As a real estate agent, your social media channels are a way to build community, promote your business and demonstrate your expertise. But what exactly are the best ways to use social media to grow your business?

As real estate marketing experts, the team at iRealty explains social media success as a cycle. Starting with the achievement of brand awareness and audience engagement, ultimately moving towards business growth.

In this article, we discuss how both awareness and engagement are important predecessors to achieving new business (buyers and sellers) through social media.

1. Brand Awareness

Posting consistently to your social media pages is one of the best ways to generate brand awareness. Recently, we have seen agents take a more personalised approach by using social media as a way to branch out from the brand they work with and display more individuality and personality with their local following. Platforms like Facebook and Instagram make showcasing who you are as an agent easy. From there, agents can draft a simple posting schedule. We suggest a mix of community based content and promotional real estate posts. Think 80% personal branding content like where you get your morning coffee to show personality.  As well as suburb profiles to demonstrate expertise, and client case studies. While the other 20% of your posts would be dedicated to listings.

After knowing what to post, the next step is to get your followers engaged.

2. Audience Engagement

Posting once a day can increase your impressions (amount of times your content is shown on the screen) by more than 200%. Engagement is the act of interacting with a social media post or ad, for example a like, share, comment or click. 

So what posts do real estate audiences find most engaging? Unfortunately,  a lot of organic (not paid for) engagement on social media is low. However, organic engagement is not impossible. Some of the highest engagement comes from things like giveaways or competitions. Some of our team’s favorites include ‘Enter your details for a chance to win’ or ‘Guess the address’ of an upcoming listing. Giveaways are a fun way to have people share your posts with friends and family. As well as being a clever way to grow your database. 

While competitions can be a great way to get your community engaged and potentially grow your database, their main focus is not winning listings or selling your properties. When you have an engaged audience, social media can be used to generate more business.

3. Business Growth

As agents social media is a valuable and inexpensive way to promote your listings and generate leads. Firstly by advertising your properties and secondly by promoting the services you offer as an agent.

Sell listings faster with property campaigns:

Whether being paid for by the agent or vendor, a property campaign is a dedicated marketing tactic for a single listing. Each campaign will display images, features and calls to action about a specific listing. Take below for example a carousel of images belonging to one property.

A property campaign can be placed on various platforms like Facebook and Instagram or span across multiple marketing tools including newsletters to your database.  The call to action advertised in the campaign can be as simple as a link directly to the listing on your website. Although, we suggest a form where your audience can enquire about the property or book an inspection.

Property campaigns are specifically designed and optimized to standout on buyers screens therefore, making your listings more competitive.  Each campaign should showcase multiple property features in a single ad.

A lot of the time these specialised campaigns come at the cost of the vendor. Stepping outside of your standard realestate.com listing where your property is against every other listing with similar features, price or location.  Promoting a property in a dedicated campaign can gain relevant eyes on the listing for a lower cost. For example a $150 investment could have a reach of 1000 local home buyers. Where a campaign worth under $500 could gain views upwards of 5000 locals interested in property. Property campaigns should be monitored daily by an expert to ensure they are achieving the highest results.

*Note the above figures are estimations only.

Advertise your expertise and services:

While Property campaigns are usually paid for by the vendor, there are ways agents can promote more than one listing across social media at once. While it is pretty common in the industry to ‘boost’ listings driving traffic back to your website or realestate.com this method still requires a budget to be set aside for individual properties. 

Recently, our team has helped agents by promoting their own iRealty Property Page or property newsletter. Both of these options allow agents to advertise more than one listing in a single campaign making it a low cost option for agents.  

Both iRealty newsletters and property pages contain unique calls to action where people can enquire about individual listings,  sign up to your database, or request appraisals. Meaning agents don’t miss out on the benefits that come with dedicated listing campaigns. 

Other great options are appraisal offer posts or utilising the services tab on your Facebook page. Both demonstrate complementary offers to your local followers.

Key takeaways: For agents, social media is more than a branding tool. Platforms like Instagram and Facebook are viable ways to grow your business whether it be by vendor paid campaigns or a clever content schedule.