Use social media to build your real estate brand and earn valuable referrals

With 90% of home buyers searching online for listings, social media channels are a great place to boost your brand, gain referrals and showcase your listings.

Keep up with the ever-changing social media landscape with these 7 proven tips:

1. Post to your channels at the right time

When you post to your social media channels, keep in mind the time of day and your audience. A number of marketing companies have tested the best time to post on social media (for a general audience) so others don’t have to.

In fact, we conducted our own tests on posts and timing. We ran our Facebook timing experiment for three weeks and found that our reach increased by 43.7%.

So, how did we decide when to post? We used the posting guide from SproutSocial as well as our own data within Facebook Insights. These analytics show when your target audience (your followers) are most engaging.

There is no absolute when it comes to creating a timed posting strategy. It will take trial and error and can also depend on a number of other factors including visual content and the value you provide.

 

2. Provide your followers with value-based content

Speaking of the value you provide, you should always strive to offer your followers content they find useful and important. We suggest maintaining a blog on your real estate website and sharing those posts on your social channels.

Writing your own content is always recommended, but we understand that it is a time commitment. If time is an issue, you can find writers to create guest posts, repost content from other sites, or hire someone to write for you.

Before you begin writing real estate content, see what posts your audience engages with. You can do this by checking out your competitions’ or colleagues’ social media pages.

Here are some value-based content ideas:

• Neighborhood market trends
• Top restaurants in [your neighborhood]
• How to posts (home repairs, landscaping, renovations)
• Tips for selling a home
• Tips for buying a home
• How to buy a home in [your city]
• How to sell your [your city] home

 

3. Showcase your listings with professional photography

Millennials make up 66-percent of the homebuying market and they are spending their time searching online, including on social media channels.

That said, real estate agents can significantly increase their user engagement for listing posts by using professional real estate images, which are scientifically proven to capture more attention online.

Not all professional photos are the same, though. In 2018, Tobii Pro conducted a study to see which professional real estate photos would capture viewer attention faster. They found that Virtuance not only captured homebuyer attention faster but held visual attention longer than other professional images.

Besides posting your professional listing images on Facebook, try adding a slideshow video of your listing on YouTube. This video platform is the second largest search engine in the world and it turns out that 86-percent of home shoppers say they would use video to learn about a community.

 

4. Promote your properties with digital listing templates

While Facebook and Instagram posts of your listings may get significant engagement on their own, try taking it to the next level with customized digital listing flyers!

Digital listing flyers are more compact, more shareable and sometimes more fun than your typical social media post.

You can create these from scratch on platforms like Canva or Google Slides. If you’d rather start with a template, we created free digital listing flyers just for you! Here’s where you can download them: www.virtuance.com/free-social-media-templates

 

5. Engage with your followers regularly  

Whenever your followers comment or tag other users in your posts, you should always respond. You want your followers to see that you care about interacting with them. It’s also a great way to connect on a more personal level.

Some social media channels, like Instagram, even reward you for interacting with the others within the same 30 minutes of publishing a post to your account.

 

6. Join social media community and real estate groups

Online community/neighborhood groups and real estate groups are great places to build your following and establish your brand.

There are a number of these groups on Facebook and LinkedIn – simply type in your farm area keywords in the search tab and see which groups speak to you. Look for groups that have high engagement (multiple posts a day) and a large number of active users.

Groups are a great place to share your listings and your value-based content.

 

7. Highlight your brand with social proof marketing

Instead of you telling your social media audience why you’re so good at what you do, have your clients tell them instead!

“Social proof is a psychological phenomenon where people conform to the actions of others under the assumption that those actions are reflective of the correct behavior.”

Nearly 70-percent of consumers look at reviews prior to making a purchase and these reviews are 12-times more trusted than the descriptions provided by the seller.

The best way to highlight social proof is through written and video testimonials. Try sending out a feedback request email after working with a recent client. If you have time, reach out to happy clients and ask them if they would be interested in being in a short video testimonial.

As mentioned above, Canva is a great platform to create graphics for your social proof posts.

Here are a few examples of testimonial graphics we created for our own social pages:  

 

We hope you find these tips helpful in your social media strategy journey. If you’re looking for more articles about social media check these out:

9 Real Estate Lead Generation Ideas to Boost Your Career

Social Media For Real Estate, Strategies to Grow Your Brand Online

How to use social media to attract home buyers