Most real estate investors use social media to establish a presence online, but that is only the start of what social media can help you achieve.
In fact, when you fully utilize the branding, and marketing power offered by social media you end up:
- Having a powerful online presence that creates trust
- Building authority that shows you as a trusted real estate expert within your community
- Creating a massive circle of influence that will allow you to achieve your biggest, most audacious goals in business and life
Think of these as levels because they each build upon each other.
This is the blueprint that will show you what to focus on within each level to achieve your biggest personal and business goals.
Why Real Estate Investors Need Social Media
First, I think it’s really important to set the stage for why social media needs to be a part of your standard arsenal of marketing tools, right there alongside your postcards, your bandit signs, your cold calls, and any other offline marketing activities that you may be doing. Because if you don’t believe in the power of social media, you’re never even going to establish that very first baseline, which is to establish your online presence.
Social Media Gives You Marketing Leverage
When real estate investors think about leverage, it’s usually around time and money and social media helps you leverage both.
Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn have all spent billions and billions of dollars to build their infrastructure and build out their databases stuffed with millions of people. The best part is they let you access their audience for free!
Thanks to their efforts, you can reach millions of people on their platforms, but more importantly, you can reach your local audience. For real estate investors, it’s important that we’re able to target the people in the area we work in. This includes sellers, plus all those valuable business connections as well.
Not only can you tap into the right audience, but you also can reach them nearly instantly. As soon as you publish a post, the algorithms start sending out that message, and your business starts getting in front of people that could become a seller, a JV partner, or even a contractor. The bottom line is that you can reach millions of people that you’ve never talked to without spending a dime on marketing.
Social Media Aids in Building Relationships
The fortune is in the follow-up and that is never truer than when we’re trying to persuade a motivated seller to sell to us. Frequently their initial answer is, “no,” but if you know anything about motivated seller marketing, you know to interpret that as, “not yet!”
Traditional offline marketing has its place, but it also has its limitations. Its biggest limitation in comparison with social media is that it doesn’t develop relationships. To do that, traditional marketing would need to engage these prospects over time.
Traditional marketing channels like text campaigns, direct mail, cold calls, and bandit signs are not built to engage. They are made to shoot out a message and ask the question, “Are you ready to sell?” Traditional marketing has a finite, short-lived life cycle and purpose. When a prospect sees any of your marketing materials, in their mind they’re either a yes, (they’re ready to sell), or they’re a no, (they’re not going to sell). If they’re a no, then your marketing materials go into their recycle bin and its job is done for the day.
If you want to try again, then you need to push out another campaign. I refer to these types of campaigns as hand-to-mouth marketing, because once they do their job, they’re done.
Social media gives us plenty of time with our prospects because they can’t throw our posts in the bin. Every time they come back to our account, they’re seeing something new. Those repeating visits give us another foot in the door. Now instead of a yes (they’re ready to sell), or no (they’re not ready to sell) we can add them to the “Not yet” column.
Social Media Creates Trust in Your Brand
The marketing we create with social media lives on our account, forever until we delete it. This helps to create credibility and trust over time because it shows a track record of being in business.
Social media gives us more opportunities to be in front of our audience. Our posts give the information about us, and our company needed to help build our reputation, establish trust and create tremendous rapport with prospects that we’ve never talked to or spent a penny to market to. It’s incredibly powerful.
So now that you know why social media is important to include in your marketing, let’s dive into those three areas of business-building that social media excels at.
Level One: Have a powerful online presence that creates trust
An online presence means simply creating accounts so that your business has a home where people can find you.
Establish Your Accounts
With hundreds of platforms to choose from, it’s important to focus in on the right platforms: Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram are the best social media sites for real estate investors. These are the big three and they’re proven to work for real estate investors because our audience is on these platforms. Plus, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram have a large enough audience that we can be sure our motivated sellers (and other network connections) are going to be on them too.
Create the Right Content
Most real estate investors use social media at a very elementary level, which is to say that they use it for publishing “we buy houses” posts. They put those out there so that everybody knows that they’re in the flipping business.
These posts help establish a baseline presence inside social media. However, there are a lot more content topics besides “we buy houses” that you need to be created if we’re going to establish an account that keeps our audience coming back for more.
Sticky Post Ideas:
- Educational Content
- Home decor advice
- Home repairs and maintenance
- Your process
- Engaging Content
- Ask a question or take a poll
- Use relatable humor
- Show behind the scenes of your business
The idea is to get our followers hooked on our content and help us become a local real estate authority so that we’re top-of-mind.
It’s also important to use the hashtags that describe the post content and include your location.
Be Consistent
You should strive to post three times a week at a minimum. This not only lets people see that you’re actively posting and engaging, but your activity is rewarded by the algorithms.
Use all the Publishing Tools
You don’t have to master every single one of the various publishing formats, but you should be familiar with reels, carousels, stories, video, and static posts. Choose the one you’re the most comfortable with to start and add on others as you get more confident.
When you do all of these you will end up with a rock-solid foundation that you can grow your brand with. You’ll need to continue doing all these activities as we’re scaling up through the next two levels.
Level Two: Build authority that shows you as a trusted real estate expert within your community
Engage with Other Accounts
If you follow other local real estate investors, agents, and businesses you also need to engage with them: like and comment on their posts. Also, begin following other people that you have identified as being a good networking connection.
Build Your Sales Funnel
The sales funnel transforms social media from an information delivery channel into an incredible conversion tool. When people take action on your social posts whether it’s to read your latest blog post, fill out a form, or start a direct message chat with you, you need a sales funnel that will take them the rest of the way.
Create Follow-Up Campaigns
Remember fortune is in the follow-up. When building out your sales funnel add automation tools that will help you follow up without taking valuable time away from your day.
When you’re engaging with other accounts, and have a sales funnel with follow-up campaigns more people will see you and your brand. By now you’re not having one-way conversations anymore. You’re no longer just publishing content, you’re also talking with other people and building a relationship with them. That begins to establish you as a trusted real estate authority in your city. People will begin to see you as an expert.
Level Three – Creating a massive circle of influence that will allow you to achieve your biggest, most audacious goals in business and life
Things get even more exciting at level three. Your resources are growing, thanks to all of the authority that you’ve built, and you have the right people to help you. You’ve got some money flowing in, maybe more deals are happening because now you’ve built out your sales funnel.
Your social media isn’t just out there saying, “Hey, I exist,” but it’s actually working to pull people actively into your sales funnel so that you can sit down with more sellers and close more deals.
This is really where you start realizing some of your bigger goals and aspirations. What are those goals?
Before you get to level three you need to decide what those goals are.
- Become a real estate coach?
- Become a public speaker?
- Start your own REIA?
- Access more private lenders?
- Or use your list for raising capital?
You can do all these things at this level because level three social media creates influence.
By now your social media is starting to shift a little bit. You’re still putting out all of the good content that you’ve been doing, but now you’re including more of your brand personality. You’re sharing about who you are as a person and about your skills and experience. You’re going to be known in many circles and people will start recognizing you when you go out. This influence is where doors begin to open for you.
Putting it All Together
Level three is a very exciting place, but it all must start at level one. You need to get good at some of those basic steps of just putting out good content and doing it consistently.
When you take all of the actions of establishing your presence, building your authority and scaling your influence then you have the ability to achieve anything that you want and Social media provides all of the resources and tools to get you there.
If you’re a real estate investor who’s ready to build your brand and create your legacy, REI Social is here to help! The Content Club provides ready-to-publish social media to attract an audience, build your authority, and scale your influence. Find out more about the Content Club!