Social media helps real estate professionals expand their reach, connect with high-quality leads and maintain a strong presence with their network. It is an essential tool for driving sales and growth.
How do leading real estate businesses stand out in a crowded marketplace? They invest time and effort in social media marketing.
For a telling peek into the hypercompetitive world of selling luxury real estate, look no further than Netflix and its growing stable of reality real estate shows – like Owning Manhattan, Buying London, The Parisian Agency and Selling Sunset, to name a few. Power players are using social media to gain a competitive edge and changing the way real estate is sold in the process.
In many ways, the adoption of social media marketing to sell real estate is a natural progression. Social media marketing for real estate allows you to show up where your target audience is spending time. You can establish your expertise and personality. You can share aspirational images of your listings and fun, informative videos. Your social media content keeps you front of mind with past, present and future clients.
According to the National Association of Realtors:
- 97 per cent of all homebuyers used the internet in their home search.
- The top three tech tools that have provided Realtors with quality leads in the past 12 months are social media (54 per cent), customer relationship management platforms (36 per cent) and MLS sites (24 per cent).
- 92 per cent of Realtors use Facebook in their real estate business, 68 per cent use Instagram, 52 per cent use LinkedIn and 26 per cent use YouTube.
4 big benefits of social media marketing for real estate
- There’s a big audience. More than 5 billion people around the world use some form of social media.
- Social media marketing and advertising allow you to show up where your target clients are active.
- Social media is the top tech tool for generating high-quality leads.
- Social media channels make it easy for clients to share photos, reviews and testimonials, help drive traffic to your site, and expand your reach to new audiences.
How to leverage social media marketing for real estate
Understand your clients
Develop buyer personas for the audience you’re trying to attract. These are research-based fictionalized versions of your target clients that describe who they are, what they want, their challenges, their interests and how they make decisions. The buyer personas will inform you how to personalize your marketing and advertising campaigns.
Create unique content for each social media channel
Your social channels offer an opportunity to introduce yourself to potential clients, establish the expertise and value you can bring, and promote your listings. What do you want people to think about you? What do you want them to know? How can you help them in their buying/selling journey? Create and highlight content that captures the attention and associations you want people to make when they notice and explore your social channels .
LinkedIn is the top social media platform for B2B companies. It’s where professionals and decision makers are, so LinkedIn recommends creating articles that are strategic and help answer the top questions your company receives. This will help you establish yourself as a thought leader in the real estate space.
With more than 3 billion monthly active users — nearly 61 per cent of all social media users worldwide — Facebook is the top social media channel for real estate professionals. It’s a great place to promote listings, share engaging content and put the platform’s strong ad targeting tools to work. Facebook inserts paid ads that look like regular posts into users’ feeds, capturing their attention in a natural way.
Striking visuals are core to Instagram’s appeal, which makes it a natural fit for real estate sales. Post beautiful, aspirational photos of your current and future property listings – inside and out. Create carousels featuring photos that will have viewers swiping or clicking left to see more. Instagram offers multiple video formats to help real estate sellers engage clients with visual storytelling that captures the imagination, informs and drives impact.
YouTube and video are fast-growing social media marketing tools. Look at the numbers: 91 per cent of businesses use videos to market their products and services. Eighty-eight per cent of marketers who use video say it’s integral to their overall marketing strategy. From informational videos to 360-degree personalized listing videos to neighborhood tours to recruiting and training videos, real estate professionals can use YouTube to help achieve a range of business objectives.
Pinterest is a popular destination for sharing and finding design and decorating inspiration, making it a natural fit to showcase real estate.
In all cases, make sure your personal brand and messaging is consistent across all social channels and marketing efforts.
Use both organic and paid social media
Organic social media best practices
Organic social media is the heart of social media marketing. Posting organic (free) content on social channels helps real estate professionals build rapport and interest with their target clients and credibility with search engines. When people like, comment on or share your content on their social media channels, it tells search engines your posts are useful. This can move your content to the top of search engine results pages, making your real estate business visible to a larger audience and driving traffic to your digital sites. To be effective, authenticity is essential. This requires a consistent brand voice and style on all your channels.
To effectively leverage organic social media:
- Optimize your social media profiles: Develop an informative social media profile that will capture your target audience’s attention and keep their interest. Make sure your brand name and logo are clearly featured so users can easily identify you. Your bio should reflect your brand voice and personality. It should tell viewers in a compelling way who you are, what you do and what makes you different — your unique value proposition. Use relevant keywords and add brand-related hashtags to help your target audience find you. Include a link to your website so users can learn more about you and your real estate business.
- Create great content that engages: Develop and regularly post up-to-date high-quality blogs, images, videos and infographics your target audience will find meaningful and want to share. These organic social media posts will also help establish you as a reliable source of information, build trust in your brand and attract people to your site. The more informative and interesting your social media posts, the more likely it is other sites will want to link to them. BuzzSumo crawls the web and social feeds to find the most popular content on any topic. Use this information to learn what’s resonating with your target audience.
- Be strategic. Invest the time to develop a strong keyword strategy to ensure you are using the terms your target audience is using. Schedule posts to run when you know your followers are most likely to be online. Use your posts as a starting point for a conversation with your target audience. Bring added value to your customers by answering their questions and addressing their pain points. Make sure your visuals are more than just beautiful. They should be used to tell your brand story.
- Make it easy for people to share your content. Social media users share web content with their connections, groups and other individuals on a social network. Getting your clients to share content about you is one of the most effective ways to build brand awareness. The more they share about you, the greater your reach. Don’t stop there. Encourage clients to share their experiences working with you. User-generated content provides social proof to potential clients. With their permission, repost their stories and content on your sites and be sure to comment and engage with their posts. This fosters a sense of community and expands your reach.
- Monitor and measure social media engagement. Use analytics to keep track of how and where visitors discover you and what they do once they’re on your channel. Instagram provides insights about individual posts to help business account holders better understand their performance. Apply the elements your followers want to see to give new life to under-performing posts.
Paid social media best practices
Unlike organic posts, paid social media ads are sponsored and can take the form of pay-per-click advertising, branded content or display ads. They can help you precisely target audiences. This is particularly true of Facebook and Instagram ads, which can target users based on demographics, interests, life events, behaviours or other parameters that will take you to the right potential client at the right time. Paid social media advertising can amplify your organic social media efforts and supercharge your overall marketing strategy.
To effectively leverage paid social media ads:
- Approach your paid social media campaigns the same way you approach creating non-paid posts. Start by understanding your buyers and create targeted ads with their needs and interests in mind. Design ads specific to each social channel you’re on. In all cases, make sure the ads are compelling, beautiful and have a clear call to action.
- Set an appropriate budget. Run small tests of different ad formats and audience segments to understand what works.
- Use the real-time data generated by your ads to track key performance indicators, such as views, social shares, number of followers/subscribers, average time on site, referrals and SEO ranking for keywords. Analyze your best performing ads and enhance them to further drive engagement.
- Use social media optimization (SMO) to get the most out of your social campaigns. SMO involves analyzing, auditing and adjusting your accounts and content to make sure they align with your business objectives and brand identity. It examines things like the consistency of content across your social media channels. Even incremental improvements can boost your visibility and reach.
Mastering social media marketing in real estate will take your business to the next level. It’s a powerful tool to communicate, network and engage with your target audience. Social media is a space that allows you to be your authentic self and showcase your personality, knowledge and unique value proposition. That said, developing and executing a high-performing social media strategy for real estate takes time and effort. Partnering with a social media team of experts with specialized knowledge in the real estate industry can help maximize performance and results.
