Social Media and Real Estate
Social Media and Real Estate
Social media is an inescapable part of our daily lives, and it's no surprise that modern real estate agents are often on multiple social platforms for a multitude of reasons.
In 2021 the American National Association of Realtors released a study that pointed out that social media accounts for the generation of more than half of the highest quality leads, more than Multiple Listing Service sites and Customer Relationship Management.
What are the dos and don'ts for a real estate agent when it comes to social media platforms? Is there one set of rules applicable to everyone? All of this and more, down below.
Identify your target audience on the platform.
Knowing who you're talking to is how you know what you need to talk about. The quickest way to run your engagement numbers into the ground is to post the wrong thing to the wrong people. Recovering from that is tough.
Take a look at the people following you and at who you are following to see how you can deliver real value to them. Before we go into each of the major platforms let's first talk about some overarching best practices.
Social Media Best Practices
Absolutely no astroturfing, ever.
People can sniff out fake accounts and fake praise extremely easily. Even 'good' bot services barely manage to create believable engagement or even engagement on a decent volume.
If co-workers or past clients follow you and leave a nice comment from time to time, treasure it but keep the relationships authentic - well, as authentic as they can be on social media channels.
Buying followers falls in the same bucket. Having a lot of followers but low engagement (likes, comments, shares, and so on) tells people, and the social media platform, that others are not interacting with your content.
Don't just sell.
People skip ads, that's the nature of the internet. On a social media feed, it's a quick swipe - less than a second's thought. If the only thing you do is sell, sell, sell then people will see you as someone who only cares about selling, branding, or promoting something and they won't wait to look at your post. They will just swipe up.
This doesn't mean that you should make your real estate business account into a personal account but there's a balance that you need to find. A good balance of selling, providing free resources, and personal things.
Real estate agents are meant to be approachable and friendly - that's what gets clients. A walking advertisement does not attract people.
However, if you feel forced to post about your personal life, don't do it. It all needs to feel authentic, a social strategy can't fix an awkward selfie or a trite caption. Authenticity reigns.
Being useful by talking about real estate trends, for example, is a great way to build social capital and you use a little bit of that capital with each post meant to generate leads. Your social presence should not be one-dimensional.
Another way to look at your social capital is to see it as social proof, replacing the testimonials that site on a website. A way to prove that you are more than just an entity designed to facilitate the buying and selling of a home, a person.
Facebook takes the lead by far (for agents).
The study mentioned at the beginning shows that Facebook was the social media platform that most realtors use. However, it does not break down further whether Facebook was the source of a proportional amount of leads.
While younger generations are abandoning the platform in droves, many still have accounts either because they cannot be bothered to delete it or they use it as an address book of sorts.
The platform is still very popular among older millennials, Gen Xers, and Boomers who are more likely to be in a financial situation where they would be looking for a new home.
How should you use Facebook?
Facebook allows you to easily create a page separate from your personal profile that you can use to manage your presence on the platform as an agent. That separate page allows you to keep a measure of separation between your professional and personal life.
The rules outlined above (no astroturfing and doing more than just selling) still apply but there are a couple of further things to consider.
Don't turn your real estate agent page into a 'link graveyard'. Some people adopted a social strategy that gets summed up by "small caption and a link" and they repeat the formula ad nauseam.
For realtors, Facebook is a gold mine. It makes it easy to keep in touch with previous buyers, find new home buyers, and cement your presence in a local market.
The significant benefit that Facebook offers is that your business page can act on the pages of local businesses and post success stories that are local to the area you serve. This makes reaching new clients who are looking to sell and buyers for open houses extremely easy.
Real estate businesses and agents that are not on the platform miss out easily creating a name for themselves in their local community. For this reason and a few others, lead generation on Facebook is constant.
Facebook's early investment in 360 videos also creates the possibility of making virtual tours where potential clients can look around a property while the agent walks around and talks.
Potential buyers are not all on Facebook though and most of the younger ones do not frequent the platform at all. In that case, where else should real estate agents look?
Instagram is a must-have platform.
Instagram is great for real estate because of the visual nature of the platform.
Instagram users devour vast amounts of content and you can multiply your gains from investing in professional photography by posting the pictures on the platform. Real estate Instagram is flush with beautiful content so make sure your professional photos stand out from the crowd.
A beautifully curated feed, what people see when they visit your profile, creates a level of expectation for who they are dealing with. This is where careful planning is necessary. If you plan to use different Instagram accounts then it's important not to mix up their purposes.
A personal Instagram account does not have access to the business features available to business accounts but it does let you have your own life.
Some real estate agents opt to have both their business and their personal lives on one feed. While this doesn't let you create as much of a beautiful feed compared to a purely business-oriented page, it does show a more amiable side to potential clients.
While the platform has historically been about photos, the recent shift toward short video content (reels) means that real estate professionals will also have to adapt. The big catch with reels though is that if they feel forced, they can seriously negatively affect the perception of an account. The most important word with social media in 2022 and beyond is authenticity.
What kinds of content can you put out for Instagram?
Real estate Instagram is varied and diverse. Property photos take up a large chunk of the space but there is a very common type of post that does well on the platform.
The announcement of a completed sale has everything you want in a social media post.
It usually features listing photos of the sold property discrete but still noticeable branding of the brokerage but the magic happens in the caption.
This is what the great real estate Instagram accounts are built on. In the caption, you will find a story anonymized story about how the deal was closed along with a quick lesson about the real estate industry or the real estate market when the photo was posted.
As always, it ends with a call to action.
This post conveys three things to real estate Instagram: happy clients, a well-versed real estate agent, and an invitation.
Most of these posts barely make use of even half of Instagram's 2200 character limit but contain real estate hashtags that help these stories and others like it spread like wildfire.
Real Estate Instagram Stories.
Stories serve two purposes for real estate agents on the platform, they help push the social media performance of a post for 24 hours but more importantly, the highlights feature lets people keep stories around for the long haul in separate categories.
This can be used by people who visit your profile to look at real estate listings, search for real estate tips, and look at positive reviews.
Highlights are flexible and are an easy-to-navigate feature for users to decide if they want to work with you.
Real estate content is plentiful on the platform with many real estate businesses recognizing the platform's uses and the fruitful gains generated by some of the by-products of traditional real estate marketing.
Before you hop on your phone and think more leads will just fall from the sky, it's important to spend some time to understand just how the ecosystem works. Remember, you don't want to be associated with annoyance.
LinkedIn's multiple purposes.
The real estate business, according to some, is the business of connecting with other real estate professionals.
Between signing up for networking events and collecting client testimonials, you can also find a way to brew enough curiosity to the point where it turns into lead generation.
The interconnected nature of LinkedIn means that even if most of the people reacting to your posts are other real estate agents then people in their network are seeing the posts too - after all, the platform needs to create its impression and engagement numbers in one way or another.
Given that it is a professional social networking site first, the definition of quality content on LinkedIn is different from other platforms. As such, the completion of a sale story format we looked at for Instagram can work as well but on LinkedIn, you can get away with flexing your know-how, it's part of the reason why the platform exists.
It is not a real estate website and though it may be tempting to talk about a new listing, it's best to talk about the different things that that listing can teach about the real estate business.
Whether it's your past clients taking a peek at their next possible move or people using the 3 pm lull to satisfy their curiosity, LinkedIn is amazing at setting you up to build relationships.
By talking about the business of real estate or the intricacies of real estate marketing, you will mark yourself as someone knowledgeable and that can be enough to intrigue new clients. If you need a few examples of posts that do this well, you can follow the trail of relevant hashtags you see on your timeline.
The bottom line...
If you have been neglecting your social media profiles then the start of the year is the perfect time to build up some credibility, increase your reach and maybe try a new tactic or two. While the real estate business is all about buying and selling homes, creating a human relationship is the foundation of what makes this business last.
It's a give and take, and if you strive to give more than you take, you will see a massive increase in interest for your services.
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