For better or for worse, the real estate market has never been at the forefront of technological innovation. But as the great poet once said – the times they are a-changin’. Yes, the great digital wave that has, to some extent, changed the face of virtually every industry in existence is currently reshaping the fundamentals of this business field, and real estate agents who want to remain competitive have to learn a couple of new tricks along the way.
That brings us to social media, one of the most powerful marketing platforms currently in existence. Just how well do these concepts collide together and what moves can real estate agents make to make their social media strategy more efficient? Let’s try to find out.
Use the Hashtags
People often look at hashtags as a cheap way of attracting more likes for your social media posts. While that is partially true, these people are completely missing the point of this incredibly useful tool and what it can do for your social media strategy. Namely, the reason why posts that feature tons of different hashtags attract so much attention is that they are easily discoverable by the people who may not be following the original poster. And that, exactly, is your mission here – to push your content as far as possible and grab the attention of as many currently unknown clients as you can.
Engage with Your Audience
Speaking about the benefits of maintaining two-way communication with your client base is superfluous – they are simply too many to count. The main issue here is how to engage your audience to start an interaction with you. One of the most efficient ways to do exactly that is optimizing your content to be easy to find and turning it into something more than sheer promotion. The second method you can use is far more streamlined and consists of posting your followers direct questions through Instagram stories, polls, and other similar methods.
Use Quotes and Testimonies
One of the most prevalent reasons why the real estate industry and content marketing never mashed together is because real estate is not quite the best material for creating interesting, engaging, and not overly pushy content. If you are struggling with this problem, the good news is that the easiest remedy can be found in good old customer testimonies and inspiring quotes regarding homes. Turn these unattractive blocks of text into appealing pictures and you will ensure yourself a steady influx of quality content in the months to come.
Set Clear Goals and Measure Your Success
Achieving success in any kind of activity is virtually impossible if you don’t have a clear set of goals and a reference point to measure how far you have progressed. When it comes to the milestones you hope to achieve through your social media strategy, it is highly advised to make them incremental and manageable, so you don’t feel overwhelmed at any point. However, they do need to lead to some overreaching long-term goal. As for the level of progress, this problem can be easily solved by hiring experts in social media analytics to help you out. At least until you gain enough experience to engage with basic metrics on your own.
Harness the Power of Video
Most real estate agents avoid using videos in their content strategy out of fear that they won’t appear professional enough or, even worse, catch some unintentional internet fame. The only thing we can say about it is that they are missing a huge opportunity and leaving an opening you can easily exploit. The ideas for the content are inexhaustible – top ten lists, neighborhood tours, purchasing tips, unrelated vlogs… As long as your ideas are good, people won’t pay too much attention to your delivery and technical details.
Create Interesting Infographics
A vast majority of information sent to the brain is visual – some researches suggest as much as 90%. Keeping that in mind, it’s no wonder that pairing relevant bits of information with compelling and easy to understand graphics has scored so much success. Speaking in cold numbers, infographics can increase web traffic by a whole 12% while content with relevant images gets 94% more views than content without them. So, if you have something important to say, don’t hide the punch lines in the wall of text. Get to the point and put them into appealing infographics instead.
Automate the Marketing Posts
One of the most important things about efficient social media engagement lies in consistency. People just have to get used to seeing your content a certain number of times per day at a certain time. The problem is that the ideal posting time and the ideal frequency of your posts drastically vary from platform to platform. The first thing you can do to remedy this issue is to carefully study which time frames fit your marketing agenda the best. The second is to acquire some of the tools like Buffer or Hootsuite that will allow you to schedule your post in advance.
Let Your Personality Shine Through
If proper scheduling is one of the best things you can do for your social media efforts, falling into a trap of professionalism and preventing your personality to shine through your content is probably the worst. To put it quite simply, people are attracted to charismatic and humorous personalities. That is the reason why certain profiles manage to amass a very strong following in spite of the fact that their audience is not necessarily interested in the topics they are discussing. So, put some effort into your online presentation and use your natural charisma to enrich your posts.
Related: 5 Digital Real Estate Marketing Ideas for Agents
Go Behind the Scenes
Following the previous topic, being witty and fun is not the only way of creating an appealing charismatic online persona. Followers also like to “peek behind the scenes” and get to know people behind profiles more personally. So why wouldn’t you show them your pets, the daily struggles of a real estate agent, snapshots of your work or short interviews with satisfied clients? Any kind of post that will humanize you and make you more of a person and less of a profile can only work to your advantage.
We hope these nine tips gave you at least a basic idea of what your social media strategy should look like. People are not always preoccupied with the quality of the presented information but the very presentation instead. Your task will be to check both of the boxes and push quality content packed into a format that is acceptable by current social media standards.
No one said it’s going to be easy but that willingness to go an extra mile was always the fine line that separated the good real estate agents from the bad ones.
This article has been contributed by Diana Smith.