Social media is so much more than just a way to keep in touch with old school friends and family members – it’s a tool for attracting, growing and cultivating an audience who are interested in what your brand has to say – all in an informal, ‘non-salesy’ way.
Social media strategies, however, die out of fashion almost as quickly as they come in, so keeping in touch with them isn’t always easy.
In this article, we’re going to walk you through some of the strategies that are going to land with a huge impact throughout 2017.
1. Organic social traffic is slowly dying
Partially down to user fatigue on Twitter and Facebook’s algorithm changes that favour user-generated content over promotional posts, organic traffic from social media is taking a nosedive.
To put a number to it, as we write this article, your next post is only going to be seen by roughly 2% of your fans. Pretty horrible, right? So as real estate professionals, what does that mean?
Focus on quality, not quantity
Slamming Facebook with posts 5 times a day isn’t going to get you very far any more. In fact, your precious time is far better spent working hard on 3 or 4 good posts to make a week.
Prepare to pay
Sadly, social media is on a real cash-driver. As a result, you’re going to have to be prepared to pay if you want your posts to be seen.
Get two benefits from one
If you’ve created a great post and are paying to promote it, you should make sure that you’re driving that traffic to the page that has your listings on it. If you’re not doing this, opportunities are slipping through your fingers.
2. Follow the millennials
In a few years’ time, those kids playing football on the green outside your house are going to be your customers. In fact, next year is going to see the biggest demographic shift in real estate in many, many years, as nearly half of all homebuyers will be made up by millennials.
Although it’d be great for them to find your services through your preferred platform, that’s not really what it’s about. You can help yourself to get your brand in front of them by:
Getting on Instagram
Research from eMarketer has shown that nearly 65% of millennial smartphone users are on Instagram. If you can get the jump on the competition, you’ll reap the rewards sooner.
Focus on expression instead of marketing
Millennials don’t follow brands for the sake of liking the logo – they want to see the personality behind it and be able to express themselves with it.
Stay visual (we mean it)
Real estate is a visual market and millennials love it, so if you’re not focusing on the imagery, you’re missing out.
3. Use Facebook to hit the baby boomer market
Millennials aren’t the only ones destined to rock the real estate boat in 2017. Baby boomers, or those born after World War 2, are set to make up the second-biggest home buying group in 2017.
Unlike millennials, though, baby boomers are going to keep using Facebook and in growing numbers, too. You can win their attention by:
Mixing educational and inspirational
Don’t throw a load of motivational quotes at your baby boomer audience, because there’s only so much they’ll eat up. Instead, focus on educating them and providing them with useful, actionable information.
Target exactly who you want to speak to
Facebook advertising might be a bit daunting, but it can definitely aid social media marketers in getting their message in front of the right sort of people.
When you can target an audience based on data such as zip code, age and even income, it’s definitely something you should be using.
It’s not easy to predict where social media marketing will take the real estate market in 2017, but one thing is clear – users want to see posts that are personal and look like they’ve been made just for them.
Buckle down and put on your content creation cap, because crafting meaningful, visual posts that people can relate to is the key to 2017 social media real estate.