New to the industry? Get started with everything you need to know about the early decisions that’ll shape your career, including choosing a brokerage, learning your market, creating an online presence, budgeting, getting leads, marketing listings and so much more. If you’re a team leader or broker-owner, New Agent Month will be jam-packed with resources to help your new hires navigate.
Whether you’re a newbie or a seasoned professional, every agent can benefit from tapping into what social media has to offer. The good news is that when it comes to social media marketing — you don’t have to always pay a lot of money to access some great tools.
In a recent session for Inman Connect Now, I shared a few of my favorite tools for zero-cost marketing. So, if you want to get organized, whip up some great content and increase your social presence, here are my go-to resources.
1. Task management
Getting organized — and just as importantly, staying organized — is the name of the game. Asana and Trello are two great task management tools that are especially helpful when you are organizing who does what for content.
For example, if you are going to shoot a video once a week, you need a place to organize topic, timing, who will edit it, what your distribution plan is and more. Also, Dropbox and Google Drive are excellent for holding big files for social media, like video and graphic files, and it’s easy to transfer those files from your computer to your mobile devices.
2. Video tools and resources
Video content is still one of the best types of content you can create for Facebook, YouTube or IGTV. Two of my favorite free video-editing mobile apps are Videoshop and Videorama. They’re both easy to use, and easy to edit and brand your videos as needed.
3. Stock photo resources
As the adage goes, a picture is worth a thousand words — and that couldn’t be more true when it comes to social media.
There are three great stock photo resources I love and use consistently: Unsplash, Pixabay and Pexels. These platforms are free and offer a wide assortment of stock photos (and stock video footage, too) to use for any of your social media posts.
4. LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram
These are three of the biggest social platforms, and they each have a number of free resources for real estate agents and brokers. With LinkedIn, make sure you optimize your profile, add your expertise, and utilize the free blog and recommendation section.
With Facebook, content is key, so using a free tool like a content grid can help get you organized. Instagram has so many more options now than ever before, but I love using tools like LinkTre.ee to add multiple links in your bio, and Wordswag and Canva to create graphics quickly and easily.
As with any social media platforms, being more interested in others is key to help build and foster those relationships. This doesn’t cost you anything (except time!)
5. Hashtag resources
Hashtags on Instagram and Twitter can be a great way to increase your reach and expand your sphere. Some of my favorite resources are: hashtagify.me, all-hashtags.org and hashtags.org. Search to see which hashtags are most relevant to your market area.
Lastly, one thing all agents and brokers can do that doesn’t cost anything is to repurpose your content and your stories. When creating a piece of content, think about how that piece of content could get repurposed, and sliced and diced.
For example, a Facebook Live could be downloaded and uploaded to YouTube, it could be transcribed into a blog post, it could be edited to pull out a few short clips for Instagram and more.
Strategize with Katie Lance in person at Inman Connect Las Vegas, Oct, 26-28! She’ll be moderating the Agent Marketing track along with two other experts, Marki Lemons-Ryhal and Chelsea Peitz, to dive deep into creating, sharing and repurposing content on social media. Seats are limited. Learn more and reserve your spot today.
Katie Lance is the author of #GetSocialSmart and founder and CEO of Katie Lance Consulting, a social media strategy firm and founder of the #GetSocialSmart Academy. She’s been recognized by Inman News as one of the 100 most influential people in real estate and is a featured keynote speaker at many industry events. Katie is also is the author of the best-selling book, #GetSocialSmart.
