Social Media 101
Social Media can be an immensely useful tool for realty agents.
Nearly 75% of adults who are online have a social media presence, primarily Facebook and Instagram. In 2019, there were 4.3B internet users with 3.5B of those active on social media, mostly on their mobile phones. In 2021, over 2.14 billion people worldwide are expected to buy goods and services online, up from 1.92 billion in 2019. Purchasing goods and services online has become a common practice and thus affected the real estate industry. Did you know that 90% of home buyers searched online during their home buying process? An agent, like a small business, without a social media presence is missing out on major opportunities.
Below are some basic principles for getting started on the popular platforms used by clients, co-workers, and industry leaders:
1. Complete your profile.
Add a high-resolution professional headshot.
Ensure all fields are complete, including Name and Title - make sure to add Fulton Grace as your agency, Website, Contact Information, and Bio.
2. Share content regularly.
Decide in advance how often you would like to post to your page and prepare by pulling photos, listings, or other sharable content and saving in a folder or onto your phone for the future. Planning ahead can help curb the lulls when you are uninspired, have little time, or have no news to share. Maintaining a regular schedule, even once a week is imperative in building trust with your community and showing your potential clients you are active.
3. Ensure consistent branding.
If you have a team hashtag, color theme, or preferred filter used on property photos, make sure they are consistent throughout all of your posts, copy, and profile details.
4. Share content your client’s value.
Know what your audience wants. If your clients are primarily a certain age group, gender, live in certain areas, or purchase similar items, you’ll want to learn from this behavior and post content that speaks to their interests. For example, if you’re an expert in a particular neighborhood and have frequents transactions there, post about local hot spots or other neighborhood secrets that prove you are the authority on that subject.
5. Link to your websites or active listings.
Make sure you are providing links and detailed, useful information about your active listings! This is an easy way to insert your “products” into your future client’s native space. Sharing your personal or group landing pages are also a quick shortcut for potential clients to review your acaldes that prove you’re the right agent for them.
6. Tag Tag Tag.
Utilize geotags, brand tags, partner tags, and hashtags often. Geotags are for the location you’re in or want the post to correlate with. This is useful as, for example, a user might search within a certain city or neighborhood tag for images of a subject they want to visit. This allows a user to get a feel for the neighborhood without seeing it in real life. Tagging your group, partners or Fulton Grace instantly pushes your post to a larger audience and into a pool of content that correlates with that tag. If you have a group or brand hashtag, like FG’s #FindingHomeTogether, this allows you to automatically create a “folder” of content under that specific tag. If it be more general, it places your post into a pool of other posts with that same hashtag. This is ideal for specific tags but less ideal for generic tags like #happy. On Instagram, users can follow specific tags, like you would follow an account, and thus allows them to see any photos posted with that hashtag.
7. Follow brands, prospects, and frequented (business-appropriate) businesses. Don’t be afraid to follow competitors, either!
Following friend brands instantly creates a community and an online presence. Following agents you admire or your competitors can be a useful tool for learning their behavior and noticing trends that work for them but might also work for you.
8. Interact with your community.
Don’t be shy! Head to the Explore page or begin interacting regularly with brands you follow, agents you admire, or other industry accounts. This is as simple as liking their post, sharing their post, adding an emoji or a nice comment. This not only puts you in front of the brand but increases your presence on the platform, which Facebook/Instagram often reward positively by promoting your page natively to like-users. Note, there is no cheat way around this. As often as they reward this behavior, they also thwart robots or hacks that some profiles might higher to do this work for them.
9. Respond quickly to comments and questions.
Make sure you have the notifications turned on for this important feature. This way, although the platform may not yet be native to your everyday activity, it will remind you when you get a new like, comment, or message. This could be from a potential client or partner - you do not want to leave them hanging!