Real Estate Social Media Marketing

The real estate market has seen a boom in recent years. It will continue growing because more and more people will be looking for real estate to invest in. As more and more people get into the real estate business, you realize that having a real estate license is no longer enough. What is it about you that stands you, or your agency, apart from others like you?

To do this, you have to establish trust and make them feel confident enough to place their money in your care. You have to assure them that even though they do not have experience in real estate, you are willing to guide them through the complex waters of buying and selling property.

Fortunately, proper real estate marketing will help you achieve this. And including real estate social media marketing as part of your marketing strategy will give you an edge over many competitors.

This article is a concise guide on leveraging social media as a marketing tool. We will talk about the different social media platforms and tips on how to get the most from them. But first, let us look at why social media marketing is important and why you, as a real estate agent, should not ignore the potential it has.

Why Do Real Estate Companies Need Social Media Presence?

The first reason is that everyone is on social media, including other real estate agents. 77% of realtors have social media accounts, meaning that many of your competitors are already harnessing the opportunity that social media avails.

A majority of your clients are on social media, and social media is one of the best platforms to grow a connection with your potential clients. It avails you a lot of opportunities, including:

• The ability to place your real estate brand in front of many people using a cost-effective and efficient medium.
• The chance to target a specific demographic. With the opportunities social media offers, you can create ads that target your potential leads.
• Social media platforms also help in brand building. Social media is a powerful brand-building tool that allows you to sell your brand to your target audience.
• The opportunity to instantly and continuously engage with your target audience.
• With social media, you can manage long-term customer relationships. 

These, and so much more, make social media important enough for you not to ignore if you are serious about running a real estate business.

Where To Start From The Social Media Platforms For Real Estate Agents

The first thing to consider when you go into social media marketing is the platform or platforms you will use.

There are a lot of social media channels, and deciding which one to choose from can be quite confusing. Not all social media platforms are good for real estate agents, and if you choose the wrong one, you might end up wasting a lot of resources. Here are the platforms you should consider when starting your social media marketing journey.

Facebook

It would be an injustice to your business to ignore all the opportunities Facebook offers you. Facebook is the main social media platform in use today and has the most active users. It is also one of the places where you, as a real estate agent, will find most of your potential clients.

Facebook allows you to connect with most of your target audience and generate new leads that can turn into potential buyers. You can decide to grate a Facebook account or open a Facebook page for your business.

The Benefits Of Using Facebook

• The sheer volume of users means your potential buyers are on the app.
• You get a platform to share your stories and build your brand.
• With the ads option that Facebook offers, you can target your target audience and place your brand in front of them. Your audience can also interact with your ads, which isn’t the case with Google ads.
• It is a way to show potential buyers the many reasons they should trust you enough to buy from you.

Should You Use Facebook?

The short answer to this question is yes. However, you should know that Facebook demands consistency. You must be an active social media user and consistently create and post content that is beneficial to your audience and builds their trust in you.

Consistent content creation on Facebook means more people will see and interact with your brand. This way, you are slowly building brand trust and giving your audience the social proof they need to put their trust in you.

Instagram

Instagram is owned by Meta, the same company that owns Facebook. However, Instagram is a different platform, with different functionalities and rules.

Unlike Facebook, Instagram is strictly a media-sharing platform where you can post pictures and engaging videos, and people get to see and comment on them. The amount of people who see and interact with your posts depends on the ever-changing algorithm.

With Instagram, you can sell your brand through visual means. Most realtors shy away from Instagram because they believe it is not a suitable platform, but this could not be more wrong. Instagram avails you the opportunity to give your audience a glimpse into the real estate world through property photos and property videos.

The Benefits Of Using Instagram

• Images and videos mean that you can give potential buyers a glimpse of the properties you are offering. You can also share success stories and client testimonials as screenshots and videos.
• The caption feature allows you to educate and interact with your audience using texts.
• You can organically reach and interact with your target audience with the hashtag feature.
• Like Facebook, Instagram also has ads, so you can specifically target your potential buyers during lead generation. 

Should You Use Instagram?

To harness the opportunities Instagram has to offer, you should have a knack for visual content creation. Just as in Facebook, consistency is key when using Instagram. You need to consistently post. However, your posts should be visually pleasing. If you want to use Instagram, you should take your time to learn how to create visual content. A bit of photography, video editing, and graphic skills are necessary.

If you feel like you cannot do this, you should stay away from Instagram. Posting content that is not visually appealing is a sure way to make your potential buyers ignore your brand.

LinkedIn

Think of LinkedIn as a conference room filled with people who have the potential to better your real estate business. It is a networking platform that allows you to connect with other successful real estate agents.

People on LinkedIn are professional and are probably more educated about your service than people on Facebook. They are looking for ways to better themselves and will only connect with you if they think you can help with that.

Using LinkedIn, you can show how knowledgeable you are in your field. This will attract your ideal clients while growing your network of professionals.

Benefits Of Using LinkedIn

• You get to network with other real estate professionals and share marketing strategies. You can also glean some lead generation tips from them.
• A great platform for locating investors and forming referral relationships to get more clients.
• LinkedIn is also a great tool for when you are hiring.

Should You Use LinkedIn?

If you are looking to grow your professional network, then LinkedIn is a handy tool. While it is not as direct as the other platforms we have mentioned already, LinkedIn can also generate leads and get you more clients.

LinkedIn does not demand as much consistency as other platforms we have already mentioned. However, the quality of the content you post must showcase how professional you are. If you are not offering value on LinkedIn, you will be ignored.

LinkedIn is like a maze, and to thrive, you have to be focused. If you do not pay attention, you might get lost among the crowd of users who are awkwardly fumbling their way through this platform.

TikTok

Tiktok started as an entertainment platform, and most people considered it a video-sharing app. However, recently Tiktok has proven to be a great marketing tool for professionals.

Tiktok is essentially a video-sharing app, meaning that the platform’s main feature is video content creation. It comes loaded with many features that test your creative side and allows you to create videos that entertain and educate your target audience.

Benefits Of Using Tiktok

• It allows you to connect with your audience more intimately by creating fun videos about real estate that they can relate to.
• You can create videos of the properties you have to offer.
• There are other real estate agents using this platform. You can glean content ideas from them, connect with them, and learn trade secrets from people who have been in the business longer than you have.

Should You Use Tiktok? 

Tiktok is a great platform for creating an online presence and building brand trust. It is one of the most popular social media channels. Most real estate agents ignore the marketing potential Tiktok has, but if you are willing to put in the necessary hard work, then you should open a TikTok account.

There are multiple platforms, and they offer varying levels of benefits. Picking a social media platform for marketing purposes can get confusing, so a good idea will be to test out a few of these platforms to see the platform, or platforms, that work best for you.

Creating Real Estate Social Media Marketing Goals

The secret to successful real estate branding and marketing is setting and meeting measurable goals. When goals are attainable and measurable, they are referred to as Key Performance Indicators. These goals help direct your actions and if done properly, boost your marketing strategy.

Your goals all stem from one question “what do you want to achieve?” There are different answers to these, but the most common are:

• Build brand awareness. While this is a good metric, it is only good at the beginning. You can measure brand awareness using the impressions on your real estate social media activities.
• Creating engagement includes the amount of time people interact with your content. Do they like and comment on your posts? Do they share? You can measure engagement using the amount of interaction on your posts.
• Convince them to take action. After you have gained the attention of your audience by creating brand awareness and getting more engagement, you can start checking for the actions they are taking. How many clicks to your website? What happens when they click on the website? Do they sign up for your newsletter?

Create these goals and attach numbers to them. Then work towards achieving these goals. 

Do’s For Succeeding In Real Estate Social Media Marketing

Irrespective of the platform you decide to use, there are a few do’s that you have to follow if you want to succeed in social media marketing. These are not tips (we will talk about those later). They are a must, and ignoring them might jeopardize your social media marketing plan.

Learn About Your Target Audience

You are on social media to find a group of people who are interested in the services you have to offer. Learning about these groups of people will give you a better chance of gaining their trust and serving them better.

So pay attention to each post you make and ask yourself several questions:

• What type of posts gets the most engagement?
• When are most of your target users online?
• Does a particular type of content resonate more with your users than the other?

These are all important questions that will guide you through creating better social media content that will serve your audience better.

Consistency Is Key

We have mentioned this before. If you want to be on social media, then you should be ready to be consistent with content creation.

Most social media platforms use algorithms to decide who sees what and when. And one of the ways these social media algorithms do that is through how consistent you are with creating and posting content.

There are various tools to help you maintain a consistent presence on social media. Create a schedule and a content calendar so that content creation will be easier.

Value Delivery

Your real estate social media posts should add value to the lives of your target users. It should offer them some sort of advantage. For most real estate businesses, this means giving out real estate advice on your social media platform, but this isn’t the case. You should get creative anytime you want to create content. Ask yourself, of what use will this be to my target audience.

When you provide your target real estate customers with value, they begin to trust you, and it will be easier to sell to them. If you are great at it, they will look for you themselves.

Use Targeted Ads

A major part of all major social media platforms is the ad feature. The ad feature allows you to create ads or boost certain posts so that people outside your direct followership will find and interact with you. Ads will cost you a considerable amount of money, but if you do it right and use the right type of content, you will reap benefits from it.

Ads are mostly trial-and-error at the beginning, so the best thing if you have decided to be serious about it is to find a social media expert to help you with it.

Social Media Strategy For Real Estate

Social media marketing is hard and confusing. It is difficult to stand out and very easy to get lost in the maze, which is why you should not venture into it without a plan. However, creating a social media plan for real estate social media marketing is difficult because you are catering to two sets of people; people looking to sell real estate properties and those looking to buy real estate properties.

To help you, we have outlined a few essential steps in creating your social media real estate marketing strategy.

Study Your Customer Personas

This is the most important part of your strategy. You need to study your target audience and create a persona for them. Your target audience is broken into two groups; buyers and sellers. You should create different personas for the two grou[s.

Gather as many insights about these two groups of people, including personal information. Think about age, hobbies, and incomes. What are their needs? What goals can you help them achieve? Draw up a list of these questions and answer them. These will give you a good idea of your customer personas. 

When you start social media campaigns, your customer personas will serve as a guide. However, you should not let it rest there. As your target audience interacts with your brand on social media, make necessary tweaks to your customer personas.

Create SMART Goals

We have already mentioned how important it is for you to create goals for your social media marketing process. SMART goals will not only track your process but direct your marketing attempts.

Your goals should be:

• Specific: Your goals should be precise and clear. They should be easy to understand.
• Measurable: Social media marketing goals should have KPIs that serve as ways of measuring how far along you are towards getting your goals. How many clicks have you gotten? How many active followers?
• Attainable: Aim for the moon, not the sun. Your goals should push you. However, they should be practical. Do not set goals that are impossible to achieve because it looks good on paper.
• Relevant: Your goals should be relevant to the current state of your business. They should have direct import on your business.
• Time-Bound: Give a deadline to your goals. Setting goals are important, and giving your goals deadlines will motivate you to work hard to achieve them.

Choose The Best Social Media Network

We have already taken a look at some of the best social media platforms. However, ultimately the best platform for you depends on you. All the social media platforms we have in this guide require time and money, and some of them require you spend some time learning how to use them.

Choose the social media platform that works best for you and ensure that it is yielding a return on the resources you have spent on it.

High-Quality Content Creation

There are a lot of real estate agencies on social media, and one of the ways you can stand out is by creating content that gains the trust of your target audience and positions you as a credible professional in the real estate business.

There are three different kinds of content that you should create as a real estate professional on social media; written content, visual content, and video content. These contents have rules guiding them, so you should spend time learning these rules. Creating content also has legal ramifications, so ensure that you comply with fiduciary rights when you are publishing content.

If you think that creating content is too difficult and you do not want to invest the time it would take to get good at it, you can hire content creation agencies or freelancers to help you. Do not create and publish mediocre content because it is the surest way to get lost in the maze.

Create Ads That Target Your Audience

While you can reach your followers organically, it is getting more and more difficult as a lot of these social media platforms create increasingly complex algorithms. Hopefully, paid ads will help you close this gap.

All social media platforms have the option to pay for ads or to boost a certain post. These ads are targeted and can be directed to people in a certain location who have similar demographics and interests.

The most important factor while creating ads is that you are transparent and honest. You can boost the trust people have in you using reviews and testimonials from past clients but never lie about your achievements. That is a quick way to lose the trust people have in you.

Rinse and Repeat

Your social media marketing strategy should not be static. They should change with time, and the changes depend on the data you gather. Measure your progress and the results of your efforts and collect insightful data from them. Using these data, you can make tweaks and changes to your social media strategy. Always pay attention to the KPIs you have set for measuring your goals. See how well you are doing and make changes to them as your social media goals change.

Finding the right social media strategy is trial and error. So keep tweaking and changing until you find one that gains you the most result.

4 Tips To Help You Maximize Social Media Use

Be Authentic

The most important rule of social media is to be yourself. Do not try to copy anyone on social media. Create your unique personality and stick to it. Your brand is exclusively yours and has a unique story so ensure you tell that unique story in your voice across all your social media platforms.

Do not sound formal or robotic; rather, give your content voice a personal tone that will cause the people to make a connection with you. Let your personality shine through the content you post on your channels.

Connect With Your Followers

While real estate content creation is important for creating a credible social media presence, you should never neglect the importance of engagement. Constantly engaging with your users by replying to their messages, liking and replying to their comments, and responding to their worries will build the trust they have in you.

People want to trust other people, and the only way to gain people’s trust is if you show them that you are just like them. This will provide them with social proof of your credibility.

Social media is where most people go to get their questions answered, so if there is a question you have the answer to or a need you can solve, solving it will get you closer to earning the trust of your audience.

Do Not Ignore Negative Comments

Respond to all comments promptly, whether they are positive or not. While positive comments are motivation and should be celebrated, you should not allow negative comments to get to you.

There are a lot of people on social media, so you can’t expect it to be all roses all the time. When you get a negative comment, absorb it and if there is a lesson, learn from it. However, do not let negative comments stop you from doing a good job.

Do Not Focus On Selling Property

As much as one of your goals on social media is to foster more sales, do not make your entire social media account about that. Educate your users and give them answers to the real estate questions they have.

You must make it clear that you are a real estate agent, but it should not be the topic of all your conversations. It should be a peripheral aspect that comes up only when necessary.

Parting Words

According to the National Association of Realtors (NAR), more than 77% of realtors use social media, and in 2020 44% of these numbers said they got most of their clients from social media.

The impact of social media on the real estate industry can no longer be ignored. It is one of the best places to sell yourself and the real estate services you offer. This is why you should take your time to create a presence on social media.

Find the right platform for you and create content centered around your profession. Interact with your audience and do this consistently. If you find this difficult to do, you can employ the services of a social media marketing company to help you.

Your clients are on social media, so make it easy for them to find you.

Ready to book a free demo? Schedule your appointment with the West Gray team here.