Social Media Strategies for Realtors: Growing Your Following
Many years ago, the real estate industry hugely depended on cold calling and traditional marketing like yard signs and newspaper ads to secure and close deals. However, with rapid technological advancements, the industry has quickly evolved to rely heavily on social media.
Well, that’s not shocking because social media marketing has been helping various businesses in different industries flourish by connecting them to their target market. So, if properly channelled, it can also help real estate businesses grow.
But then, it’s improbable that you’ll get buyers to put down a deposit by merely looking at some of your Facebook or Twitter posts. As a realtor, you know how important building trust is in this line of business. There are many ways to build trust on social media. However, based on our experience at Homes by Ardor, having a solid following is one of the best ways to earn people’s trust in social media real estate.
This guide will focus on essential tips for building a strong social media following as a realtor to help you achieve your real estate social media marketing goals.
Essential Tips to Help You Build a Strong Social Media Following as a Realtor
Here are some essential real estate social media marketing tips to build a strong social media following as a realtor.
1. Choose the Right Social Media Channel to Gather Followers
Choosing the right social platforms to project your real estate business should be one of the first things to do as a real estate agent hoping to succeed at social media marketing. That’s because there are many different social media platforms and channels, and there’s no way you can be on all of them to market your real estate business and attract potential clients. However, you can be where your target audience is and easily engage them there.
So, the first step is to find out which social media channels your audience is readily available on and create an account there. Understandably, you may need to do some extra work to discover your audience’s specific social media platforms, but it’ll save you from wasting your marketing efforts. Some popular social media platforms where you can readily find real estate audiences include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and Tiktok.
Once you know the platforms your audience hangs out on, you’ll know what works best for each forum and how to tailor your social media marketing strategy to attract followers. For instance, creating a Facebook page can be an excellent way to garner followers if your audience is on Facebook.
2. Optimize Your Profile on Each Platform
Sometimes you’ll need to create social media accounts on different media to connect to your audience and garner followers. In such cases, you need to take the time to develop a customized and consistent business profile on each of the various platforms you use. Potential clients may look you up on different platforms and go elsewhere if your accounts lack essential information, current activity, or a clear sense of your real estate business.
To avoid losing future clients, solidify your social presence. You can achieve this by doing the following.
- Use the same profile picture across all your profiles so your audience can easily recognize your accounts.
- Use the same or similar handles so it’s easier to find you across various platforms.
- Fill out all areas of the profile pages of your accounts. Remember to include your real estate business’ mission statement, a brief description, a link to your website (if you’ve any) and other social accounts, and your contact information.
3. Post Contents Educating Your Buyers
Educating your audience (both new and past clients) is an effective way to get social media followers. When you take the time to create and post educative content for your audience, you’ll achieve two objectives. Firstly, from your posts, your audience can deduce that you’re a social media realtor.
Secondly, by sharing some of your real estate knowledge, you’ll make your future clients smarter, earn their trust and give them reasons to want to work with you. And when they decide to work with you, the whole property-buying process will be smoother for both parties concerned.
4. Add Video to Your Realtor Marketing Strategy
Video is another effective way to connect with your audience. Asides from being engaging, it’s also dynamic. Although it may be tempting to skip the expense and stress of making videos, you must know that they’re essential elements of social media real estate marketing.
Ponder on this; the real estate market is visual. That’s to say that your clients have to see who they’ll be paying to and what they’ll be paying for. If done well, video content of new listings can help initiate an emotional connection with potential clients that pictures of the same listings can’t.
So, feel free to get in front of a camera to make videos that’ll spark a connection with your audience. Your videos may not necessarily be that of your newest listings; they can be just educational or informational.
5. Interact With Your Audience
Social media real estate marketing has a significant advantage over its traditional counterpart: it gives clients room to interact with realtors rather than just passing information. So, use this superiority to your advantage to engage your audience and build a large following.
You can interact with your audience in many ways. Some of them include:
- Responding to the good and bad comments on your posts and business account. However, resist the temptation to trade words with your harshest critics but always acknowledge those who praise your service.
- Chatting with your followers to proffer answers to some of their questions.
- Going live as these live sessions allows you to share your personal life experiences and expertise directly with new and existing clients. You can also host live Question and Answer sessions to reach a wider audience and increase your followers.
Note that you shouldn’t limit your interactions to one social media platform. Spread your engagements and interactions to all your social accounts but be sure to know what works best for each forum.
6. Use the Right Hashtags to Optimize Your Posts and Broaden Your Reach
Many social media real estate agents need to learn how important hashtags are to real estate social media marketing. People often think hashtags are used solely to increase likes on social media posts. Truthfully, hashtags bring more likes and engagements. They also make posts more discoverable on social media. In addition to that, they also help strengthen social media presence.
As a realtor aspiring to build a large following on social media, using hashtags efficiently can be an effective way to attract potential customers and followers to your real estate brand. You can use custom or branded hashtags to build brand awareness. Beyond building your brand, hashtags can also be a way to start or join a trend on social media to boost engagement.
7. Don’t Just Promote Properties; Promote the Town too.
Promoting the town where your properties are listed is one trick many successful social media real estate professionals employ to attract followers and clients. This trick is one of the most successful social media tips for real estate agents because it works in real time. That’s because interested property buyers always seek information about the good and bad of the towns in which they’re considering buying a property.
Since most real estate blogs will only give these buyers some flowery description of the town alongside some basic demographic statistics, you can use your real estate social media channels to provide a rich understanding of the neighbourhoods in your market.
That way, you won’t be promoting your home listings alone; you’ll also be using the medium to garner new followers. Remember that many cities and towns have handles. So, you may want to tag the specific handle of the city you’re promoting.
8. Create a Timely and Consistent Posting Schedule
A strong media following is essential for any real estate social media marketing strategy to be effective because it exposes more people to your real estate world. However, growing this strong following doesn’t necessarily have to be costly. Rather than spend money on paid social media marketing, advertising, or fake followers, you can use various tactics to boost your followers without spending a dime. Timely and consistent posts are one such tactic.
You may have heard that you must post often to achieve your real estate social media marketing goals. However, effective social marketing is much more than posting frequency. It’s more about consistency and value. Valuable and consistent posts have a cumulative effect on social media engagements. When your audience finds your content to be helpful, inspiring and consistent, they won’t hesitate to engage and follow your accounts.
A consistent posting schedule may be challenging in real estate, where plans constantly change. So, after finding content ideas that’ll add value to your target market, you can use marketing tools to automate your social media calendar if you need help keeping up with a consistent posting schedule. That way, you can schedule your posts days or weeks in advance.
9. Always Share Your Success Stories
Posting every time you close a deal may look like bragging; it’s one real estate social media marketing strategy that works. Posting these secured deals is a proven way to build trust, confidence and reputation in real estate. The more people see the deals you’ve closed, the more your reputation and their trust in you grow. Even if these people don’t have an immediate need for your services, they’ll always refer you to others who do.
Furthermore, your successes show your audience how your real estate business has developed and progressed over time and the impact it has made on your previous clients. Success stories can serve as a vehicle for attracting and engaging additional followers to your real estate social media profiles.
Therefore, endeavour to post on your various channels pictures of satisfied clients, as well as those giving you a shout-out on social media to generate more engagement, interest, and followings.
10. Drive Traffic from One Social Media Channel to the Other to Gain Followers
You may create engaging content and publish it on your different social media channels only to discover that you get more content engagements and followers on some platforms than others. That’s because some of your followers on those platforms you recorded success may need to learn that you’re active on other media too.
That’s where cross-promotion comes in handy. It’s an excellent strategy to drive traffic from one social media platform to another. So, always let your followers know about your other social media channels. You can also include a call to action asking followers to connect with you on your accounts on other platforms.
Conclusion
Social media marketing for real estate agents is more straightforward than many think. The tips above are some of the best to help build a strong, thriving social media following as a realtor. What more? They’re easy to implement and take little time to yield results.