The Ultimate Social Media Guide for Estate Agents
Property Webmasters
We provide estate agents worldwide with industry-leading websites and innovative lead generating marketing campaigns.
Why should Estate Agents use Social Media?
Social Media for Estate Agents is something that can’t be ignored. Each platform has its unique advantage and here at?Property Webmasters, we pride ourselves on producing exceptional and consistent results on social media. Throughout this Ultimate Social Media Guide for Estate Agents, we will discuss the benefits of each platform, different social media marketing strategies that produce excellent results, exploring content marketing, as well as sharing some of our top social media tips.
We understand that social media marketing for estate agents can be daunting, which is why we created this guide. So let’s get started, here’s a deep dive into which social media accounts and platforms we focus on here at Property Webmasters.
Facebook is a social media platform that consistently produces results, whether it’s organic or?paid social activity. Producing content on Facebook that is authentic, eye-catching and informative will help generate engagement and interest. It’s important to post content regularly on Facebook and it’s worth mixing up the content published on your social media pages to keep your followers interested.
Build your social media following by interacting with your audience and we encourage you to demonstrate your personality.
When it comes to posting on Facebook, we would recommend taking some time to focus on your content and scheduling posts in advance. There is also the opportunity to?promote your agency through Paid Ads, allowing you to dynamically promote your real estate listings, build awareness of your agency and add value to your exact target audience through their location, demographics and even interests.
Twitter is another successful social media platform we recommend Estate Agents take advantage of. Similar to Facebook, it allows you to produce some great social content that will help your Estate Agency stand out from the rest. Twitter is slightly different from other social media channels, as it has a character limit and the content published on there is usually more light-hearted and to the point. Don’t forget, if you post regularly on Twitter it will encourage people to like your page as they’ll recognise the brand and what you offer.
Instagram is a really exciting platform when it comes to real estate marketing. You have the opportunity to explore different types of content on Instagram, ranging from lives to reels and guides. Incorporating fresh ideas into your strategy and uploading them to your Instagram feed, will help to increase your social media engagement and overall presence due to the content being interesting and relevant to your audience. Instagram also gives Estate Agents the chance to give your agency a brand identity and increase your social proof.
LinkedIn?
Instagram, Facebook and Twitter all have very different audiences to LinkedIn, the majority of content published on LinkedIn is professional and is typically presented in a different way, allowing you to reach an audience you may have otherwise missed!
As a social platform, one benefit of LinkedIn is that people who work in the property sector, along with vendors and landlords tend to interact with industry-related posts, allowing you to build connections with others in the industry and build awareness of your agency. It is also a great platform to promote upcoming events and news, your latest achievements such as recent sales, and even a place to get feedback by utilising the polls feature.
Mixing up the type of content you upload to LinkedIn will help you build relationships and gain even more engagement from your target audience.
TikTok
TikTok has burst onto the social media scene over the past few years and it’s a marketing tool that can NOT be overlooked.
Often, useful content that is uploaded to TikTok involves estate and letting agents walking through new and exciting properties or sharing their top tips and tricks within the industry. With the right social media strategy applied, TikTok has all the tools to help you become a well-known name within the Real Estate industry.
With video-first content being pushed heavily across all social media platforms, TikTok has become one of the most popular social media sites for displaying your content in an engaging and relevant way and is a platform that the property industry HAVE to be taking advantage of and will set you apart from other agents.
Want to learn more about TikTok, we have a blog dedicated to it! Click?HERE
How Paid Social Media Can Become One of your Top Lead Generation Tools
With over 1.84 billion daily active users across Facebook, Instagram and Messenger, the changes to Facebook’s and Instagram’s algorithms make it continuously harder for businesses and users to grow their following and overall engagement. Although this is where?Paid Advertising?comes in.?
Allowing you to reach your audience by their exact demographics, behaviours and interests, as well as multiple other custom and lookalike audiences, Meta Ads allow you to display high-quality engaging creatives to the right platform at the right time, inadvertently increasing your overall engagement and awareness in the process.?
Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as posting organic content 7 days a week (although this can definitely give you a piggyback), so although there is a cost when it comes to your?Paid Ads, you can control this. Whether you want to publish a social media campaign for a set amount of time or keep it running until you wish to turn it off, Facebook business manager allows you to have full flexibility when it comes to setting a budget that’s right for your agency.
Throughout this guide, we will provide you with some social media marketing tips that will improve both your paid and organic activity.?
Paid Social: What Budget do Estate Agents need?
Giving you complete freedom when it comes to your ad spend, Facebook (Meta) allows businesses no matter how small to advertise to their target audience. With no simple answer to an average cost per conversion, Facebook offers endless metrics that allow you to track everything from impressions to ROI and the overall frequency of your campaigns.?
Although it’s not as simple as the ‘bigger the budget, the bigger the success’, Facebook takes into account a number of factors to determine the cost and success of your overall campaign. Take a look at just a few of the influencing factors that we have found:?
Set Goals That Make Sense
Although we have seen some quite literally ‘life-changing’ results for our clients through?Paid Social media, it is important to remain grounded with your goals and set realistic expectations that are achievable for your Agency.
Once you have your initial campaigns set up, the real hard work starts here. Analysing and optimising the results generated is a key process when it comes to the success of your campaigns. Once you start to find out what works and what doesn’t, this is where you can take your campaigns to the next level, by fully understanding how customers react to your campaigns at every stage of the funnel.
Brand Awareness is one of the most underestimated campaign types when it comes to building a sustainable audience. Alongside organic posting,?paid brand awareness campaigns can help you build your brand and reach a much wider audience at a much faster pace and with your knowledge of the local area and local housing market this can help instil trust within your prospective audience.?
Is Paid Social Right for my Agency?
The goal of Paid Social media is to find and engage with your target audience,?ensuring that when they are ready to commit, your brand is at the front of their mind!
Engaging with your audience at every stage of the funnel allows for higher quality leads further down the line as your audience will be of higher intent to go through with their enquiry/purchase, as a result of already being aware of your business and what you offer.
From educating your audience with your brand to retargeting users with campaigns that are of interest to them. Without Paid Social you are missing out on a huge chunk of engagement that is vital when nurturing prospects as well as limiting your agency’s overall reach when it comes to your digital presence.?
The Digital Marketing Essentials
Tracking
Pixel tracking allows you to trace your website visitors so that you can remarket to them directly. Not only can you track who has been on to your website, but you can also track the actions they took whilst navigating. Why is this important? Retargeting to previous visitors is essential, typically customers don’t enquire the first time around and it can take around 7 different touch points before they enquire.
Without the pixel, you are unable to run dynamic product ads. The Facebook Pixel is an essential tool for generating quality leads and if it is something unfamiliar to you, please ensure that this is set up as soon as possible!
Not only does the Facebook Pixel allow you to track and retarget your audiences, but it also allows you to optimise your campaigns and build more specific custom audiences for future campaigns further down the marketing funnel.
Content
Within your?Paid Social campaigns, it’s essential your content is informative, engaging and relevant. If you fail to engage your audiences, you will not generate leads! Put yourself in your audience’s shoes, would you make an inquiry to a business if their marketing efforts were lazy, dishonest and irrelevant? Your customers need to feel like they are missing out if they don’t enquire with you! Boast about your service, shout about what makes you stand out from your competitors but remain honest!
Customers value transparency and trust and you’ll be found out if you fail to follow this. Avoid huge chunks of text, keep it short and intriguing and make the customers want to find out more.
Content is king! Be creative.
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One of the best practices for content is to ensure that it is aligned with your creative. If your creative is images of a property/development you are looking to sell and your content is based more on the area, this will make your campaign less relevant and is something you want to avoid especially when retargeting. Tell them exactly what to do next, CTAS are the clear pathway to an enquiry and it is crucial that the audience is left knowing exactly what they can do next.
Strategy
The final essential step to making sales directly on Facebook is a comprehensive and well-thought-out strategy. It is important to recognise how the process works and what steps you need to follow and have in place before you can start generating good-quality leads on Facebook. Your social strategy should replicate a ‘marketing funnel’ and acknowledge there is a process that needs to be followed and that it isn’t going to be an over night success. You can break campaigns down into 3 separate objectives.
The first is?brand awareness.?Has your estate agency been getting enough exposure, are people familiar with your business, do you have a reasonable page following? If the answer is no, then you must first concentrate on this before moving towards your next objective.
The second is?traffic.?How much traffic are you currently getting to your website? If it’s a lot then great, there’s no such thing as too much traffic! If it’s not enough then you need to focus on this. Successful traffic campaigns can lead to a huge surge of web visitors. Usually, these are people who have never been on your website before. In some cases, these web visitors may result in enquiries the first time of asking. What is more likely, however, is that they take a look at your website, see what you have to offer and then they continue with their day and move on to something else. These people have now shown interest towards your business, but a number of factors may have contributed to why they haven’t led to a conversion.
Now you have attracted people to your website, it is lastly it is time to implement a?remarketing strategy?for them, this can be done on Facebook & Instagram. When done right, this will generate?hot quality leads?ready for your team to make sales!
‘Your audience is 70% more likely to convert with Retargeting…’
Lead Generation
Another feature that can be beneficial for attracting landlords is through lead generation forms on Facebook, giving you the opportunity to ask a highly targeted audience for their data and information in return for something that will be beneficial to them. Lead forms on Facebook are a great way of collecting data that will be useful for you from audiences that are interested in what you offer. By targeting specific questions towards your prospects, you are not only collecting useful information but also building your database as a result. With an average conversion rate for Real Estate being 10.68%, lead generation forms are a way of potentially?gaining 10% more leads than you were previously.?
Heavily reliant on by small and medium-sized agencies, Metas Lead Generation tools are a great way for agencies to grow their customer base and generate leads from both ends of the funnel.
Hoping to improve ‘end-to-end’ management of lead generation, here are a few updates Meta have launched:
With social media taking over 25% of all digital media consumption, not only will this help small businesses market and connect with customers but it will be a great step for businesses looking to improve their productivity.?
Facebook, The New Reality of Marketing
Facebook is the largest platform with over 2 billion active users, it is a free way to increase your social media presence, with the ability to post imagery or videos of available properties, showcase the surrounding area and most importantly sell your audience a lifestyle.
Facebook Groups
Facebook ads aren’t the only effective way you can market on Facebook. By utilising the free features within Facebook such as Facebook Groups, you can potentially build stronger long-lasting relationships with landlords as well as increase your organic visibility. Facebook groups are a great way to either privately or publicly post direct and relevant content to landlords that will not only help you engage with them directly but also provide a more personal approach. From posting links to relevant blogs and articles to posting quick tips and advice, Facebook Groups are a great way of engaging with a direct audience for?FREE.
Another way you can take full advantage of Facebook Groups is by picking out and utilising existing groups, both nationwide and in the local area, on Facebook e.g. specific groups for landlords. By getting your name out there and putting out what you are doing you are increasing your chances of getting noticed and indirectly building your following.
Be Aware of Your Brand Image
Follow the right people on social media to spread the word about your estate agency.
Use websites such as?Crowdfire to find and follow potential clients in bulk by searching for property-related accounts or you could even follow your competitor’s followers. If you bulk follows, make sure you bulk unfollow any account that does not follow you back, depending on who they are.
If you follow the right accounts and mention the right people, you will see likes, shares and comments in return which will generate greater brand interest.
Planning/Publishing
With 3 billion people using social media every day you need to give your audience the best chance of finding your agency. You will want to plan your content ahead of time instead of creating and publishing content spontaneously. Also, to ensure that you are maximising your reach on social media, you need to publish relevant engaging content at the right timing and frequency. If publishing your posts organically is not really your thing, there are various social media scheduling tools that you can use to plan and publish your content ahead of time. Continue to refresh your content where possible.
Images and videos
Providing quality content is certainly a crucial step for your website’s success. However, if you don’t present it properly, it could potentially be pointless. Have you ever loaded a website to see a plain white background with endless text? The first thing that pops into your head is ‘Information overload!’ and you tend to exit and look for a different site. This is what you want to avoid.
Studies show that 75% of people judge a website by its initial look, so first impressions really do matter. You need to add multiple colours, images and videos to make your website aesthetically pleasing and truly grab the viewer’s attention.?Providing high-quality imagery and videos will be a great way to help people decide whether they should stay or leave your site depending on what they’re looking for.??
Tailor Your Content to Mobile Devices
People see thousands of adverts every day and everyone is always on the move taking in new information. Get your message across straight away, make your content snappy and easy to digest.
Do’s
Don’ts
Hashtags Can Go a Long Way
If you’re using?social media then it’s important to use hashtags on every post. It’s a great way for smaller agencies to get their name out into the online realm. It may not be a popular hashtag but if someone is seeking it out and you’re the only one using that # then you’ll benefit from it. Examples of hashtags include:
Make Meaningful Connections
Making connections can take your business a very long way, and it’s so simple and easy to do. We’re not saying it’s going to be like Tinder where you have to swipe left, then pop up to them and try to win them over. Not at all, if someone leaves you a comment on your posts, then reply to them and open up a dialogue, are they asking you a question? Be as helpful as you can. Are they saying how gorgeous the house is? Agree with them and tell them what you like about it.
A simple conversation can go a long way. Every person is a potential buying customer, even if it isn’t straight away and is 5 years down the line. If you have treated them with respect and given them your attention then they will feel a sense of trust and will remember that they can talk to you, so they may pop into your inbox any time they see a house available, or they may even recommend you to a friend as they know you’re trustworthy and knowledgeable.
By creating a meaningful connection with a client, this can lead to receiving a testimonial from them and it can be published across your social channels and most importantly google my business.
How we can help!
Here at Property Webmasters, we design and implement high-quality engaging creatives, to ensure your brand and campaigns are seen by the right audience at the right time.?
From Instagram to Facebook and LinkedIn we implement a structured marketing strategy allowing your agency to adapt to new trends and opportunities within the industry, guaranteeing you are always that one step ahead of the competition.?
Get in touch today?to see how we can get a completely bespoke strategy in place to help your agency achieve your 2023 goals!