So, you're sold on the reasons why you should have a social media presence for your real estate business, but where do you start? Where will you see the biggest return on your investment?
Today, we are going to be sharing how to set up and use social media marketing to grow your business, since social media marketing is an important part of your overall marketing strategy. Social media offers a powerful and affordable tool to communicate directly with your target audience, establish a brand for your business, build relationships with your followers, and generate leads - all from your smartphone.
But, before you dive in, you want to know a little bit more about how to set your social media up for success and posting strategies that will make all your efforts worthwhile.
Let's get started!
Set Up Your Social Media For Success:
1. Use Business Accounts:
If you already have personal accounts, you'll want to start new accounts for your business only and keep them separate. Otherwise, your relatives who just want to see what you're up to lately are going to get blasted with daily real estate posts. Plus, you'll probably want to limit some of the personal content on your real estate page to only what is relevant to potential clients.
When you're setting up your accounts, be sure to select "business" accounts and link them to your business website. Fill out as much information as you can, so the profile has all of the contact information that someone might be looking for.
2. Connect Your Accounts:
You'll want to maximize your access to powerful analytics that will help you learn what is working and what isn't. To do that, your accounts need to be connected.
Start by opening your business Facebook page and then you can connect it to you business Instagram and WhatsApp.
If you open a business Pinterest, you can connect it to your website, Instagram, and YouTube.
As you go through the settings options for each account, look for the opportunities to connect accounts to close the loop.
3. Use The Same Name:
When setting up your accounts, use the same name. It is much easier for someone to find you on any platform as @enyarthomes than if you have 5 accounts and each one has a different name.
You may want to open all of the social media accounts you're going to use in different tabs and try out the name in all of them before committing, so you don't have to go back and change it.
If the name isn't available on one of them, consider making a small change, such as adding an underscore (@enyart_homes) or another detail (@theenyarthomes). If someone else has the name, but isn't really posting, reach out and send them a nice message asking them to release the name so you can use it. Let them know about your business and vision and why it's important to you. If you already have the URL for the name, they'll probably be open to changing it.
On that note...
4. Open All Of Them:
It's time to snag the name on every single social media site, even if you never use them. You don't want somebody else to grab the Twitter you didn't get and then start posting things that are very, very off brand for you. Eventually, somebody will think that is actually you and it could cost you business.
So, get every social media site that you may ever want or need, even if you don't post. Here's a short list of where to start:
Get the URL, use a site like Hover or Namecheap and renew it every year
Instagram
Facebook
Pinterest
Twitter
TikTok
YouTube
Feel free to add more if you think you may need them down the road!
5. Fill Out Your Profile:
Each social media site gives you a different number of characters for your profile. Maximize the space. Be sure to share what your brand is all about, hashtags that are relevant and ways to contact you.
You can make changes over time, but fill the space from the very beginning.
Also, add a great picture to your profiles. Use a free site like Canva to size them for each social media tool. Friendly faces do perform better than logos, unless you don't have something you can work with. Then, just make sure the logos are sized correctly for each platform and swap them out for a great picture when you're ready.
If you will be linking to blog posts or content off the platform, sign up for a free account on Linktree and connect it for the URL instead of a website. You can link to all types of posts and sites from one Linktree, giving you a lot more freedom than if you use one URL.
Social Media Tips to Grow Your Business:
Alright, now that all of your accounts are set up correctly, it's time to start posting and sharing content that your target audience is going to love.
Social media is so much more saturated than it was even 5 years ago and many brands are taking advantage of inexpensive advertising opportunities, which means viewers are seeing more ads and less content than ever before.
This means a strategy must be in place if you are going to grow your business!
6. Be Consistent:
You don't need to be on Instagram Live everyday talking like your favorite influencer, but you do want to be consistent. This will give you leverage over the brands that are not consistently showing up in their follower's feeds.
Make a commitment to yourself on how often you'll be on the platforms and stick to it. For example, do you want to commit to sharing content 3x a week on M/W/F? Great. Put it in your calendar.
Do you want to be more aggressive and commit to daily posting and 2x weekly Instagram stories? Get it done!
These small efforts will pay off long-term with an established, humanized social media presence that will help you grow your business. Consistency is king.
Need some social media post ideas? Check out our post with 75 social media post ideas!
7. Choose a Focus:
Let's face it: you're busy. That's why you want to choose one or two social media accounts to focus on when you just get started, unless you've decided to hire this out to a social media expert.
So, start with the platforms you feel most comfortable with and go from there. A great place to start is Facebook and Instagram. Add YouTube if you'll be making videos for clients, because you can cross post those videos on your YouTube.
As you get more comfortable, consider adding in LinkedIn for blog posts and important content and even Pinterest to drive massive traffic to your blog posts.
If you have lots of witty one-liners, Twitter will love you and if you really love creating video reels, TikTok is new and growing fast.
Whatever you decide to do, start with a couple and really dive in. Then, slowly build out your strategy as you have the time, so long as it won't disrupt your consistency on the platforms you're already using.
8. Schedule Your Content:
Of course you can't be on these platforms 24/7, you've got houses to list and sell. But, you can make it look like you are - with the use of schedulers that will share out your content.
Once you get proficient, you could probably create and schedule content for the week in a couple of hours. Then, just let them drip out into your feeds while you're focusing on other areas of your business.
For schedulers, you can use the free Facebook scheduler for FB and Instagram. Or, sites like Hootsuite and Buffer offer even more robust scheduling tools.
For Pinterest, Tailwind is the only approved scheduler. For Instagram, Planoly is one of the most powerful schedulers you can use to really curate a cohesive feed.
Ready to geek out over social media schedulers? Here's a great post with 25 of the best scheduling options for social media today.
9. Show Your Face:
Here's the thing, you can grow your social media slowly over time with a beautiful, designed feed, but if you really want to make connections and start that wildfire of content, you'll need to show your face.
Especially in industries like real estate, where you are the brand, people want to see you, watch you show your newest listings, and get to know you.
Sure, this might be awkward at first, but over time, you'll get more comfortable in front of the camera and it'll become second nature. The more often you reach for your phone to record a property walk-through or to take a picture with your buyers who just snagged their dream home, the easier it will get.
Then, when you see how much people appreciate this human approach, it'll encourage you to keep going.
After all, being a realtor is really about building relationships and if you're starting that conversation on social media, you'll want to show them who they could be working with.
10. Start a Series:
When planning out your content, think about ways you can add value. Then, try to come up with a series, or two, that you can regularly post about that will bring people back to your profile.
For example, we curate a few different series' a week, including a Sacramento Spot of the Day and a Market Stats report that shares current real estate market trends for local areas.
Our local spot of the day allows us to share other local businesses we appreciate, while also giving our followers ideas of places to go when they're looking for food or something fun to do.
On the other hand, our market report gives valuable market data that buyers and sellers can use to determine if they'd like to sell and info on areas where they may want to buy.
Think about ways you can add value for your target audience and start sharing!
11. Connect With Others:
The whole point of doing this is to connect! Take time to respond to comments, follow others you'd like to get to know, and keep the conversation going.
If you're going to share about a local business - tag them! Let them know you're helping them out and hopefully they will reciprocate.
As you get more established, you can partner up with other business to offer giveaways that can drive traffic to all of your pages and build relationships with your followers.
12. Check Your Analytics:
Don't forget to take advantage of the benefits of having business accounts: analytics! The longer you have your accounts, the more data you will have access to that will give you powerful insights, like:
How are posts performing?
What time of day do posts reach more of your followers?
How many new accounts did those hashtags reach?
Which posts got more comments?
and much more!
Schedule sometime each month to sit down and look this over. Adjust your strategy to include more of what is working and less of what is not.
13. Celebrate Every Win:
Social media marketing can be time-consuming and uncomfortable at times, especially if you're putting yourself outside of your comfort zone to show up on camera.
Sure, we all want to think we will wake up to 2 million new followers, but especially in today's social landscape, that is not realistic.
But, you still should celebrate every win. Get more followers than you lost this week? Celebrate. Posted more live videos than usual? Celebrate. Got a new lead from a social media post? Celebrate.
By celebrating every new milestone, you'll see your social media efforts as positive and be motivated to keep going.
14. Spy On Your Competition:
Social media doesn't just make it easier for your target audience to find you, but it also makes it easier for you to spy on your competition.
Don't worry; everybody does it. You can and should look up the competitor realty groups in your area, as well as find and follow the big names in real estate all across the country. See what types of posts they are sharing and how often they are going live on Instagram or Facebook. What kind of content do they create? While you never want to copy someone else's branding or marketing plan, you can absolutely be motivated by others who are killing it and let that creatively inspire you to drum up even more ways that you can use your own social media presence to grow your business.
15. Be Patient:
This is a big one, friends. We can't stress this enough: your social media and blog will not blow up over night. SEO, even when done perfectly, takes time. Social media accounts, even when set up perfectly, take time to grow. You're working with a very saturated digital landscape where people have a lot of content coming at them all the time. You'll need to find your own approach and voice to cut through the noise, so you can find your target audience and they can find you.
Here are some things to think about when you get discouraged and want to give up:
A blog post can take 6 months to a year to start ranking on page 1 or 2 of Google and may never rank that high if it's a competitive topic dominated by sites with high DA
A new social media account can take 6 months to a year to start growing and gaining momentum, even with daily posting, unless you post something that happens to go viral
A new website starts with a DA of 0. Everybody starts at 0. The highest DA a site can earn is 100. It can take many, many years of consistent effort to get to a DA of 20 or 30.
Remember, just like your business, growth takes time. The more that you are creating, networking, and leveraging social media to increase brand awareness, the better it will be for your business now and for the long haul.
___________________________________________________________________________________________
We could keep going, but we'll stop there for now. Come back soon for more powerful social media marketing tips that are great for realtors looking to grow their brand and business.
As you're trying out these tips, remember to keep an eye on your analytics to see what is working and not working. Make tweaks and pivot as needed until you find what really works for your brand and target audience.
There are a lot of ways to use social media successfully, so pave your own way and don't feel like you need to be doing what somebody else is doing. If you're looking for more inspiration, check out our post with 35 powerful real estate quotes.
With time and practice, you'll gain confidence on social media and start to see your accounts grow.
Thanks for reading!
Comments