How to Create the Ultimate Social Media Marketing Strategy as a Real Estate Agent

Having a website and running a blog does not suffice to market your real estate business in 2021. Social media marketing has been growing in significance over the last few years, and the COVID-19 pandemic has further accelerated this trend.
As a real estate agent or broker, you have to get on social media if you want to be able to compete in the industry and to continue generating leads. The good news is that this segment of digital marketing doesn’t require any specific technical skills or previous experience. All that’s needed is to create a strategy and start implementing it, diligently and systematically.
To help you get started, we’ve put this guide on how to develop the ultimate social media marketing strategy as an agent.
Decide Which Social Media Networks to Use
The first step in creating a real estate marketing strategy for social media is to select the platforms on which you want to create accounts. Each network offers different pros and cons, which means that you need to be present on a few of them in order to maximize your benefits. Marketing your business on several social media platforms will help you reach out to the widest audience of potential home buyers and sellers.
Facebook
When making a decision on which sites to focus, you have to take into consideration that 17 years after its launch, Facebook remains the most popular social media network across all industries, including real estate. As an agent who’s expanding his/her digital marketing strategy to social media, you simply have to make use of Facebook. The 2.8 billion monthly active users mean that basically all of your future real estate clients, or someone related to them, has an account on Facebook. Furthermore, Facebook marketing is relatively easy and quick to implement.
Instagram
Another must in social media marketing for real estate agents and brokers is Instagram. In recent years Instagram has established itself as a leader in posting photos and short videos, which makes it a perfect fit for the real estate industry. High-quality photos and videos of real estate listings are an integral part of getting the attention of real estate leads. You must already have professional photos and virtual tours of the homes you are selling, so all that’s left is to post them on Instagram.
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Twitter
While many so-called experts claim that marketing on Twitter is dead in 2021, this is not the reality at all. Twitter is still holding its position as one of the most popular social media networks. Additionally, it is really well suited for real estate marketing. You simply upload a photo or a video, enter up to 280 characters of text, and are ready to tweet your most recent listing. Similar to Instagram, Twitter gives agents a powerful tool: namely, the ability to add your location. This helps you bring the right audience to your real estate tweets.
YouTube
As mentioned above, Instagram is very popular for short videos, but YouTube remains the best platform for posting long-form videos. Among the new reality of virtual tours, you need to share videos of your properties on YouTube in order to be competitive with other agents in the local housing market. So, this is yet another network which should be a part of your social media marketing plan.
LinkedIn
One more social media site which you cannot afford to ignore as a real estate agent is LinkedIn. Unlike the rest, LinkedIn is an established network of professionals. Your personal LinkedIn profile and your brokerage’s business page are the ultimate proof that you are a reputable and trustworthy agent with whom clients would like to work. Before contacting you, the majority of leads will check you out on LinkedIn to take a look at your experience, skills, and endorsements. That’s why you should put extra effort into building a solid LinkedIn profile. This includes asking past and current clients as well as colleague agents and brokers to endorse your skills and share their experiences working with you.
Focus on Visual Content
Once you’ve created your accounts on the above-listed platforms, it’s time to start thinking about the content that you will be sharing. The visual content that you create will constitute the bread and butter of your social media strategy.
With the millions of new daily posts, it’s hard to grab the attention of potential clients. The only way is to post astounding photos and videos. As an agent, you are in luck as you should already have attention-grabbing photos of your listings. So, property photos are the first type of visual content that you should schedule on social media. Make sure that the photos highlight the best aspects and qualities of the homes you are selling. Also ensure that the photos you post are branded with your agency’s logo.
Another type of digital content that is an excellent choice for social media marketing is videos including videos showing the exterior of homes for sale as well as virtual tours of the interior. You can post these videos on your YouTube channel and share the link on your accounts on the other platforms.
Moreover, to establish your reputation as an expert on the local real estate market, you can create and publish infographics. For instance, you can use infographics to share updates on the local market and recent trends in real estate. Leads will appreciate this knowledge and understand that you are an expert on local real estate.
Research and Incorporate the Best Real Estate Hashtags
The third vitally important aspect of a successful social media marketing strategy for an agent is the hashtags that accompany your posts. If you are already familiar with content marketing, you can think about hashtags as your keywords. Essentially, that’s how new social media users will be able to find your posts and follow your accounts. That’s also how existing followers will continue coming back to your social media accounts.
There are hundreds of real estate-related hashtags, so you should always choose the most relevant ones for your post. It’s important to keep in mind that the most popular hashtags vary from one social media platform to another. That’s why you should conduct thorough research on the best real estate hashtags on each particular network.
One way to do your research is to simply go to each network, search for competitors in the field, and check out what hashtags they are using. Moreover, Twitter—where hashtags are particularly important—suggests relevant hashtags when you are typing a post and shows you how many times they’ve been used recently. Another way to research hashtags is to use some specialized third-party tools.
Once you’ve built a list of top hashtags, make sure to include 5-6 of them in each of your social media posts.
Share Content on a Regular Basis
The best social media strategy needs to incorporate a schedule or a calendar. This simply means that you have to plan ahead what content to post when and where. Before you get into this type of marketing, you should know that occasionally posting on Facebook or Twitter, when you have some extra time, will not do the trick. You need to commit to posting regularly in order to be able to build an audience and generate new leads.
If you’re wondering what’s a good frequency for posting content on social media, it means at least a few times a day, on each channel where you have an active account. You should take this into consideration when deciding which networks to join. Don’t create more social media accounts than you can manage while continuing your main job of buying and selling properties as an agent.
You can also consider using social media management tools which can help you cut the time needed for posting. Moreover, such tools allow you to schedule posts in advance. This means that you can allocate a few hours to preparing your social media posts for a couple of weeks so that you can devote the rest of your time to your other duties.
Engage with Your Social Media Audience
Last but not least, when working on your social media strategy, you should factor in the need to engage with your followers. There is a reason that social media is called social. It’s all about being social and engaging with your audience.
As an agent or a broker, you already have superior people skills, and social media marketing is the right place to deploy them. To begin with, you need to respond to any comments and questions that you get as soon as possible. Communicating with users who’ve expressed interest in engaging with you is a proven way to generate leads on social media.
In addition, you should consider posting content that invites users to engage. Some examples include posting questions and posting contests.
Social media is definitely the future of marketing for real estate agents. So you should get started sooner rather than later in order to get ahead of the competition and stay there. Now that you’ve read our guide, you know everything you need to know to build a successful strategy for marketing your real estate business on social media.
About the Author: Zach Saadeh is the CEO and Co-Founder of Studiorific, a social media management platform that helps you streamline your marketing processes from a single platform. Turn hours of scheduling posts into 15 minutes.