails. You might get a handful of visitors, nosey neighbors, the real estate enthusiast in town in for a quick browse, but not exactly what you were hoping for. It’s a far cry from the crowded, wine and cheese, open house events that you see on TV. So how do you do it? How do you get crowds of people through your open houses? Finding a buyer would be great, but 30–50 new contacts would be even better. That’s a week’s worth of work! I’ve spoken with several agents recently concerning what they’re doing to ensure traffic to their open houses; specifically in the digital/social media space. Surprisingly enough, almost every single one of them was seeing the most success using Instagram to drive traffic and attention to their open houses.

Here are the top 3 strategies:

1) Instagram ads

Although we’ve all seen the “sponsored posts” coming up in our newsfeed, most people were unaware of the ease in which one can create their own custom sponsored post on Instagram. By quickly linking your Instagram to a business Facebook account, you are able to post directly to an audience on Instagram with the same targeting capabilities that Facebook ads provide. The agents were using this primarily by running an Instagram giveaway ad 72 hours prior to the open house. All it takes is a simple image of the house with a text stating something like, “Follow my page and stop by the open house on Saturday at 123 Main St. Show me this ad and enter your name in a drawing for a $50 gift card of your choice.” This strategy accomplishes many things…

• this strategy can reach up to 10,000 people in the surrounding area of the open house
• It invites people to follow your page (more eyes on your content = more potential customers)
• It allows you to follow up with these people on a 1 on 1 basis as they come in through your open house. Create conversation by asking what kind of gift card they would like, learn more about their context and personality, and you get their social media information because they had to follow you to enter
• For just $100, ($50 to run the ad and $50 gift card) you can reach almost 10,000 people and drive a significant amount of traffic to your open house that day.

2) Create a custom hashtag

Creating a custom hashtag for your open house will do wonders for traffic and will also give you some tangible data to take back to your sellers at the end of the weekend. Creating a hashtag using the address, (#123cliffdrive) and encouraging people coming through to snap a photo and post with the hashtag does a few things for you:

• Following the weekend, you can go back through the hashtag and engage with all of the people who posted from your open house on social media
• It allows you to show your seller exactly how many times their open house was posted using the hashtag as well as how many people engaged with each post
• free marketing from people all over the community posting photos of your listing

I’ve seen agents use a contest as incentive for the people passing through to post, with some having even gone as far to use a sign on the balcony or in the kitchen that reads, “Snap a photo of the view and #123cliffdrive to enter to win 2 free movie tickets.” Have fun with it, make it your own. At the very least, use it as a conversation piece for the people that walked through the house and started to walk out. It’s quite simple to ask, “Did you take a picture of the pool and use the hashtag to enter my contest?” This will bring some personality and attention to your open house.

3) take a video

Instagram’s new 60 second video feature has allowed for some incredible uses of video to create buzz around open houses. Use this feature to tell your story. The best example of this I’ve seen comes from a good friend of mine. Each weekend, he finds someone coming through his open house with a great story. Before they leave, he asks if he can question them on video concerning their story and the reasoning behind their interest in the neighborhood. He takes a 1 minute video and posts it every Monday as a story from

the weekend. The video is not something amazing, rather just a quick video of the couple expecting a baby that needs to upsize; or the family from the Midwest on their way out to California. These videos keep people excited and engaged. There are people who are excited each week to see what story he is going to post from the weekend. And often times, the people featured on his videos become his clients because of the genuine interaction.

These 3 strategies are all simple, cost effective, and easy to implement weekend after weekend. If you do 1–3 of these strategies every weekend, you will not only start seeing more people coming through your open houses, but those people coming through will also convert to open houses. Go out and give it a shot; see you Sunday afternoon!