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Within the myriad of social media platforms, you are able to show your audience that you are connected to the community, and you get to exhibit your experience, knowledge and understanding of the local market — for free.
The goal, similar to farming, is to become a local celebrity in your market.
Social media is an invaluable resource for real estate agents, but with all of the options and strategies, social media can become overwhelming and time-consuming rather quickly.
The best way to avoid being overwhelmed, wasting time and getting sucked into the addictive nature of social media is to have a plan. Here are five tips for creating effective social media posts and scheduling them out in advance.
5 creative ideas for sourcing your social media content
1. Use local real estate information (micro-economic data)
- Find photos, or take great photos of a stellar feature in one of your listings
- Take pictures of a prominent building or statue
- Use images of your clients signing docs or holding a sold sign
- Shoot a video for a local or even hyperlocal market update
- Post statistics or infographics on cities, counties or communities that are relevant
2. Use national real estate news and data (macro-economic data)
- Follow major news sources that have real estate content and share articles like:
- Keeping Current Matters
- The Wall Street Journal
- MarketWatch
- Bloomberg
- The New York Times and other prominent newspapers
- HousingWire.com
- Inman
- Post information from major housing economists
- Create or find infographics on housing or rental costs across the nation
- Share info about interest rates on homes mortgages
3. Use community information relevant to your buyers and sellers
- Take photos or video of your favorite local businesses (include hairstylists, restaurants, bars, gyms, insurance partners, churches, etc.), and recommend those businesses to others
- Recommend your favorite parks for kids or pets
- Create a local events calendar monthly with all the things happening around town
- Link to, or create a calendar of, school events like sports, dances and other happenings
- Write blogs about your favorite aspects of the community and neighborhoods
4. Use your personal interests to let the world know about you
- Blog or video segments about your favorite places to visit
- Share info about the local sports teams
- Take pictures of your networking event or your favorite charity function
- Take and share photos of your team and your office
- Talk about the the reason you love what you do and why you sell real estate
- Talk or blog about why you love living where you live
- Share customer reviews and success stories
- Post seasonal and holiday reminders (one of the easiest ways to create and post content)
5. Home and design
Who doesn’t love pretty photos, right?
- Show pictures of homes before and after staging
- Save images sourced from one of the free stock photo sites of interior design or landscape photos
- Link to articles from people’s favorite TV shows on HGTV or DIY Network
- Share ideas for home decorations for the appropriate upcoming holiday
- Link articles to the latest design trends from your favorite Pinterest boards or Instagram design professionals
- Take your own photos when visiting a builder’s model home or the community’s hottest new luxury listing
This list will give you a multitude of ideas of what content to post and share. Now you must coordinate a calendar of all of these.
Start curating your content in segments. Start with one week of content and then let’s start scheduling!
Here’s a sample of what one week of content could look like:
Scheduling your content
This might seem like too much social media when you should be focusing on selling real estate, but with conscious effort once or twice a week to curate the weeks’ content, you can use one of the many social media scheduling services or apps to handle the logistics of posting at the times you want to post.
CoSchedule had some amazing research on when to post on various platforms — check that out here.
If you want free tools, you can use the free services built in to your Facebook business page or download TweetDeck for Twitter or Later for Instagram.
If social media is on the forefront of your business and you intend to make it a pillar of your marketing, you can use paid services like Hootsuite or Buffer to input, schedule and publish your content on a variety of social media platforms.
Check out this article on the top 10 social media scheduling tools for more information about ways to automate the process.
The best time to post your content
According to data, there are specific times that your content will get more views, more traffic, more likes — and thus more impact. There have been many studies on the matter.
Times on when to post content according to different studies have shown slight differences in who is providing the data, but it mostly boils down to when people are most likely to be on the platform that you are sharing your content.
For the business-to-consumer space, these are roughly the best times to post:
- Facebook: 9-10 a.m.; noon-1 p.m.; 4-5 p.m.
- Instagram: 8 a.m., 1 p.m., 9 p.m.
- LinkedIn: noon
- Pinterest: 8-11 p.m., with 9 p.m. being peak. Content on Pinterest can be posted just before the weekend because people are curating their project ideas to execute during the weekend.
Use this guide as a basis to crush your social media marketing. Find your niche in the space. Your audience is constantly looking for ideas and information. Keep feeding them great content that you’d like to consume as well.
The more info, the more screen time, the more “face-to-face” time they get with and from you, the more they feel like you are an expert in your marketplace, the more likely you are to get that come-list-me call or we-want-to-buy-a-house call.
Get out there, make an impact, and become that local celebrity and influencer that gets business from social media.
What other great ideas do you have for your social media? How are you killing it in your marketplace? Let us know in the comments section below.
Matt Kaestner is a Realtor Zutila, Inc.
