Newsflash.
Your real estate social media channels are not all about you.
Ouch.
We’ve all been guilty of it at some stage. Our weeks get busy, we didn’t allocate time to create a social media strategy, so we rush and get into the habit of making our profiles a collection of our ‘just listed’ and ‘just sold’ properties.
Question is, is this engaging informative and helpful content that helps your audience?
Having successful social media accounts requires time, planning and your presence and input as the agent. It’s not something that you can allocate to another person as their sole responsibility. Your social media accounts are YOUR brand, so it needs your input.
New listings are important as too are sharing your successes.
One shares the “product” you are selling and the other establishes your brand as a successful agent.
But these two items need not be the sole focus of your social media strategy.
Keep your audience engaged and informed by dedicating time to address customer pain points. Teach them about your local area, inform them about industry updates, educate them about the processes of the industry.
Keep this as a focus of your strategy and your audience will stay with you, grow, and be highly engaged.
Social media is SOCIAL. It’s a place that people go to be educated, informed, and entertained.
If your social media channels aren’t ticking those boxes, your audience won’t stick around.
So, if you are going to have social media channels:
1. Pick your social media channels and do them right. If you don’t have time to be across them all then just choose one. An inactive social media channel is like an empty shop front with your name across it. If a potential client finds it, it doesn’t leave a great impression.
2. Plan your content ahead of time. I can’t stress how important this is. This gives you time to create educational content. You can build a baseline of an education post, local area post, open times and personal posts and leave space for flexibility to share a new listing or an amazing sale.
3. Participate. You can have people create the content and schedule it out, but you need to be involved in what message you are delivering and what information is shared. It’s your brand, participate.
It’s important to highlight. Social Media isn’t your only digital footprint. There are also online profiles on your agency websites and the portals, review sites and your personal profiles to think about.
Here are some tips to manage those:
1. Google search different variations of your name to see what comes up. This is what a potential client will do!
2. Lock down any personal accounts and don’t make them available to the public. Make sure you’re not using the same profile picture and the name is different. The number of agents that have freely accessible party pics available on search is surprising!
4. Review your profiles – for your company website and the portals. Have it re-written to talk about your experience but word it so that it explains how working with you benefits any potential future clients. Diarise to run a check every 6 months. A lot can change in that time!
5. Collect online reviews. Choose a review site and add it to your processes and procedures to request a review from every seller and buyer. Research from Bright Local shows that 97 per cent of consumers look online for local businesses and a huge 85% read and trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations in today’s age.