Most clients want more than an agent focused on a quick sale. They want someone knowledgeable and trustworthy with a proven track record that can get them the best deal.
How do you create the reputation of being a super-agent that is the go-to reference for friends, family, and people you’ve never met? You can achieve this by leveraging the power of social media and social media marketing.
Social media is a variety of platforms that provides an opportunity to connect, engage, and entertain a wider audience of people than you may come across in person.
Leveraging the reach of social media gives you access to many more people than you would otherwise, but you need to utilize social media correctly in order for it to work.
If applied correctly, your social media outreach and marketing will establish you as an expert in your market.
It’s a great way to start dialogues with people you may otherwise never connect with, share tips and helpful advice, as well as create ongoing relationships with potential buyers, sellers, and renters.
Social Media Marketing
Social media is a tool to connect people and businesses. Too often, it becomes a way for people to vent and air grievances, but it can also be a powerful educational tool to connect with people from all over.
Social media and social media marketing are strategic ways to enhance brand awareness and increase sales. If done strategically, social media marketing can also build brand loyalty, position you as an expert, and influence buying or selling decisions.
Social media marketing takes on a variety of definitions, so depending on the marketing campaign strategy you’re trying to create, you can educate and inform, build a brand, or convert a sale.
Before diving into social media marketing tips and suggestions, you need to strategize what your outcome objectives are for your marketing campaign. Understanding a potential client's stage in their purchasing decision is extremely important in crafting your messaging.
1. Be Informative And Helpful
Help your audience learn about important real estate trends and solutions to some of the most pressing issues that buyers and sellers are dealing with at the time. Establish your reputation as someone that is insightful, informative, and helpful.
Most social media posts fall under 7 different primary types of posts.
- Blogs, articles, and guides
- eBooks
- Images and video
- Video stories (think Tik Tok and Instagram reels)
- Live feeds
- Infographics
- Contests and polls
Each post may yield different results depending on the type of outreach messaging you create.
If you have the time and money, you can A/B test each post type and see what converts best for you, or you can access resources of people that have yielded the kinds of results you want.
For example, I promote the use of video texts as a way to connect with potential clients. Every day I recommend sending out 10 video texts to people in your sphere with a simple “hello, I’m thinking about you” type message to stay top of mind.
2. Be Consistent
Posting on social media channels is a free way to create better brand exposure and build your reputation. But, it won’t happen overnight, and it won’t happen with just one post.
The trick, then, is to be consistent. You should analyze when is the best time of day to post on each social media channel you operate for ultimate engagement, as well as the ideal number of times to post at each one.
How you post to your channels and on a business, the page will be different content, so devise your marketing strategies to be appropriate for each one.
With every marketing post, you should keep the following elements consistent:
- Brand image
- Brand Philosophy
- Key hashtags
- Posting frequency
Ideally, you should focus your marketing on 1-3 social media platforms, with a posting frequency of 2-3 posts per day, per platform. Have a strategy that you can post daily and monthly that you’ll be able to stay with for a year.
Part of your strategy is to determine what platform is best for you and your potential clients, but also what you’ll be able to maintain over the year.
To be able to stay consistent, you’ll need to plan your content calendar ahead of time and batch prepare it so that when you don’t have time to create content, you’ll still have something you can use.
Quality over quantity is a priority in your postings so focusing your emphasis on posting a couple of times a day with content that is valuable to your audience is the best strategy for your social media marketing efforts.
The types of content you should be creating should provide value to the audience and engage in a way that is authentic to who you are and how your brand identity is defined.
Four types of content get the most engagement and interaction. Understanding these four types of content to produce will give you plenty of ideas and yield outstanding results for your efforts.
The four top content types are:
- Newsworthy
- Storytelling
- Media
- Trending
Newsworthy: Any item that provides insight and news that is helpful to your audience is an excellent suggestion for you to generate your content. Consider human-interest news and market-specific news items that are relevant to your audience.
Content that is newsworthy, whether it's public interest, announcements of events in your community, or even announcements about new restaurants and cafes in your area are all great content ideas to add to your social media pages.
Storytelling: Storytelling is an exciting, engaging way to get your message across and comes across as interesting and informative without seeming to be “salesy.”
Creating content that is storytelling, whether it’s detailing the journey of a new home purchase or some other endearing story is extremely interesting to people on social media.
Media: Using media, either pictures, videos, or gifs, are excellent ways to convey your message and personalize your message to your audience. The phrase “a picture is worth a 1000 words” is never truer than on social media. Pictures are more engaging and interesting than just content based on words, and video outperforms them both.
Trending: Much like newsworthiness, trending identifies everyday things that are popular now. You can cross-tie your brand with a popular trend or social media challenge, such as those that promote a charity or similar philosophy that aligns with your brand.
An example of using a trendy topic in your social media would be the old “ice bucket” challenge that was all the rage a few years ago. Remember that social media trend? People would film themselves getting ice water dumped on them to raise awareness of ALS, a debilitating disease.
How this craze effectively raised awareness of the disease is a topic for a different conversation. But the point is this–using something extremely popular like the ice bucket challenge is engaging and shows you as connected to what everyone else is interested in as well.
3. Be Yourself
When you post on social media, be sure to be as true and authentic as possible. Posting things just to be on a consistent schedule is not a great strategy if things you are posting don’t jive with who you are and what you represent.
Instead, approach your social media marketing the same as you would if you were meeting a person face-to-face. Always be genuine.
For example, if you really enjoy having a space in the home dedicated to entertainment, then post content about ways you can improve the “man cave or she-shed” that is part of who you are. Let your personality spill out, be entertaining and funny.
Better yet, you can create engaging posts such as before and after pictures of a space being renovated, or crazy moments watching a championship game that you can film and upload.
You can post items of interest to you or questions you may have about how other people feel about a specific event in the community or their lives. Make this content personable and relevant to a larger conversation, but always provide a way for your audience to see you as a person and not just as a real estate agent.
The point here is to be relatable, to be seen as more than a real estate agent. If you hem and haw, or have been told you have a certain catchphrase you say all the time, use that in your video content. Don’t be overly polished and boring. Instead, be who you are when you can let your hair down, when it’s you and the family or with your friends.
Showcase the real you,
4. Be Engaging With Your Audience
One of the most important points of advice I can give you about social media marketing is to engage your audience.
Don’t think for a second that posting something will do the trick. You want to create a dialogue with your potential clients. Find the types of things that they like and are sharing, and find some content you can generate that ties together your audience’s interests with your real estate business.
One thing here and don’t get me wrong about this; your content isn’t just about real estate, and your content should highlight things of interest for your audience, but find a creative and subtle way to tie both together.
5. Answer Questions and Comments
One of the best ways to engage with your audience is to ask questions and provide answers.
If you’re being true to yourself, you should be able to add a little fun into these Q&A’s. Ask questions about upcoming events, such as the Super Bowl, and ask what type of party people are planning to have. Subtly you may throw a question into the poll about the size of the current house and whether it’s large enough or not.
As you compile data, you can show results and add that to a relevant real estate solution that includes reaching out to you.
Also, consider responding to every comment–both good and bad–that you receive on your social media platforms.
While you don’t want to engage the trolls, you do want to mitigate the level of damage they do on your pages. Better yet, handling difficult, as well as happy and easy, people will go a lot further in establishing your reputation than any type of content you may produce.
People like to see how you react in stressful situations; are you a person that’s calm and level-headed? Or are you out to just finish every argument and “prove” that you’re right?
The way you engage with your audience shows them how you will handle situations in any agency relationship and goes even further in building your reputation and trustworthiness.
6. Use The 80/20 Principle When Posting
The 80/20 principle is based on a concept of emphasizing those things that yield the best results, named after a famous Roman farmer that discovered through trial and error that 20 percent of his crops yielded the most gains.
When posting on social media, this principle is slightly different. To yield the results you want, people aren’t on Facebook or Instagram to be bombarded by real estate agents and others selling their services.
People are on social media to watch what other people do, to look at cat videos or pictures of food. Social media is a diversion for most, so respect that and post accordingly.
The 80/20 principle about posting on social media is that for every 4 items you post, the 5th can be real estate specific. That means posting interesting things about kids, family, pets, and events in your area before you post anything about real estate.
Building your brand expands your potential reach to possible clients. But in order to grow your brand, you’ll need to be engaging others and make your posts interesting for people to like, share, and comment on.
And if you’re engaging those people that take action from your posts, you’re developing a rapport that you'll be able to pivot toward an agent/client relationship when the time is right.
7. Utilize Before And After Pictures
One way to create engaging social media posts that get a lot of engagement and helps create better marketing results for you is through the use of before and after pictures.
For sellers, this may be easy to do.
You can take some pictures with a phone or tablet, highlighting curb appeal and maybe a room or bathroom. Then when the house is ready to be put on the market and there have been some minor renovations and touch-ups, get professional pictures taken that showcase the changes.
You can comment about the before and after and how they increased the sales price without costing the seller too much money upfront.
The benefit of this strategy is two-fold. One, you’re showcasing how you helped a client and got them a better deal from listening to your advice. And two, you’re exhibiting the value you can provide to future clients without actually pushing your services on them.
Showcasing before and after increases legitimacy and credibility about your expertise to your audience and leveraging user-generated content enhances that even more.
User-generated content is that content that people create and share with you such as
the before and after pictures of an upgrade or other renovation to their home.
8. Increase Your Visibility Through Video
Videos give an interactive way to remotely see a property at the viewer’s convenience. Facebook, Instagram, and Tik Tok are great mediums to post your video content on.
Using video as a walk through whether live streaming or recorded can drum up attention and interest to schedule an appointment as well as get contact information from people that aren’t already in your sphere of influence.
Additionally, some agents have seen a huge return on the investment from using Tik Tok videos. I have a video on some tips and tricks on how to use TikTok as a real estate agent on my YouTube channel.
9. Social Media Is Perfect For Real Estate Agents
Social media is a perfect platform for many agents, especially as a form of marketing and lead generation.
Some basic stats to munch on;
Social Media Outperforms Almost All Lead Generation Strategies: During the pandemic in 2020, the top way to generate leads in real estate was through referrals. Coming in second place were clients generated through social media at a whopping 44% making social media marketing crucial for your success.
Facebook Is Where Agents Connect: Over 74% of real estate agents are already using Facebook as a means to connect and engage with potential clients.
Social Media Is King: According to a NAR survey in 2021, over 53% of respondents say that social media is the best marketing tool that they have in their marketing and brand exposure strategies.
Mobile Is The Wave Of The Future: Over 81% of millennials and nearly 80% of Gen X found their home online and through a mobile device.
The power of social media has created an outreach potential for agents like never before in the business. Leveraging the reach of social media should be front-and-center of any marketing plans you have, which, at the end of the day your audience may prove to be your greatest advocate.
Taking the time to develop a coherent messaging strategy, posting engaging, fun, and thoughtful content that adds to your audience’s viewing, and interacting with your audience may yield a ton of new clients and advocates for your services.
Building a relationship with your audience is the anchor to any social media marketing plans you may have. The goal is to be likable and trustworthy, someone that is more about people than transactions, and over time that trust will generate a lot more leads than any paid ads could.
