Selling real estate is more than just showing properties and emphasizing their size and beauty. As a real estate agency, you trade emotions — visions of the future and memories that your clients will create in the home they buy from you.
Consumers want an agent who will provide the best value for their money, protect their interests and guide them through the legal and documentation aspects of the property purchase.
The real estate market is crowded; to reach your target audience, you’ll need a strategy to make you stand out from the competition. That's where real estate social media marketing steps in.
Using social media for real estate marketing can help you build long-lasting relations with your clients that will level up your business. Keep reading to find out how to do it.
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Real Estate Social Media Marketing Definition
Knowing what social media marketing is will help you comprehend how it relates to real estate.
Social media marketing is a type of digital marketing that uses different social media platforms as tools to achieve business objectives — from increasing sales by promoting products or services to building a brand and raising brand awareness.
Real estate social media marketing uses social media platforms as lead-generation, promotion and sales tools in the real estate field.
It increases a real estate company’s online visibility and exposure to its target audience captures potential buyers’ attention and efficiently connects them to the objects of their interest, leading to business growth and an increase in sales and revenue.
How To Easily Craft a Winning Social Media Marketing Strategy for Real Estate in 10 Steps
Crafting a social media marketing strategy for real estate means setting your goals and expectations and defining your steps to achieve them.
The following are general recommendations for real estate social media marketing. Remember that the top real estate marketing agencies can also help you get personalized strategies tailored to your business needs.
1. Set Your Goals
Before taking any action, you should define the goals of your social media marketing activity.
Your goals should be S.M.A.R.T. — specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. By setting these criteria, you’ll ensure having sustainable and realistic goals you can achieve within a given time frame. This method helps avoid generalizations and unclear objectives, making monitoring progress in a given timeframe easier.
For example, a S.M.A.R.T. goal for a real estate business could be generating 100 new leads in a month, making 15 rentals or 10 sales within the same period.
2. Know Your Audience
Each product has a target audience; since real estate is not a typical "product," their target group is quite specific. According to the National Association of Realtors, here are some interesting demographics of real estate buyers:
- The average first-time real estate buyer is between 33 and 36 years old.
- The average repeated buyer is 59 years old.
- 61% of real estate buyers are married couples.
- 17% of real estate buyers are single women.
- 9% of real estate buyers are single men.
As you can see, you should target people between 33 and 59 years since they have the most significant buying power. This age group is also predominantly active on social media, making up almost half of all users, 46,4% to be precise.
The researching target audience will provide valuable insights to help you create a buyer persona and use the correct approach to your potential customers.
3. Choose the Right Advertising Platform
After setting your objectives and creating a buyer persona, it's time to decide which social media to use for your real estate marketing efforts. Basically, you’ll want to be active on platforms your dominant audience uses the most; according to the top social media marketing agencies, those are Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.
The Facebook business page is a must-have for all real estate businesses for two reasons: the audience using this platform and its advanced features.
Almost 72% of the U.S. population uses Facebook, spending on average 33 minutes daily browsing their home feeds; therefore, it’s an excellent starting point for real estate businesses.
Facebook provides great demographic targeting options, including targeting local customers, which will be your most frequent buyers. Besides, it is ideal for storytelling and introducing the audience to your brand and its missions.
Best practices for successful Facebook campaigns:
- Post consistently.
- Use a lot of visual materials - photos and videos.
- Respond to your followers' comments and questions regularly.
A social media platform with 2 billion monthly users, among which 47% of U.S. adults, is not the one you want to miss. Adding to the fact it is intended for photo and video content, Instagram is an ideal platform for the real estate business.
Best practices for fruitful Instagram campaigns:
- Use high-quality images and videos and share them as posts, stories and reels.
- Post consistently early in the morning and in the late afternoon.
- Use filters and effects that will make your content stand out.
Great for generating leads and building a real estate network, LinkedIn has the demographic you’re aiming for — professionals with the highest buying power.
However, LinkedIn is somewhat different than other social networks. Posting twice daily, especially when your account is new, will be considered spamming. Instead, publish high-quality content twice a week and concentrate on building connections with people from your industry.
4. Include Video Content in Your SMM Efforts
We’ve mentioned the importance of video marketing for real estate on Facebook and Instagram, but this visual medium is so powerful that it deserves a separate chapter.
Video matters because customers prefer it to textual or image content; they remember it and it influences their purchasing decision. This is especially relatable in the real estate industry, where video provides a better user experience than photo content.
Although shooting a video requires certain funds, that is the investment that pays off! On average, adults spend 147 minutes daily watching video content and that time keeps increasing. Facebook alone has more than 8 billion video views daily, according to Hubspot.
5. Provide a Complete Picture of What Buyers Are Getting
Pictures and videos of the property you're selling are very important. Still, it's equally important to show potential clients the bigger picture.
Provide them with detailed information about the neighborhood where the property is located, notable facilities nearby and all pros and cons that could affect their decision.
Some areas are quiet, ideal for families with children, while others are busy and urban and, as such, suitable for young people and couples without children.
Take advantage of each neighborhood and bring it closer to your target audience.
6. Share Educational Content
Content marketing for real estate is a powerful weapon you can use to win over many clients, but only if you provide them with helpful information.
Instead of just naming the features of the properties you sell, create informative and educative content which teaches your followers what to look for when buying a property. You could write about potential issues they could face (roof, plumbing, HVAC and other hard-to-fix red flags), hidden defects that are hard to notice and similar topics.
Share content on your blog and all your social media accounts — that way, you’ll boost your SEO, increase page rank and visibility and position your brand as an industry expert. If you need help with content that will help your overall SEO, consider consulting real estate SEO specialists.
7. Interact with Your Followers
Not long ago, real estate buyers communicated with agents mainly using phone calls, but today communication takes place primarily on social media. Users tweet their questions to real estate agencies’ profiles or use direct messaging to find out information about the properties.
Consider using chatbots that will provide answers to FAQs and do your best to be as responsive as possible since it can affect the early stages of the buying process.
8. Build a Real Estate Network
Networking with professionals in your niche can bring you multiple benefits, and LinkedIn is the ideal platform for this type of connection. If your colleague in LA has a buyer looking for real estate in Chicago, he will refer the buyer to you and vice versa.
LinkedIn won't just be useful for selling private homes; businesses also need office space, especially as they expand and grow their teams. If you've networked with business leaders from other industries and been recognized as successful, they'll remember you when they need services from your domain.
9. Conduct Social Listening to Find Out Sentiments Towards Your Brand
You carefully select properties you’ll offer to your target clientele, considering their taste, needs and preferences. The same should apply to your social media content — your audience should find it appealing and engaging.
Conduct social media listening to get insight into brand mentions and get a sense of its status on social networks to determine how your content connects with readers.
10. Stay in Touch with Your Existing Clients
Although your primary goal is to generate leads and get new clients, you should pay attention to previous buyers. Ask them to join your online community and don’t underestimate word-of-mouth marketing; satisfied customers are your brand’s best advocates.
Top 3 Social Media Marketing Tips for Real Estate
Here are three tips equally applicable to all real estate social media marketing platforms:
1. Post Consistently
How often your posts appear on your audience’s feed depends on your publishing consistency and customer engagement.
Don’t confuse consistency with frequency and follow these practices for best results:
- Publish as much new content as you can produce without compromising its quality.
- Quality is more important than quantity.
- Content should be consistent rather than frequent.
2. Provide Value to Your Customers
Every post you publish on social media should be valuable to your customers. That doesn't mean you have to turn it into a DIY page. Options are numerous: from advice on spotting defects and affordably renovating the property to unique selling or renting possibilities.
Whether it's news about price fluctuations in the real estate market, exclusive offerings or other valuable information, relevant and credible posts will position you as an expert in your industry.
Clients will trust you and recognize your posts as worth reading if you consistently publish valuable content.
3. Answer Both Positive and Negative Comments
On social media, you will face many comments. Some will praise your service, others may criticize you and some may even be insulting.
- Make your responses fast, so your clients know you're constantly at their disposal.
- Thank them for the compliments.
- Provide additional information if clients request it. If you do not have the information available, provide an answer as soon as possible.
- Try to find out the causes of dissatisfaction so that you can correct your mistakes and be even better — this will cause sympathy in your audience.
However, resist the temptation to respond to insults.
Pros and Cons of Using Social Media Marketing for Real Estate
Using social media for real estate marketing provides many benefits:
- Helps real estate agencies reach the clients they wouldn’t get using traditional offline marketing methods such as billboards, handouts, direct mail, etc.
- Provides a better return on investment (ROI) than traditional marketing methods.
- Has great targeting potential, so you’ll get your desired audience’s attention more easily.
- Builds a brand reputation and a relationship of trust with your clients.
- Boosts SEO and traffic to the real estate agency’s website.
- Enables the creation of a broad business network with professionals in the real estate area from other parts of the country, which helps to expand reach.
Real estate agencies may experience some or all of these benefits, but only if they set S.M.A.R.T. goals, understand the needs of their audience and implement the strategy that will help them reach those goals.
However, using social media for real estate marketing may also lead to some downsides if you use poor advertising practices or follow an inadequate SMM strategy:
- Creating an inaccurate buyer persona will waste your most valuable resources — time and money. It will lead to poor ad targeting, low visibility and efficiency of your posts.
- The desired audience will poorly receive content tailored to fit different expectations and needs.
- Publishing on the wrong platforms, too frequently or at the wrong times of the day can also lead to poor performance of your posts.
- Insufficient or inadequate engagement can negatively impact your brand’s reputation.
Real Estate Social Media Marketing: Final Thoughts
Social media marketing for real estate generates 44% of buyers; the only marketing tool that is more potent is word-of-mouth or personal referral.
Developing a personalized social media marketing strategy for real estate businesses can help you expand your reach and connect with clients and colleagues regardless of their physical location, increasing sales and revenue.
Define your goals, research your audience and implement all the steps that will get you to your goals — or partner with some of the top real estate marketing agencies to accomplish the best possible results.
