Social media is one of today’s most dynamic and far-reaching tools in building your online community, promoting your brand and showcasing your expertise.
It’s not surprising to find a real estate agent being very active and highly visible in social media, especially those who know the true value and capabilities of social media channels.
The best ways to leverage social media for business
In a real sense, social media success is a cycle and something that should always be on top of everyone’s mind.
The success cycle begins with achieving brand awareness, followed by audience engagement and finally resulting in business growth. The same cycle applies to both large and small-scale campaigns and serves as a very helpful guide in measuring the traction and growth of your social media campaigns.
Awareness, engagement and business growth
More than anything else, engagement and awareness as the two primary KPIs that are most seriously observed in social media, while business growth is generally the end-result real estate marketers what to achieve.
Enhancing brand awareness
Consistently and regularly posting on social media is one of the best ways to ensure your online visibility and footprint, as well as enhance your brand awareness.
With the rising popularity of social media, agents have devised their custom approaches to help promote their brand and be able to showcase their individuality, innovations, and personality to attract followers.
Creating and scheduling posts on social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook make posting simply by publishing immediately or scheduling posts in advance.
Strategising your content is also critical, as you plan to ensure that your posts are timely and relevant to the needs of your target audience. You can do a mix of promotional real estate posts and community-based content.
For instance, a good strategic plan is to dedicate 60 per cent of your content on personal branding content to showcase your personality, skills, interviews, etc. The remaining 40 per cent can be dedicated to listings or business-related posts such as bulletins, updates or client and case studies.
Check for audience engagement
Measure your social media awareness campaigns by determining how engaged your audience is to the content you are posting. Generally, posting an update once a day increases your chances of increasing your impressions and studies have found that it can boost your brand by more than 200 per cent.
Checking your social media posts for likes, comments and shares are key elements of engagement which means the more of those you get on your posts, the more engaged your audience is.
While free or organic engagement can be low on social media compared with paid or sponsored posts, planning for organic engagement as your social media KPI can be a great way to measure the effectiveness, relevance, and impact of your content.
Take advantage of promotional events or giveaways to entice your audience such as running online content and awarding prices can be a great way to engage your audience.
It does not have to be a complicated or extravagant event, what matters is that you initiate an attention-grabbing activity by giving out prizes in the form of coupons, gift certificates, vouchers, etc.
Determining your business growth
Let’s face it, social media is a very effective yet highly affordable way to promote listings and generate leads for your real estate business.
With social media, you can advertise and sell listing faster and reach out to a broad audience without costing a single cent.
For a very minimal amount, you can advertise using sponsored ads to reach a wider and targeted audience.
You will be able to see the impacts of your social media campaigns and get inquiries or responses right away, versus traditional print ads where clients or interested buyers or sellers do not have direct access to the listing.
This way, you will be able to effectively track and monitor the traction of your promotional and listing campaigns to provide you with the compelling business intelligence to review and assess the strengths and opportunities of your real estate business.