Gone are the days of giving a Bill Bellichick answer about your social media presence: “I don’t Twitter, I don’t MyFace, I don’t Yearbook,” he said. “I don’t do any of those things, so I’d probably be the last to know.”
This business is a people business. It’s a personality and relationship business, but the world — and certainly the market of real estate — is becoming more digital by the quarter. Sure, you’ve been doing your work, setting up your leads, and developing your contacts. But the path to buying and selling a home has changed. The new path to picking a real estate agent is now so research driven by the consumer as access to information has increased. But this isn’t your parents’ real estate sales environment anymore. It’s a fast moving market where the client has already made ten decisions about you, the realtor, before even looking at a property. And what potential clients learn about you and your properties online, builds trust long before you see the glint in their eyes.
It used to be Always Be Closing — Now: it’s Always Be Posting.
Your digital footprint across the gamut of social media platforms helps clients gauge your product offering before you business is done. They are the pistons powering your business, punching you through successes and warming your leads before you even meet them. And folks, make no mistake this doesn’t have to make your job harder, but it will make it that much more successful.
Social media strategies need to offer more value than updating your Facebook posts with your latest listing. Real estate businesses may not have online content with the most pop, but there are ways to drive daily traffic toward potential clients long before they become either a buyer or seller. Social media isn’t a one off or a set and forget system; effectively using social media is a daily prime factor for successful realtors and real estate companies. Their social channels are organic in that they live in an ever-growing space in the daily scroll of those not even in the market. Bottom line: this is about consistency, not just about being clever.
How to Selling Real Estate on Social Media
Facebook may own Instagram, but the best types of content for each is remarkably different, and the same goes for Twitter. Each one is a vine that will dry up if not maintained properly. There are a few key functions all social media platforms reward realtors with, each in their own way. They all help you use likes, shares, and comments as lead generation tools, of course. Most importantly and useful to your long-term success is how they aid in building a brand of trust, consistency, and market share. By taking advantage of the apps at hand and committing to creating a frequent, true presence on them you slowly become ever present in your sales region.
Using Facebook to sell real estate
How to Excel: Although this platform is constantly changing, both with their organic algorithm and ads manager, Facebook still has an insane amount of active users, and gives those advertising access to a ton of data. On the ads side: its an excellent source of lead generation because it best allows for demographic research for b2c efforts. Realtors can utilize a technique called micro-targeting to not only narrow their advertisement fields, but also their returned search results. On the organic posting side, make sure that you’re making a local footprint. Use facebook to educate potential clients about the city or town you have properties in rather than simply promoting a home in an area. Highlight schools, fun activities, and, if you’re in a city environment, utilize walk-score ratings to generate interest in an area directly to people either living or looking in your scope of properties. This builds a deeper base of trust within potential clients because you’re not selling all the time, you’re offering a vision of the life your buyers want. Place them in the dream and then sell the dream.
Methods to avoid: Facebook often has the most active comment section. As with all businesses people are far more likely to comment about a bad experience than they are a good one. Lesser real estate professionals will frequently disable comments on their profile page, or ignore them entirely and only respond to positive comments. It’s vital to accept errors and ownership of dissatisfied clients. Take the time to respond respectfully to otherwise negative comments with genial positivity or offers to connect further offline to meet their needs. This helps make you a whole person in the eyes of current and potential clients. It allows them to see you as self-aware, astute, and actively working to do best for your clients and business. People who actually care will be able to see right through the sometime disparaging comment section.
Selling Real Estate on Instagram
How to Excel: Instagram is so much more than selfies and dog pics (hold on, we’re not saying get rid of those). The photo / video content platform has morphed into a sales engine that is probably the best platform for real estate agents to invest in. Backed by Facebook, the targeting qualities are pretty extensive, but we aren’t going to talk about that here. First and foremost, don’t be afraid to put out Stories on Instagram. Yes, they’re short lived format but they offer a lot of insight and a ton of capabilities for engagement. Try putting up some stories and utilizing engagement features like polls, questions, quizzes, and chats to get some feedback from your followers. Show that you’re a local! Take some time in between showing listings and grab a coffee at the local coffee shop, take a pic, tag the location and restaurant. Your future buyers want to see what it’s like to live in the area, not just pictures of potential kitchens, living rooms, and staircases.
Methods to Avoid: This is a living, breathing platform, and using it only to post still images of listings or sales is a waste of its potential. If you’re not having a great year in regard to sales — don’t stop posting. It’s like a void in your resume, folks will wonder more about the gaps between sales than they do about what good you can do for them.
Selling Real Estate on Twitter
How to Excel: What Instagram is for telling a story through images, Twitter is a platform for conversations. You can find people having discussions in real time and help answer questions. Have you heard of social listening?
Social listening is the monitoring of social media channels for any customer feedback or mentions of keywords, topics, competitors or industries. With some tools this can be further narrowed down to a location as small as a mile.
On Twitter, you can monitor for keywords that are often used in correlation with a product or information search. “Moving to Boston”, “growing family”, etc. are all incredible searches for a real estate agent to pay attention to. These keywords create a laundry list of real people having real conversations that you can help.
Methods to Avoid: Twitter is all about the conversation. There’s nothing worse than having a conversation with someone who only wants to talk about themselves. It’s a disservice to your hard work building a reputation to only post your content. Constant self-promotion leads to limited interaction while it simultaneously creates gaps in your content history because you aren’t closing or listing something new several times a day. You’ll end up with a timeline of repeat posts and alternative phrasing for the same listings. It’s dull and predictable content that at least will get you ignored, and at worst, unfollowed.
Once you learn to post a consistent stream of content that is equal parts variety and quality your online persona will deepen and strengthen concurrently making you more valuable to those buying or selling a home. You truly will get out what you put in so remember to:
