Social Media Best Practice for Agents

By Ryan O'Grady • Posted on Feb 11, 2020
4 minutes read
social media best practice

In our previous article, we took a look at some of the better social media platforms for agents to grow their online presence, boost their profile and generate more leads.

Today, we explore social media best practice for agents to help convert those leads into clients. Here are our four top tips for getting the most out of social media and how best to leverage it for success.

  1. KEEP BUSINESS AND PERSONAL SEPARATE

Make sure you direct clients, suppliers and anyone involved in the real estate industry to your professional accounts and keep your personal accounts private. Prospective clients want to work with a professional who will put in the hard yards to sell their most expensive and largest asset or to find them a new home.

While you’re human and have a life outside of your career, your prospects do not want to see endless pictures of your kids – or worse still, pictures of you drinking beers with mates.

The other key advantage in creating business pages is that it automatically gives you access to detailed analytics that help you form a profile of your followers and provide additional marketing opportunities, such as boosted posts and paid ads.

Also, make sure that the profile picture you use is a professional one. With the quality of pictures phones are capable of taking these days, you don’t necessarily have to spend on a professional photographer, but it’s not a bad idea to invest a little bit of money to ensure you nail it.

Bonus tip: if you do take your own pic, don’t wear sunglasses in your profile photo. It looks unprofessional and hiding your eyes can have the subconscious effect of challenging your trustworthiness.

  1. MAKE SURE ALL CONTACT INFO AND BRANDING IS CONSISTENT

A great way to sabotage your efforts is to have outdated, incorrect or incomplete contact information attached to your social media profiles. Make sure you have the same info listed across all social media platforms. For example, you may think that by having different phone numbers listed on different platforms is giving your prospects options, but in reality, it only creates confusion that will cause instant disengagement. That’s a lost lead, which is exactly what you want to avoid.

On the topic of consistency, always make sure your branding aligns across all your social media profiles. Social media is a great way to build brand equity, but if your logos, graphics, messaging and style guidelines differ across platforms, all the effort you have invested into building a brand is wasted.

It’s also worth noting that, when it comes to social media, you may be representing the brand of your business or agency, but you are also establishing your own personal brand. This is what will really boost your career and your profile within the real estate industry, and creating a set of rules for the types of imagery or videos you use and the tone of captions and posts will help you create a strong personal brand that people will be drawn to. For establishing your personal brand within the real estate industry, LinkedIn is where you want to be.

  1. UNDERSTAND YOUR AUDIENCE AND KEEP CONTENT RELEVANT

Take advantage of any metrics and analytics you can get your hands on. Understanding what your audience likes and shares will help you form a content strategy that will gain real traction as opposed to creating a rollercoaster effect of cut-through (i.e. 1,000 likes on one post, 12 likes on the next).

As soon as you get your social media profiles set up, release real estate focused content. The obvious one here is to post about new listings you have. More often than not, there’s slick photography you can use and also professionally written property descriptions by copywriters.

But don’t miss out on the opportunity to further build your personal brand! Using social media to inform people with tips and tricks to apply to real estate – as well as driving people to blog posts you write or commission – will help to establish you as an expert with serious credibility.

  1. KEEP THE CONTENT DYNAMIC AND REGULAR

Regardless of the social media platform, if you’re putting up word-heavy post after post, you’re doing it wrong. While what you write is of vital importance, so is utilising the breadth of multimedia options available to you.

Balance your copy-driven posts with pictures, videos, AR and VR graphics and anything interactive. This will keep your audience engaged with your content and coming back for more.

Also make sure you’re using the right type of content for each platform. Instagram is designed to be visually dynamic and scrolled through quickly. That means it is not the place for a long-winded caption that would work on Facebook or LinkedIn.

Every agent gets extremely busy, but it’s important that you make time for regular social media posts. A great way to organise yourself and ensure that posts are made regularly is to utilise social media planning tools like Hootsuite. It allows you to schedule posts appropriately (e.g. ensuring posts appear during commute hours to capture people’s attention on the way to and from work), releases posts across your various social media platforms and offers additional insights into the way people are interacting with your social media, like which social media mediums are working for you and which aren’t.

WHAT NEXT?

In our next article, we will take a deep dive into lead conversion tactics you can implement off the back of your social media efforts and how social media can underpin, support and enhance your marketing initiatives for greater success.