Beginner’s Guide to Real Estate Social Media Marketing

With this article, you can start using social media to grow your business right away.

Here’s what you’ll learn:

Why Real Estate Social Media Marketing Is Worth It
How To Do It Efficiently (So You Don’t Waste Your Time)
Which Platforms Are Best for Lead Generation
Real Estate Social Media Marketing Best Practices
Tips for Using Paid Ads
How You Can Get a Steady Stream of Social Media Leads

Why Real Estate Social Media Marketing Is Worth the Effort

If you’re like many real estate agents, you already have plenty of tasks on your to-do list. Should spending time on social media really be one of them? The answer is yes, and here are a few of the main reasons why…

Real Estate Social Media Marketing Is an Effective Lead Generation Strategy

Social media platforms are lead generation goldmines. They’re perfectly designed to help you deepen existing relationships, expand your network, and quickly connect with a wide audience.

As long as it’s part of a well-rounded marketing strategy, social media can absolutely support your goals of building your pipeline, engaging with leads, positioning yourself as an expert in your market, and boosting traffic to your website.

(Don’t have time? Learn how to get real estate leads on Facebook and Instagram using Market Leader’s Network Boost!)

It Helps You Keep In Touch With Current and Past Clients

The goal of successful marketing in general is to deliver the right messages to the right audience, in the right place, and at the right time. Social media presents the perfect opportunity to do all of that.

Sharing housing market insights, acknowledging major life events (e.g., birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, etc.), and finding other ways to demonstrate genuine care, are all great ways to create meaningful connections with those on your contact list who follow you on social media.

Social Media Provides Valuable Learning Opportunities

Platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and ActiveRain can put you in touch with top-performing real estate agents, peers, and influencers so you can learn about new ways of growing and managing your business. Here’s a quick list of the best real estate social media accounts to follow.

How To Do It Efficiently (So You Don’t Waste Your Time)

Social media marketing for real estate agents can be an effective lead generation strategy. But it can be an equally effective time-waster.

Some agents simply get distracted. They’ll look through photo albums, watch cat videos, catch up on last night’s game, and – whoops! – the thirty minutes they set aside for marketing is gone!

For other agents, the struggle is more related to a lack of strategy and skill. It’s easy to spend way too much time throwing ideas against Facebook “walls,” hoping something will stick.

Here are four quick tips to help you do social media marketing more efficiently and avoid those kinds of costly mistakes.

1. Plan Your Posts in Advance

Set aside time to focus specifically on coming up with new post ideas for the month. Even if it’s just 10 minutes.

Not only will planning enable you to avoid racking your brain for the best idea as you’re also trying to work through the day’s to-do list, but it will also help you be more strategic with your social media marketing in general.

To save you time, we’ve already created a list for you: Get 37 real estate social media posts!

Also, check out platforms like Hootsuite, Planoly, or Later, for example, that make it easy to schedule and automate real estate social media marketing plans.

2. Be Intentional

Start by creating a real estate marketing plan. Then use what you establish there to ensure your social media strategy will have clear objectives, a target audience, consistent branding, and proper budget allocation.

As a result, you’ll be more likely to post in a way that generates solid results – more engagement, more leads, and more appointments – with a higher return. (Instead of wasting your time with too many “just for fun” posts that don’t help you grow your business.)

Create content that resonates with your target audience and encourages engagement. Use high-quality images, videos, and infographics to capture attention and spark conversations.

Focus your social media activities where they will have the largest impact. Respond and reach out to past and prospective clients first, and save the reading of articles and watching of videos for your off hours.

3. Engage, Respond, & Stay Active

The more you engage on social media, the more visible you’ll be. The more helpful and service-oriented you are, the more leads and followers you’ll attract.

Provide value, share your expertise, educate, offer solutions, offer advice, and share recommendations. Each of your comments and replies are opportunities that have the potential to turn into direct messages, which could eventually develop into appointments.

4. Limit How Much Time You Spend Doing All of This

You only have so much time you can devote to tasks that aren’t directly related to closing deals. So don’t let posting, commenting, replying, and maintaining an active online presence steal time away from the higher-priority stuff.

Time blocking will help you to keep on track (and avoid the temptation to follow every shiny object you see). Once the scheduled time is up, navigate away from social media and move on to the next task in your schedule.

Some agents find it more advantageous to schedule two blocks of time, with one block in the morning and another at the end of the work day.

Which Social Media Platforms Are Best for Real Estate Agents?

Not all platforms are conducive to social media marketing for real estate.

If there’s only one platform you use to leverage, it should be Facebook. It’s the largest social media site, with over 2.74 billion active users worldwide.

You can market to prospective clients on Facebook (and Instagram simultaneously) for free. The first step is creating a Facebook business page, if you don’t already have one. Once you do, you can start posting content that people in your farm area will find useful such as local market updates, neighborhood news, and restaurant reviews.

You can also use the Facebook Ads Manager to target specific types of leads. For example, if the majority of your clients are parents between the ages of 30 and 40, you can use Facebook’s ad platform so that only people fitting this profile will see your posts.

Also, Facebook allows retargeting, meaning you can make your ads visible only to Facebook users who have already visited your website.

There are other platforms available which can also help you generate leads. Learn about the best social media platforms for real estate marketing.

Real Estate Social Media Marketing Best Practices

Use High-Quality Visuals

Real estate lends itself to visual mediums. Use high-resolution photos and videos to showcase your properties. Invest in professional photography and staging to make your listings even more appealing.

Try To Adhere to the 80/20 Rule

80 percent of your content and posts should offer your audience value, insights, or entertainment, and the remaining 20 percent should promote your business. This ratio serves two purposes:

• It keeps your audience engaged and interested in what you have to say. (No one wants to get blasted with constant “updates” and “exclusive offers” from a sales shark.)
• When you do share promotional content, your followers will be more receptive. Your sparse marketing-heavy posts will be more impactful because they’ll stand out.

Post Video Content

Video content has a higher engagement rate than images or text posts. Consider using virtual tours, neighborhood guides, or live Q&A sessions to connect with your audience.

Use Hashtags Strategically

Research and use relevant real estate and location-based hashtags to expand your reach and attract potential clients who are interested in your target market. Get a list of 114 real estate hashtags and learn everything you need to know about using them to generate leads.

Track Your Progress

Most social media platforms provide ample backend analytics you can leverage. Keeping a close eye on the performance of your posts and campaigns allows you to refine your strategy and focus on content that drives the most engagement and conversions. In other words, data will help you do more of what works well and less of what doesn’t.

Tips for Using Paid Ads

Using social media for paid advertising is a great way to grow your business. But if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can easily waste a lot of time and money.

Take it from us – For decades, Market Leader’s team of digital advertising experts have helped real estate professionals like you generate a steady stream of buyer and seller leads by perfecting the art and science of paid social media ads.

That said, we’ve picked up some valuable tips along the way that you’ll find helpful:

Set Low Daily Budgets at First

It might be tempting to “throw money” at social media ads and hope that solves your need for leads. But that’s not how real estate social media marketing works.

Instead, set a daily budget that’s far less than you’d be willing to spend every day (even $10 per day might be enough). From there, test, monitor results, iterate, and – only after discovering what performs best – gradually increase your daily budget.

Just as it’s important to test and optimize, it’s important to consider your specific business needs, spending allowance, and objectives when setting an advertising budget.
Initially, set small spending limits for each ad on each platform as you begin testing. Once you’ve optimized your ads for ROI and performance, it’s easier to determine how and where to allocate your ad spend.

Ultimately, it’s not your budget that matters most, it’s the cost of achieving your goals. This could be cost-per-impression (CPM), cost-per-action (CPA), or cost-per-lead (CPL).

There’s a big difference between the three types of costs. CPM guarantees impressions by the thousands, CPA tells you how much you’re spending for a user to take action, and CPL tells you how much you spend on ads for each lead they generate.

Be Meticulous About Audience Targeting

Writing compelling ad copy is important. Designing your ad with the perfect media is also important. But you can still fail to generate leads and convert them into clients if you don’t target the ideal types of people with your ads – people in your local market who are the right age for buying or selling a home and are actively looking to do so.

Once you’ve honed a particular go-to segment of your target market, run tests with new segments concurrently to see if you can draw even more (or different types of) leads.

Test, Test, Test, and Optimize (Then Repeat)

Adhere to this mantra with your real estate social media marketing campaigns: “Always Be Testing.”

There are a myriad of tests you can run on ads. These include trying new image styles, ad forms, calls to action, headlines, and body copy.

It’s also wise to develop and test new audiences and refine existing ones. And just like with any other skill, you’ll never truly master social media advertising, so you won’t ever reach a point where your campaigns wouldn’t benefit from additional testing.

When conducting tests, identify which ads and audiences are yielding poor results and cut them out. Then double down on the ones giving you the best results.

Note which ad copy and image styles tend to yield the best results. Then focus on using those styles with future ad sets.

Calculate & Track Conversion Rates

Because converting leads to clients is the ultimate goal of your Facebook lead generation campaign, conversions and your conversion rate should be the metrics you care about most. It’s necessary to track the leads your ads are generating, as well as the rate at which you’re able to convert them to clients.

Without tracking these metrics, it’ll be impossible to know if your ads are spending your marketing budget effectively, or if you’re properly connecting with and nurturing the leads your campaign acquires.

There are two types of conversion rates you want to calculate and track:

1. 1. Your Ad Conversion Rate – Determine the performance of each ad by tracking how many ad impressions or clicks you need to acquire a new lead.
      • Leads Acquired / Ad Impressions = CPM Ad Conversion Rate
      • Leads Acquired / Ad Clicks = CPC Ad Conversion Rate
   2. Your Lead Conversion Rate – Determine the performance of your follow-up and nurture strategy by tracking lead-to-client conversions. (Clients Acquired / Leads Generated = Lead Conversion Rate)

Keep Your Ad Simple

As with any kind of ad copy, less is often more. Refrain from using too many words, and ensure every word is laser-focused on enticing users to click on your ad.

Shorter, punchier ads capture attention because they communicate a clear message quickly. Longer ads have a greater chance of confusing or boring the consumer.

This basic advertising principle is perhaps especially true on social media, where your ad is competing against countless other posts, banner ads, and pop-ups. Short attention spans demand quick impact.

Craft Compelling Calls To Action

Weak CTAs will garner weak responses. If you don’t come out and ask your prospects explicitly to take a very specific action (e.g., “Get a Free Home Valuation”), chances are they won’t take it. Don’t leave it up to them to interpret your message; your CTA should be simple to do and easy to understand.

If you don’t come out and ask your prospects explicitly to take a very specific action (e.g., “Get a Free Home Valuation”), chances are they won’t take it. Don’t leave it up to them to interpret your message. Your CTA should be simple to do and easy to understand immediately.

Here’s the secret to success: the ad content (including the CTA) should match the prospect’s needs and interests. For example, a generic ad that says “contact me if you want to buy or sell” will be less effective than an offer to tour available listings (for buyers) or an offer for a free home valuation (for sellers). Trigger emotions, highlight the benefits, and use verbs.

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