Social Media Brainstorming

Real Estate Social Media Tips To Dominate

Are you a real estate agent? Do you sometimes not know which end is up with your real estate social media?

Realtors are inherently great at marketing. You have to know how to get deeply in touch with your clients, local market, and community.

These real estate social media tips are meant to build on those natural marketing instincts you already have.

Social media activity provides digital proof and instills trust with new clients.  It builds your message in a very concrete way provides a way to further connect with your local clients and groups. Real estate social media can build trust, and spread your marketing through friends of friends.

But how do we become masters of real estate social media?

In this article, I’ll give you 21 tips real estate social media that cover Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest as they make-up the primary hub you’ll want to be on.  These social media networks are great for real estate business.

1) How to Use Facebook as a Real Estate Agent:

78% of small businesses attract new customers through social media. A large part of this comes from Facebook as it is one of the more established networks.

How can you, as a real estate agent, take advantage of this platform? What strategies and tactics should you use to build an audience and engage them?

The first step is setting up a Facebook Page. You should already have a personal account and can easily setup a page from there.  It is extremely unadvisable to use your personal Facebook account for real estate.  You’ll want to keep the two profiles slightly separated in terms of the content you share and the professional tone you take. Plus, Facebook pages give you a great deal of marketing tools that you will need.

Check out this great post on setting up Facebook Ad Campaigns.

Let’s talk about ways to engage clients with your page:

1. Include cool facts about your neighborhood, city, and state: Do some research and once a week post about some cool fact that happened nearby.  A good way to find this information is by watching your local news channel and putting reminders a calendar for next year.  You can also find rare bits of information at a local museum.  Simple ask the curator there and I’m sure they’d love to help you dig up old, juicy information about your local area.   This helps keep you relevant to your audience while producing unique content.

Something like this would work great for a real estate social media post in Kansas City:

2. Use Images all the time: Real estate social media posts with images get more engagement than those without. Use your smartphone camera to capture impromptu pictures of various things. They curate them on your wall.  If you have any image editing experience, add some quote or text over the image. This can easily be done online for free. Just Google: “Free Online Image Editor” and you’ll find numerous ways of doing this.
3. Partner with local businesses: You aren’t the only business owner out there!  Real Estate social media is a lot easier if you do it with someone else.  If it’s winter, partner with a local apple orchard and give your fans a special coupon for hot cider. If it’s spring, partner with the local ice cream shop.  This will help build your business owner to business owner relationships and grow likes to your page.
4. Show you Care About Your Clients: We send thank you and greeting cards all the time! Do this on your Facebook wall by simply tagging someone in an image or post on their birthday, move-in day, and other celebration.  It’s a great way to subtly engage your audience and show them you really do care about them.
5. Give-away things weekly: Remember how radio stations always give-away items on the air? You can take a leaf out of their marketing book. Contests and freebies get everyone excited and give them a reason to really like your page.  You can give all sorts of free things out from gift cards to tickets to food.  This is also a great tactic for building an email list from your Facebook Page.  For example, you can post that you’ll be give 3 random people who’ve joined your email list a special prize this week.
6. Post Your Listings Rarely: A good rule of thumb is once a week when posting listings on real estate social media channels.  People understand that you’re a real estate agent and are going to post some listings. But the goal of your Facebook page should be to keep you front of mind for potential clients. Not to sell them. For example, you want them to always be happy and excited to see your posts. That way, when they want to buy or sell real estate, they are happy and excited to do business with you.  When you post your listings, make sure you have some personality behind the post.

7. Run Facebook Ads for Likes. Facebook lets you run all types of ad campaigns. It’s a great way to supplement your real estate social media efforts.  Setup a $25 per month Facebook ad to get fans to like your page. This will keep your Fan Page growing and when people join your group all of their friends see your page in their timelines. A nice, low-budget, ad spend on Facebook Likes is a great way to boost your marketing potential.

2) How to Use Twitter as a Real Estate Agent:

Twitter has a different demographic that uses it regularly and you really should be on it regularly as a Real Estate agent. The premise behind Twitter is that you have 140 characters per post and the Tweet is displayed to all your followers plus people that search for keywords. Use it to engage, and keep strengthening your relationships.

You’ll really want to structure your content like you did for Facebook. Here are some Twitter tips:

1. Tweet Advice About Moving, Staging Homes, and Upgrading Homes: You can find some great examples online of staging and DIY home upgrades.  This content usually has some fun images attached to it and is loved by a large majority of people. Provide your audience with some interesting and helpful tips about these three topics and you’ll have a crowd on Twitter quickly.
2. Tweet Local Happenings: Did you just hear about something interesting that happened? You can give your opinion or ask what your followers think about it on Twitter. Twitter is a real-time social network where local happenings rarely are covered. You can easily become an authority source quickly.
3. Tweet Questions: Questions are great on Twitter. They help improve engagement and show that you actually care about your followers.

What’s the hardest thing about moving to a new home? #newhomes #kansascity

What’s the next room in your home due for an update? #diy #dreambig

How many times have you moved in your lifetime? #moving

4. Use Hashtags: On Twitter, using hashtags is frequently used in searches. People will search by hashtags they are interested in and find your Tweet this way. Include them in every Tweet for ultimate engagement.  For example, use hashtags like: your geographic area, your neighborhood, your city, recent events, and keywords.
5. Tweet about Causes Going On: Is there a charity or cause holding an event? Share that information with your followers while tagging the organization. This is a great way to really show you care and aren’t just about business.
6. Use @usernames to engage with clients: Just like on Facebook, you can tag individual people in your posts.  You can really reach out to a home buyer or seller this way and engage with them online.
7. Use Contests to grow your email list: Just like our Facebook posts about give-aways, these Tweets are a great way to get people to take action. They offer a prize in exchange for joining your email list or following you on Twitter.
8. Tweet about Your Listings: Finally, only tweet about your listings if you have something interesting to say about them.  Twitter is a way of staying front of mind with your buyers. You should focus mainly on providing great content and only mention real estate occasionally.

3) How to use Pinterest as a Real Estate Agent:

Pinterest drives more traffic to websites than Twitter and Facebook because of the way it is setup.  As a real estate social media platform, it’s a really awesome tool for turning photographs into website traffic.  The realtor in you should be excited about Pinterest because it is the perfect social network for all of our great images. Realtors have awesome images of houses and neat redesign ideas. Listings are almost always sold by visual cues.  Pinterest is the place where we do this best on real estate social media.

Here are a few tips:

1. Set Up a Board About Your Region: This is the place where you will upload awesome pictures about your city, neighborhood, and state. Try to take a few pictures every week and put them here.  You can also include cool listing pictures. Be sure to link all of your images back to your website to capture as many visitors as possible.
2. Set Up Boards About What You Do: Unlike Facebook, your Pinterest account is singular. It is your personal account and your business account.  You can have boards about cooking, yoga, or whatever else you like to do! These boards will help your real estate boards get more traffic.
3. Set Up Boards about Home Decorating: Pinterest is full of home decorating tips and people searching for the next coolest thing! Be sure to help them by curating a great board on this topic.
4. Set Up a Board for your Listings: This board can get some awesome traffic to your listing pages. You’ll want to write a 150-200 word description for each picture you put on the board. Also, be sure to link the board back to your listing page.
5. Use Hashtags just like on Twitter: Pinterest is basically an image search engine. You can use hashtags to get your content found more easily by people looking for it.
6. Use Contests and Giveaways: Finally, just like for Facebook and Twitter, you can host contests on Pinterest. Wait until you have a large enough following to do this however. Be sure to partner with another member of your community so that you can cross promote each others brands.

Conclusion

These are just a few real estate social media tips to really help grow your website traffic. Hopefully you’ve picked up an idea or two and can start implementing it today!

I’m sure you’re anxious to get started, but be sure to share this article if it helped you at all.

Thanks for reading and be sure to share this real estate social media article.