Inside Third & Bond: Week 132

This week the Third & Bond bloggers discuss their efforts to market their project on a certain social media platform…Week 121 was an historic moment for Hudson: we embraced social media to market a real estate development. The decision to create a Facebook page was made with some ambivalence. Who buys a home based on Facebook? Is it worth the time and effort to run a Facebook page? What’s the point? How many of the 400 million people on Facebook will care?

In the ten or so weeks that Third + Bond has been on Facebook, we’ve gained 183 friends, fans or likes, depending on today’s Facebook nomenclature. That’s about 18 a week, which is not far off from the number of weekly visitors to the physical site. We see upwards of 360 visitors per week to the page. True to our expectations, some of our fans are no-quotes-needed friends of people involved in the project, like Alison’s mom. The majority though are people we don’t know and that’s pretty interesting.

We see the Facebook page as another opportunity to capture and keep the interest of potential buyers or the pals of potential buyers. It’s push marketing in that once you like us, we can pop onto your screen whenever we like and grab your attention. In contrast, while you can bookmark our website, we can’t contact you at will. We can’t remind you to check out our latest news, we can only hope you come back to visit once in awhile.

We’ve also found that Facebook…

…simplifies communication compared with the formality of a programmed website. The status update allows us to give snapshots of something that’s going on, like the times for an open house or the water service being turned on. The photo albums give us a chance to share more images that tell the story of the project. In short, Facebook gives us more opportunities to get you to like us. (Next thing you know we’ll be signing Third + Bond up for Match.com.)

To capture new attention, we are running a couple of pay-per-click campaigns on Facebook. If you’re on Facebook, these ads are the little square images with a few words below them that appear on the side of your screen. Pretty innocuous as far as on-line advertising goes nothing you have to click to ignore, nothing that flashes or pops-up. If you choose not to ignore the well-behaved ad and click, then we pay Facebook and you are taken to the Third + Bond Facebook page. Once you’re there you have access to all of the content and if you want to know when we post updates or show your love, you can like (or fan or friend it keeps changing) to stay connected.

We have 3 ad campaigns and up to $1,000 to spend each month. Facebook uses a bidding system to get the best prices from their advertisers. The range for bids changes depending on the desirability of the time period. Right now for example, we have an ad with the parameters: 25 miles within Brooklyn (smallest radius we can get), all females and males 28-51 years of age. The suggested bid range is $1.09 to $1.41. If you believe Facebook, that’s the range for successful bids so if you want to get your ad out there you’d better bid $1.09+.

This ad has made over 2 million impressions since March, which means it has shown up on the screen of Facebookers over 2 million times. But the ad was clicked on only 744 times, providing us with a click through rate of 0.034%. Not awesome but better than you might think. The fact that this ad has been interesting enough for 744 people to click through to see a project with 44 units is good. How much did it cost? Less than $500. Another of our campaigns has seen 1,160 clicks versus 4 million impressions.

We like pay-per-click and the other means of tracking web browsing because it gives us some concrete data to go along with the semi-reliable responses we get from the open house check-in sheets. We still don’t know which of the advertisements you saw first or which got you to the project, but we can at least see if the money we are spending on-line is generating enough attention as to be worthwhile.

Third + Bond isn’t breaking new ground for the real estate industry by delving into social media but we are exploring new ground for Hudson. Funny to think that less than 4 years ago we had just lost out on our first bid for the Third + Bond site, LEED was not a household brand, the economy was hot, and Facebook was strictly for college kids. Time to take a deep breath—or download an app to do that for us.

Facebook: Third + Bond Twitter: Thirdbond

Inside Third & Bond: Weeks 1-131 [Brownstoner]

Our legal fine print: The complete offering terms are in an Offering Plan available from Sponsor. File No. CD080490. Sponsor: Hudson Third LLC, 826 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.