Social Media Marketing: An Empirical Analysis of the Online Presence of Commercial Real Estate Brands in Germany

Social media or social networks influence the way of communicate with each other in every field of private and business interaction. A growing importance of digital transactions and communication processes is expected in the future. Especially the real estate sector is rather slowly participating this trend.This research paper focuses on the usage of social media, especially Facebook and Twitter, in real estate companies in Austria. The first part gives an overview about the current state of social media in the real estate business comparing the future potential of usage. The aim is to analyse the different applications of social networks with their advantages or disadvantages for the business and to structure and classify the future potential in business. Different to several surveys concerning the aims of social media usage this paper analyses the social media appliance of the entire Austrian real estate sector by identifying the social media channels of each company. The outcome is to analyse different types of social networks with their usage and evolution for the real estate businesses in Austria.This paper covers a structural overview and a market potential analysis of social media in Austria. It comes to the conclusion that the usage of social media is decreasing more coming to the west of Austria and that applications are currently not used by many market participants. But social media will become more and more important as an enlargement of business marketing and communication in the real estate sector in Austria.