10 tips to step-up your real estate social media marketing

One of the most important elements of SEO for social media marketing is hashtags. While there’s a heated debate surrounding the topic of the effectiveness of using hashtags on social media, the stats show that some industries, real estate included, can still benefit loads from implementing the right hashtags into their profile activity.

#1 Make Sure You Got Your SEO in Check

Often, within the marketing community hashtags are seen merely as a tool to boost engagement. However, for real estate professionals, hashtags can generate more than just extra likes and comments. They are great for boosting your page’s visibility to potential customers as a lot of prospects use industry-specific hashtags to look for available options.

As a real estate professional, you may vary the level of specifics of the hashtags you use. You can go for both generic hashtags to improve your visibility and generate better engagement and extremely targeted hashtags to fish for potential home buyers and home sellers.

Here are just a couple of examples of relevant hashtags you can use in your social media marketing strategy:

  • Generic real estate hashtags: #realestate #realtor #broker #justlisted #homesale #househunting #properties
  • Real estate agent hashtags: #realestate #commercialrealestate #realestatebroker #realestateagent
  • Customised real estate hashtags: #[Target Neighbourhood] #[Real Estate Team Name] #[Brokerage Name] #[Target City]homes #[Target City]property

However, you also need to remember that most social media platforms limit the number of hashtags you can use per post or per comment, Sometimes, the more is not the merrier. Keep it on the low, it’s the quality and quantity that counts!

#2 Ensure You Know Your Platform and Adjust Your Social Media Marketing Accordingly

As it has been mentioned previously, you need to know the specific regulations the social media you use for your social media marketing endeavours has. However, it’s not the only thing you need to research to step up your real estate social media marketing.

Another factor that can make a huge deal of a difference is the platform itself. Different social media have different contingent and different formats of content presentation. Your job is to match the two with the content you share to appeal to your target audience.

The four main platforms that real estate professionals should consider for their social media marketing activities are Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Each of these platforms has their own peculiarities, so if you want to use more than one of the platforms, you need to make sure you don’t just recycle the content without adjusting it to fit the service.

Pro Tip: No matter what platform you prioritise, you should still focus on creating video content as it’s the driver of any social media marketing efforts. Today, video tops over any other form of content since it allows you to tell a more coherent story, engage better and overall provide more information to your viewers. As a real estate professional, you can employ the following video formats into your social media marketing plan:

  • Q&A in real-time (if you decide to go live)
  • Videos of your listings
  • Educational videos about the industry

#3 Focus on the Neighbourhood Not Just the House

The next thing you need to remember when trying to grow your social media presence is that you should really be passionate about your job. Your followers want to see that you both love and know what you do. Then and only then will they keep engaging with your publications.

One sure-fire way of doing so is to go beyond just the houses you list. Instead, you can cover the neighbourhood those houses are located in.

If you do that, you can kill two birds with one stone: you will both show your passion and attract people from the local area to keep up with your posts (remember point #1: locals = potential leads).

#4 Establish a Trusting Relationship With Your Followers

Social media marketing is one of the most effective forms of digital marketing. However, it is only so if you establish a two-way connection. The best aspect of social media is the fact that they are both active and reactive, and allow real-time communication between businesses and their prospects and customers.

If you want to build your follower base as a real estate professional, you need to make sure that you establish a genuine bond, a connection between you and your audience.

To do that, you have to ensure you are always up-to-date with all the comments, mentions and replies and react to them timely and adequately. The reason why so many people prefer social media over any other means of communication is because of how simple and quick it is to reach out to businesses. Keep it that way!

#5 Include User-Generated Content into Your Social Media Content Plan

One of the infallible ways of building trust towards your brand and bettering your connections with your audience is making them a part of your business page! Let them know their feedback counts and is valued immensely. A great method of showing that is by using testimonies and success stories relevant to your craft.

Perhaps, you’ve closed a deal or found a great house for your clients. Let them leave a comment for your social media page. Not only will that be an honour for them to make an appearance, but your other followers will also see that you are, indeed, not a scam.

#6 Don’t Only Post Your Listings

Speaking of your content… While you might want to advertise your listings as, essentially, getting customers is the prime goal of your social media marketing activity, you shouldn’t get too caught up in it.

A large portion of your audience is not following you to just see the houses you’re trying to sell. If they were interested solely in that, they would have just googled properties available in the area they are looking at instead. No! On social media, people are after satisfying content. So this is exactly what you should deliver to make sure your page is being successful. A good ratio is 20% to 80% when it comes to listing ads and other content.

Some ideas for what else you could post about:

  • Home tips and renovation ideas
  • Event coverage
  • Your individual professional life (there will be a percentage of followers who want to work in real estate, too, and are interested in a blog of someone who’s already in the industry)
  • Industry and market news
  • Memes (those can keep you relevant and not overly snobbish in the eyes of the younger audience)

#7 Conduct Contests and Giveaways to Build Brand Awareness

The best way to boost your brand awareness and attract numerous new followers to join your page is contests and giveaways. Just make sure they are not the ‘follow everyone I follow to get this free gift type. Those can kill your engagement and social media ranking since a lot of people hit the unfollow button as soon as the contest is over.

Make sure you craft a really engaging offer that would spark a lot of discussions and attract people who are genuinely interested in real estate and adjacent topics!

#8 Don’t Neglect Targeted Ads 

Ads might sound like a tacky investment but they genuinely can help you generate more quality leads! Both Facebook and Instagram have great ads options that you can customise to target the right crowd.

#9 Use Social Media Marketing Automation Tools

There are lots of tech tools to make your social media marketing journey less stressful. Some of the tools you could take into consideration include:

Scheduled posting or postponed posting tools 

Undeniably, some hours are just better for posting than others. The longer you work in SMM, the more apparent it becomes. However, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the best posting hours correlate with your business hours. If you’re targeting a specific group of people, you might not even be awake when they’re active on social media. That’s why you should turn to tools to schedule posts for later.

Content planners

The golden rule of SMM is to be consistent in your posting. You can’t post too much but you also can’t post too little. To keep everything balanced, you need to have a calendar of the stuff you’re going to share with your audience.

Social CRM system

If you want to ensure great relationships with your customers, make sure you track all the mentions and keep a log of all the interactions. A CRM tool will help you immensely with that!

#10 Focus Equally on New Leads and Already Existing Buyers

At last but not least, when trying to build your real estate social media marketing strategy, you need to divide your marketing efforts equally between the new prospects and the already existing customers. You have to generate content that would appeal to both and keep both groups engaged. Then, you can expect a successful development of your social media platform in the long-run.