Top 5 tips for successful estate agent social media management

by Steph Rady, Head of Marketing and PR

It’s a given these days that your business needs to be on social media. Consumers spend a large portion of their day glued to their phones, scrolling through different social platforms, so if your business doesn’t have a presence it may as well be invisible. So how do you ensure your presence on social media is as effective as it can be? Read on to find out…

Set goals

Now, you’re not going to hit a million followers overnight and as an estate agency on social media, you probably never will (go ahead, prove me wrong!), but setting yourself achievable goals will ensure you move in the right direction. For example, if you’re managing your social media in-house, it’s important that you post regular, relevant content and it doesn’t get forgotten amongst the million other things you need to do as a business owner.

Set yourself a goal to post once per day and stick to it. Be sure to look at where you are now and ask where do I want to be in 3 months’ time? Whether that’s to grow your social accounts to gain more followers, drive more traffic to your website or achieve higher levels of engagement on your posts, take the necessary steps and stick to them

Involve clients

Social media is a great way to interact with potential new business, but it’s also a great way to engage with current clients so make sure you tell them that you’re on social media. This will raise your following and engagement levels but more importantly, it will mean that the people following you are the most relevant people possible. So when you advertise a new offer, service, or property, the right people are already there in front of you!

Ask your happy clients to leave positive reviews on Facebook and Google. This will help your Google ranking and show you to be the go-to agent in the area when new potential clients research your company. Not to mention 71% of consumers who have had a good experience on social media with a brand are likely to recommend it to others.

Post relevant content

Posting is the most important aspect of a successful social media campaign. Don’t be fooled by companies out there who offer social media management for a ridiculously low monthly fee – the content is most likely regurgitated, automated and irrelevant. Ensure you do not post the same things every day, e.g. property after property posted in exactly the same way as this will just lose you followers.

In our experience, a strong social media campaign requires a healthy mix of post types that you need to review on a regular basis. Here are some types of content that tend to work really well for agents to give you some ideas:

• Local property news
• Local area information
• Hot properties – top tip: Try boosting these types of posts on Facebook to drive more buyers/tenants to your stock – they say Facebook will be the next property portal after all!
• Fun posts to drive engagement – for example, running a competition, asking your audience questions, getting them to “vote” on something, the possibilities are endless!
• Human interest posts – now this can be anything from staff shout outs, successful completions, to charity work undertaken by your team – top tip: social media is also a great way to raise money for charity events

Connect with local businesses

As an estate agent, you’re constantly being squeezed for your fees by competition and online agents, so make sure consumers know why you cost more and give them the value. Social media is not only a great way to improve customer service, it’s essential for showing how connected you are in your local community. One way you can show this, is by interacting with local businesses online.

You can even take this a step further and start doing joint promotions – this will cut the cost of your marketing campaign in half and show potential customers that you know everyone and everything going on in the area, leaving them no choice but to instruct you to sell or let their property.

Review your campaign

It’s all well and good following the above steps but if you don’t review your campaign results, how can you hope to improve? It’s quite literally Einstein’s definition of insanity: “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”.

Social media is all about trying new things, but if something doesn’t work or doesn’t get the results you were hoping for, don’t despair. Review why it went wrong and try something new!

 

I hope this blog was helpful for those of you looking to do more with social media. If you’re going to take anything away from this, let it be this: social media management should not be an afterthought. It takes time, dedication and thought to make it a success but when you get it right, you will wonder how you ever operated without it.

If you like the sound of the above but don’t have the time to do it yourself, click here to request a call and we can discuss how we might be able to help you achieve your social media goals!