Is Social Media Key to Success in your Property Empire?
Originally posted on & updated on 17th November, 2024
France is still one of the most popular overseas destinations for buy to let investors. But in this new social world how much does ‘being social’ play in the success of your buy-to-let business?
Maria and Andy Richardson own two beautiful holiday lets in Brittany. We asked Maria for a top tip or secret to their success. Instead of an organisational or operational reply that we were expecting we were stunned when Maria replied, “It has to be – use social media!” Maria continues “I originally thought that Twitter was for Twits, Facebook for keeping in touch with family and friends and Linkedin was for business people, how naïve and wrong could I be. I since have discovered that this is simply not the case. Nowadays, most of our bookings come via Twitter.”
Around 200,000 Brits own houses and flats in France, many of which are used as rentals in some capacity, whether its long-term, year round holiday lets, or letting around their personal use, most of them in large cities with good transport instructure, decent population and universites. Take a look at our a la carte service which is perfect for investors wanting to buy in Paris of other cities of France.
My-French-House.com has helped hundreds of international buyers and investors find their dream buy-to-let property throughout France every year. Patrick Joseph founder of MFH confirms that ‘growing social’ is definitely a growing trend, “We keep in-touch with many of the people who buy their property through us on social media. Our buy-to-let clients are conscious about the broadband speed available when looking at property as, as they inform us, we need to be able to engage with prospective clients online through not just our website but also socially.”
Maria Richardson states her success is down to getting personal! “I think my success with social media is the personal interaction between myself and potential guests. I tweet about our holiday cottages and also about our local area, in particular things that I think that are distinct to Finistere, our Department in France.”
Patrick warns, that although this is a free form of advertising it doesn’t come cheap. Managing engaging X, Facebook and Pinterest accounts with regular content is extremely time-consuming. It can eat away at that valuable time you want to be concentrating on other areas of your business. And with so many new social media apps and platforms, such as WhatsApp, Threads and BlueSky, it’s getting even harder to find the time, and especially the ideas, to manage them all. Then there’s the ever growing YouTube platform, which can be very rewarding tool on many levels. But again, to be successful, it’s essential to post regular quality content, which for videos often means dealing with and editing hours of footage.
Although there are no statistics or data on the whether social media is the key to success in a business in France, we believe that success is down to the person behind the social engagement and Maria agrees, you have to, “be yourself, open, honest and creative”.
Search, Save and Review
