Social media marketing (SMM) refers to leveraging social media channels and platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Tiktok, and Twitter to promote self, brand, or business. It has become an essential part of marketing strategy for realtors and real estate professionals and connecting with your target customers.
The use of social networks has increased exponentially over the last few years. Social networks have attracted users from all age groups, geographies, genders, educational, and professional backgrounds. Hence, it should be just natural for real estate businesses and brands to leverage social media to establish and market their brand. What makes social media attractive for real estate professionals is the ability to connect, engage, advertise, and promote their brand based on parameters like location, interests, and behavior of their target customers.
Benefits of Using Social Media for Real Estate
There is much research and evidence available to show the benefits of using social media for businesses. A few benefits for the real estate sector are listed below:
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Increase Audience Reach
Real estate is a competitive industry. Putting out the word about their business and properties are necessary for the survival of realtors. This is why they need an effective platform to strategically reach out to their target customers. As most people spend a significant amount of time on social media platforms, it becomes a great tool for achieving maximum reach for realtors. It is also quite cost-effective compared to most traditional forms of marketing and advertising.
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Brand Building
Brand building is another important exercise for real estate professionals as it helps them to build a positive reputation for their company and property offerings. Social networks allow them to share valuable information about their properties and company directly with their customers thus helping them build a positive image for their brand.
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Solid Network
Networking is one of the fundamental aspects of success in the real estate business. Realtors need a strong network of industry peers, customers, and prospects to increase their sales. Social media offers incredible opportunities for real estate professionals to build a vast network of industry peers, prospects, and customers. Features such as messaging, commenting, and sharing content help them build connections on a more personal level.
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Lead generation
While social media is generally considered a tool for mass engagement, it is also a great way to build one-on-one connections and generate direct leads. In recent studies, 47% of real estate businesses say that social media offers the highest quality leads as opposed to other sources.
Social Media Marketing Best Practices That Realtors Must Use
While social media is a powerful marketing tool for real estate professionals, following a few best practices can help you get the best out of it. Try these real estate social media marketing best practices:
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Select a few platforms and stay consistent
There are many social media networks available today that you can use as a business owner. However, you need to identify the ones that are right for you based on your customer persona and the demographics you are targeting. User demographics include the age group, profession, education, and location of the users, among others.
Once you have chosen a few social media platforms, it is necessary to stay active and post on a regular basis. Whether it is Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, or Snapchat, actively posting on these channels is key to winning followers and potential customers.
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Promote more than your properties
Posting pictures of properties is an obvious practice for realtors. However, you need to be creative and go beyond only posting your property pictures. For example, sharing the testimonials and success stories of your customers can help you connect with your audience on an emotional level.
Some other creative content ideas include posting current industry trends, company accomplishments, awards and recognition, event highlights, and home decor ideas.
Content from other social media influencers can also be shared with due credit given to the owner.
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Educate your audience
Buyers have a lot of questions they want answers for. You can use your social media pages and handles in a smart way to answer their queries and questions. As a realtor, you would have gained much knowledge about the industry. You can share that knowledge with your audience. You would also have faced several challenges yourself as a buyer. You can share your lessons from your pitfalls with your audience.
If you have a blog, you can write articles that help your audience and share them on social media. You can create surveys and polls. The bottom line is, offering value to your audience through content will get them talking about your brand and help you gain more visibility.
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Constantly engage with your audience
Social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram are great ways to build and grow a user community around your brand. However, you also need to focus on engaging with your connections and followers on a regular basis.
Make sure that you reply to the comments you receive on your social pages. Also, ensure that you respond to the page mentions you receive. Consistently engaging with the user community on social platforms helps you gain their trust and build much-needed exposure for your brand.
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Use video marketing
Today, videos have become a powerful way of marketing a company’s products and services. A video is more attractive than plain text content.
Besides being engaging, videos help you get more creative. Another advantage of video marketing is that it can help you boost your website rankings on search engines such as Google.
You can either create a video of yourself or create a 360 view of your property and neighborhood and share it on social networks. You can also create Q&A sessions and panel discussions to position yourself as an authority on the subject matter. They can also help you garner maximum engagement in real time.
You can further create live videos using platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube to gain more exposure and drive higher engagement. The secret is to think like a prospective buyer and create video content that adds value to them.
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Monitor the results
Continuously monitoring data and analyzing results is a key priority for real estate professionals. Social media analytics helps you keep track of your content’s performance. Measuring this performance helps you analyze which content type performs better, what is the best time to post, when you will receive maximum audience engagement, and which channel adds the most value to your business.
Using social media analytics, real estate marketers should look for answers to the following: what is the public sentiment about the brand; which platforms and advertising efforts are delivering better ROI; and how organic and paid social strategies can be improved as well as future content can be optimized to maximize its effectiveness.
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Conclusion
As a real estate professional, your goal is to attract high-quality leads through your marketing strategies. Social media is a tool that can help you generate these leads. With social media, you can build a community where you can connect with your prospective customers and engage with them.
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