It is commonly believed that every real estate agency or agent in the industry must be using social media regardless of the service they offer, niche, or platform. It is correct to believe that social media is a powerful tool that can contribute to the expansion of your business by helping you locate new customers, sellers or buyers; however, this is only so when it’s used correctly.
A recent study from the Nаtiоnаl Aѕѕосiаtiоn of Realtors showed that social media has become essential to getting clients and closing deals throughout the industry. Below is a brief report of the study:
- 77% of real estate businesses actively use social media for real estate purposes in some shape or form.
- 47% of real estate businesses observe that they get the highest quality leads from social media in contrast to other sources.
- 99% of millennials and 90% of baby boomers start the process of searching for homes online.
All these means that social media is a treasure trove for the real estate industry. In this chapter, we discuss the various platforms that can be used, and tips on their proper usage to expand your business.
Social media for Real Estate Professionals: top platforms
LinkedIn can be the most productive social media platform for CRE professionals, due to it being the largest, professional and B2B network in the world. It also offers a variety of opportunities for you to engage with vendors, potential customers, prospective partners etc.
Business leaders all over the world share their experiences and insights on LinkedIn, which makes it the ideal place to develop a thought leadership portfolio, create brand awareness in the industry and for prospects, as well as generate precise leads with content and ads.
LinkedIn offers a myriad of ways to post content, which translates to the need for a carefully planned strategy:
- Personal updates – Whether by reaching out directly or when researching your company, prospects will often come across your personal profile first. Therefore, you should fully optimize your profile to paint an image of your role in the company, links to your property websites, what you have to offer, memberships of organizations, etc. It is highly recommended that you share content weekly.
- Industry groups – These groups on LinkedIn are usually all private, and also most often separated by certain industries or job roles. Industry groups are amazing spaces where you can share content with peers, reach potential customers, and be a thought leader.
- Company updates – Your company page is automatically a sort of brochure – containing services and current news about the company. How can you mаkе it wоrkfor you? You can leverage it by creating a huge network of employees, partners, clients, and vendors who can then help share your content.
- Pulse articles – Pulse is LinkedIn’s news aggregator platform with which you can write and share content with your followers and a larger audience when it gains enough momentum.
LinkedIn Brand Facts
Twitter Brand Facts
Twitter’s reputation has multiplied in recent years due to how it is used by brands, celebrities, politicians etc. Its lenient rules of entry .
compared to other platforms being one of the many benefits it offers to professionals in commercial real estate.
Twitter is focuses on volume, with an average tweet remaining conspicuous on the timeline of your followers for as short as 5 minutes and no longer than 15 minutes. Therefore, you must increase the frequency of your posts to get likes, retweets, responses and generally some traction. To achieve this, you must:
- List out peers, business leaders, thought leaders, and the target markets you want to reach and follow them on twitter. According to statistics, over half of them will have accounts that you can follow and engage with.
- Have regular conversations – With its 280-character posts, Twitter is a great place to keep updated daily. Although it gets a bit difficult to engage in conversation with other people, this is where your greatest growth will come from. Hence, try to take some minutes every day to engage in captivating topics with fellow users.
- Run paid campaigns to convey high value information – When you have to share some important information or new content from your company, Twitter ads are highly productive in amplifying your message. Running paid campaigns enables you to target users by industry, age, location, people they follow, and their browsing habits. Targeting prospects on such an open and active platform is extremely helpful for reaching customers.
To stay relevant on Twitter requires pushing out a lot of content daily, as well as a large enough following to share your message on a large scale.
Facebook is the largest social network in the world. It’s that one where everybody you know has an account, the one where your family members share everything that’s happening in their lives and where you read news articles every day after work. It is likewise the largest collection of brand pages and private groups in the world, which enables you to еngаgе with уоurtarget audience and generate activity on your CRE web properties.
Similar to Twitter, visual content flourishes on Facebook. The rate of engagement for images are about 50% higher than only text, while the rates of video engagement can be up to 70% higher than text and links. To get the best of this platform, combine content from your website and links to interesting information you’ve gathered from other sources.Post to Facebook once every 2-3 days at the very least, and everyday being the best frequency. However, if you have launched a new site, are organizing an event, are publishing new pictures of a property, then it’s best to post more frequently to capture an audience that wouldn’t ordinarily see your posts.
Being heard is the biggest challenge on Facebook. Automatically, the posts of an average brand are only seen by about 2% and 8% of their followers, meaning that even with 1,000 followers, merely 20-80 people will see the posts. Even if your page has a healthy engagement rate of 2-3%, at that rate you’re only getting 1-2 clicks per post.
Facebook Marketing Stats
Here are some thingѕyou can do to improve those rates:
- Directly engaging with audiences – If a follower comments on or likes a post, or if they share or repost your content on another group or Page, make sure you engage with it. Try reaching out to people who engaged with your content. Remember that Facebook is a communications platform – optimize that.
- Jоin private grоuрѕаndѕhаrе content – Private groups usually contain a lot of people – whole communities of prospective clients. Like LinkedIn, you can join these groups and share with them your recent photographs or blog post to generate traffic to your market. Don’t do open promotions.
- Work with оthеrbrаndѕоn Facebook – Brand Pages can like and comment on each other’s pages as well as share each other’s content. Take advantage of this to expand your brand.
- Pay for boosting your content – As earlier said that just a very small percentage of posts are seen by your followers Facebook, you can pay for a small $1-3 boost for posts that are particularly important. These boosts help your content to be seen regularly and can greatly increase the reach you have.
Combining frequent posting with paid boosts and active outreach will multiply both your reach and engagement, subsequently helping you build a large audience for your content.
Instagram Marketing Stats
Instagram has grown to become one of the world’s largest social platforms, having over a billion users wоrldwidе аnd 120 million in the United States alone. Although people believe that Instagram’s audience is mostly young, the ages 25-44 are the largest number of users on the platform. Beyond this, given that Instagram is a purely visual medium, specifically developed for the smartphone era, it enables commercial real estate agencies to play up the major selling points of every property.
Your brand needs to be relevant on Instagram to be effective. By default, feeds are automatically updated based on various factors considered by the algorithm. Some of these factors are, the type of content you regularly interact with, hashtags and the searches performed, and the accounts you already follow.
How do you leverage all these and boost visibility for your content?
- Follow people who post content similar to yours– Like Twitter, Instagram lets you follow and be followed by anyone. The ratio of followers to following can affect your visibility and the perceived value you have to offer. To magnify this, list out accounts you follow and be on the lookout for local influencers, relevant content and CRE topics.
- Comment on other posts daily– Take some time every day to browse Instagram and drop comments on posts that are related to your own content. Doing this can help capture the attention of other higher-profile users, as well as improve engagement on уоurоwnроѕtѕ.
- Leverage the Fасеbооk аd network – If you already run ads on Facebook, it is only natural to run them on Instagram. Given that they’re both оwnеd by the same company and use the same platform, and with Instagram representing 30% of the entire traffic between both, not running ads on Instagram is a bad decision.
Instagram doesn’t include the noisiness of Twitter and isn’t as highly curated as Facebook. Instagram is the ideal middle ground where you can pick and choose your own content and boost your social media presence greatly.
Do you want to do it yourself? Check these 5 top resources on this Social media management and marketing.