Social media marketing is a great way to create awareness for your real estate investing business, but it’s not enough. You need to know how to create a social media strategy for real estate that will help you leverage your social media platforms and maximize the effectiveness of your efforts.
Real Estate Social Media Marketing Platforms
The first step in establishing your social media strategy is to determine what social media platforms you want to use. There are many benefits of social media for real estate investors, but it’s important to know which ones will work best for you. The most popular social media platforms for real estate investors include:
Facebook for Real Estate
Facebook has grown to become the largest social media platform for real estate investors. Investors can use it to promote their business and connect with potential clients, create a community of like-minded people, and even advertise their business. Because Facebook has been around for so long, most people have an account here in addition to others they may be engaging on. That’s good news because it allows you to reach people who are on those other networks like Tik Tok, Pinterest and others without having to create accounts on those platforms too.
LinkedIn for Real Estate
LinkedIn is a great place to promote your real estate business. It’s also especially perfect for networking with other professionals in the real estate industry including other real estate investors, agents, wholesalers, and even lenders. LinkedIn’s superpower is that it can help you cultivate relationships that will bring more business and even real estate referrals your way.
Instagram for Real Estate
Instagram allows real estate investors to showcase their before and afters and create powerful video content. It’s a unique platform because it gives you the ability to publish social media posts in many different formats including carousels, static posts, stories, and videos. Instagram is a great platform for building an audience of potential sellers as well as allowing you to easily connect with agents, lenders, and contractors.
What Types of Real Estate Content are Right for Social Media?
One of the most important things you need to do as part of your real estate social strategy is to identify what types of content will be most effective for your business. There are no hard and fast rules when it comes to deciding how much, or what type of social media posts, you should publish on social media. The key is to find out what works best for you and your audience.
Real estate social media marketing works best when you have a diverse calendar that is not too sales-y. Your social content should not only help sell your real estate solutions by showing social proof, but it also needs to be “sticky” so that your audience continues to engage with your content. The more often your audience is exposed to your message, the more trust you develop, and the better chance you will have at converting social leads to deals.
Rather than constantly bombard your followers with sales pitches try posting some of these content types to help people learn about your brand.
Property Photos
Before and afters are engaging and interesting, but they also provide a key source of social proof. These kinds of images not only help you show off the craftsmanship you put into your renovations but also help to build brand awareness and trust with agents and private money lenders.
Success Stories and Client Testimonials
Success stories and client testimonials are another effective way of showing social proof. Plus, they can help answer questions potential sellers have about your service. Most people love to hear success stories, but they also want to know what the experience was like with your company.
Company Milestones
Showing growth and success are great ways to inspire confidence in your brand. Even showing how you’ve overcome challenging situations is a good way to build trust among your followers. Anyone who has been in real estate can appreciate that not every deal is without its pitfalls. Demonstrating how you persevere and overcome is an effective way of gaining trust and building loyalty among sellers, agents, and lenders.
Industry and Market News
Build trust by showing your audience that you’re in touch with your market and that you have a deep understanding of the real estate industry. By sharing industry and market news you demonstrate to your audience that you are a credible resource.
Home Tips and Renovation Ideas
As a professional flipper, you’ll likely have many renovation ideas as well as tips from your business experience. Sharing this information creates engaging content that will help keep your audience interested in your message.
How to Win More Real Estate Clients from Social Media
With an understanding of what to post, let’s talk about the steps to turn your social traffic into clients. Below are a few of the important elements for your social strategy that can help to increase your bottom line.
Optimize All of Your Social Media Accounts
On every social account, make sure your profile and about sections are 100% complete. Be sure to include your location, email address, phone number, and website. Your profile may also include a profile image and or a banner. Be sure to create a banner that explains how you help sellers (your unique value proposition), and also provides strong branding elements.
Be sure to add a call-to-action button on Facebook so any potential lead can contact you quickly and easily.
Improve Your Response to Inbound Inquiries
At the end of the day, the success of every social media real estate business goal is determined by the ability to convert a lead. However, there’s a big problem that needs to be solved before the circle from lead to deal can be closed and that is response time.
Despite the number of real estate professionals using social media to reach out to prospects, the struggle to respond timely remains a challenge for them. According to research by Sprout Social, only 1% of real estate businesses respond to their incoming social messages.
When time is of the essence, you simply cannot afford not having a process in place for responding to inbound inquiries from direct messaging sources like Facebook Messenger, or Instagram messaging.
Improve your ability to respond to Facebook Messenger and Instagram Quickly
First, make sure that you are always logged in to Facebook Messenger. This will ensure that you don’t miss any messages. Second, set up notifications for Facebook Messenger. This will ensure that you are alerted when someone sends you a message. Third, create canned responses to common questions. This will help you respond more quickly to messages. Finally, if there are certain people who send you a lot of messages, consider creating a group chat with them. This will make it easier to communicate with them.
Also, double-check the settings on your mobile device:
- Make sure the app is set to “push notifications” and that you have the following options selected:
- Enable push notifications for Facebook Messenger
- Enable text messages for Facebook Messenger
- Make sure the volume for alerts is on
If you don’t see any changes, try restarting the app or turning it off and then back on again.
How to Grow Your Real Estate Social Following as a Real Estate Business
Assuming you know the right content to publish and have a good understanding of how to win leads, you will still need to know how to attract more followers consistently for the growth of your account. You’ll also need to nurture your followers to keep them interested in your content. Here are some key activities to help you grow and keep your hard-earned followers.
Promote Your Social Media Presence Everywhere and Often
Here are some quick and easy ideas for promoting your social presence:
- Invite your friends and family
- Add your social handles to your business cards and signage and on your social media posts
- Include links inside your email footers and on your website
Use the Right Hashtags
Hashtags are a great way to organize your thoughts and keep track of topics on social media. But, with so many hashtags to choose from, it can be hard to know which ones to use. Here are a few tips for using the right hashtags:
- Use specific, niche hashtags.
- Research popular hashtags for your topic.
- Keep track of how popular a hashtag is before using it.
- Use location-based hashtags for posts about events or places.
Posting Consistently is Critical to Real Estate Social Media Success
The best way to get the most out of a social media presence is to post regularly. When you automate social media posts, publishing becomes even easier to do and you’ll be able to connect with your followers on all of your platforms.
There are many tools available to help automate social media posts like SocialChamp, Hootsuite or Buffer to help you manage your social media marketing. If you find the task of scheduling and monitoring too much for a single person, then hire a virtual assistant to do it for you.
Cross-posting your social content on your other active social media platforms is an efficient way to expand your reach. Cross-posting is the process of posting similar content across multiple social media channels. Social media managers use this tactic to save time and resources by having one cohesive message across all platforms.
Determine Your Social Media Publishing Schedule
People often ask how frequently they should post to social media. The answer varies, depending on the social media platform and your goals, and your audience. To determine your social media publishing schedule, start by asking yourself these questions:
- How frequently do my competitors post on social media?
- What type of content gets the most engagement?
- How much time can I devote to creating and publishing content?
Show Your Unique Personality Throughout Your Social Presence
When it comes to building trust, creating social proof, and having brand awareness, nothing beats having a recognizable personal brand. A personal brand is your identity—the sum total of everything that makes you who you are. When it comes to real estate social media, who you are is the one thing that matters most. After all, real estate is a relationship business, and people like to do business with people.
Here are some quick ways to begin creating a memorable personal brand:
- Use a professional headshot in your posts and as your social media profile image
- You’re more likely to use a photo of yourself if it is a good one! It’s well worth the additional investment to hire a photographer who can show you in your best light.
- Develop a niche in your market that you can be known for
- Your niche can be as broad as a city, or as narrow as a single distressed situation or a combination of the two. The important thing is to dive into your chosen niche and become known as the expert.
- Decide how you want to be perceived – what is the personality of your brand
- Since you are the brand, you need to decide how you want to show up in front of people. Do you want to be an easy-to-talk-to, tennis-shoe-wearing brand, or are you more comfortable in a suit jacket and polished shoes? Nothing is wrong with either of those personalities, they will both attract people who resonate with each one. The most important thing to do is decide so that your branding, and voice can be carried through with a unified look on all of your marketing from content to images.
How REI Social’s Affordable Social Media Management Can Help
REI Social’s Content Club is designed to help real estate investors harness the power of social media without having to become social media experts! Our ready-to-publish posts have a real estate social media strategy baked in, so all you have to do is post! Marketing real estate businesses has never been this easy.
Want to take us for a spin?
Download 15 FREE Social Media Real Estate Templates for Investors
Designed for marketing real estate investor businesses our templates come with images and post captions written to attract sellers, agents, and other important networking connections! All you need to do is copy and paste our posts to your social media accounts and enjoy building a robust social media presence.
In conclusion, here are a few tips to help you maximize your social media presence:
- Only use the best content available
- Content should not only help you market your services but also help to build trust and credibility with your audience
- Connect with your audience and invite them to connect on social media
- Utilize every available opportunity to acquire new users to your social media accounts
- Use hashtags for your posts and include links on these posts
- Remember to use a bio-link tool when including links on Instagram
- Post consistently (three times per week minimum)
- The REI Social content club includes 30-days of posts so you can schedule one every day!
- Cross-post across multiple channels so that you’re maximizing automation and saving precious time and resources