As we head into the prime selling season, it’s safe to say that your digital footprint has never been more important. Gone are the days when there were multiple bidders for almost every house listed. In 2021 and a good part of 2022, potential buyers had very little time to review houses online, make multiple in-person visits and ponder how much to offer.
Now, with higher mortgage rates and still-high home prices, they have that time, and in many ways, the market returning to “normal” is a good thing. Being rushed to make what is usually the biggest purchase of their lives can be very stressful.
So, how are you set regarding social media? If you were a potential buyer coming to your Facebook or Instagram or any other platform, would you be impressed? Would you reach out to potentially choose you as a REALTOR®?
In 2023, what your TikTok FYP looks like or the activity of your Twitter “oomfies” might be more important than the design of your website. And if you don’t know what those terms mean, you might just have a golden opportunity to explore a brave new world of social media marketing. No longer just platforms for silly dances, politics or pictures of food, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Twitter offer huge opportunities for the savvy agent to grow their brand. Learn how to navigate the algorithms that can get you in front of eager consumers, and the kind of content you can create that will catch their eyes.
Scheduling Regularity a Must
Keeping your social media platforms updated with new information, images and data is crucial. As is being consistent with when you post.
“Consistency matters in business, and in anything we do,” says Carrie Little, managing broker at CarMarc Realty Group, Inc. in Warrenville, Illinois. “As real estate agents, we know that nothing happens overnight. It happens over time and with consistency and hard work. Consistency matters in social media because if you’re consistent, and keep it simple, and create content once a week, your viewers come to expect that.
“In 2020, I made a decision to go live every Friday at 9 a.m. Central, and I had two viewers. Now, because I’ve been consistent, I can have anywhere between 50 and 100 viewers. If you remain consistent and do it over time, people will know that you’re going to be there, and they will show up.”
Little knew that people who came to her Instagram wanted to learn something. They weren’t there to be entertained. They wanted useful information, so the night before, she figured out what to talk about.
“I had already posted on Monday and re-shared what I was going to be speaking about on Friday, so I would create my infographic, say what the topic was going to be, then e-blast it to my network and people,” she says. “I would write down all my bullet points Thursday night, so consumers and other real estate agents in my network would come to hear what I’m going to talk about.
“The key is to teach something, typically about real estate. People want to hear about changes in the market, or how they can buy a home with little money down. And people want to know what’s happening in the cities where they live.”
Anna Bishop, a REALTOR® with Crye-Leike, REALTORS® in Arlington, Tennessee, uses Facebook as her go-to social media platform. She has different ways of leveraging it in today’s real estate market.
“I try to give people what they want to know, not only about real estate, but also about me, to get to know me better as a person,” she notes. “I think that helps leverage my sphere, what my interests are, what I’m doing daily at work or in my personal life. Facebook is the most comfortable platform for me. It’s the one I’ve been on the longest. It’s the easiest for me to navigate. I think it’s the most far-reaching.”
Marki Lemons-Ryhal, founder of ReMarkiTable, LLC in Chicago, Illinois, second’s Facebook’s power and value for REALTORS®.
“It’s definitely the largest social media platform, and (parent company Meta) happens to own Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger,” she says. “One thing I love to tell agents is that we have to get over FOMO, fear of missing out. You want to be on the platform where your buyers and sellers are in your target audience, because this is not one size fits all.
“Last year I decided to delete Snapchat, TikTok, Twitter and Clubhouse because they are not the preferred platforms my target audience is hanging out on and telling me all their business in real-time.”
Bishop relates that she favors Facebook because the platform makes it easy for her to track metrics. As for content, she shares that posts about anything having to do with the housing market get traction.
“People love tips on preparing a house for the market and anything, particularly right now, about interest rates,” she says. “And they really want to know what I think about the market. There’s some fear as we are seeing nationally with home sales on the decline, but people really want to stay abreast and know what I know about the market. Anytime I post an update, I get a high response.”
Multiple Usage of Materials
Repurposing content is a major tool at the disposal of savvy agents. Jeremias Maneiro, associate broker at Rochester, New York-based RE/MAX Realty Group and president of JMan Seminars Inc., is also very consistent in his efforts.
“I try to schedule two livestreams per week, one on Monday, one on Friday, and those livestreams are multi-cast to three different platforms,” he says. “One is 30 minutes, the other is 60 minutes. From each one of those I can then repurpose a ton of short-form video content, so I have content for Instagram, TikTok and even YouTube shorts.”
Maneiro plans out in advance what he is going to post and how he is going to reposition it for various other platforms so that when it’s time to do the editing, he doesn’t have to spend time deciding what goes where.
“If I’m going to do a livestream for 30 minutes, typically I might have three talking points,” he explains. “I then know I have three pieces of content that I can repurpose. So if an overall theme was about selling a home, I might have something about getting your home ready for sale, how to get the most money possible, and then how to make your move with pets. I then know in post-production that I can chunk out that content and reuse it, whether it’s educational, entertainment or motivational. Those are usually the three buckets that I like to put the content into.”
Lemons-Ryhal points out that a useful tool for REALTORS® is restream.io.
“I was recently playing with Restream and realized that I can also stream live to Instagram, because they have the OBS key,” she says. “Imagine the ability to go live in eight locations at one time. I’m live on Facebook, Amazon, YouTube, LinkedIn and Instagram. And once you’re done leveraging Restream, you can come back and use something called repurpose.io, where they will take a video and allow you to share it in multiple locations.”
Outsourcing video is one of Maneiro’s strategies.
“People want shortcuts sometimes, and what I do is outsource my social media,” he says. “(Agents) are the ones that have to be in front of the camera. I’m going to create more content, but I’m doing that by delegating the post-production. For the repurposing, I’m going to create a lot of videos, then have somebody else edit the videos and post them for me.
“In the creative process, we’re going to pay more attention to doing the research ahead of time. Seeing what keywords are resonating with our audience through a keyword explorer, like Google Trends, you have an idea of what the pain points are for your audience, and how you’re going to solve them in the video.”
Outsourcing social media is something REALTORS® should do only if they are willing to create video content, according to Lemons-Ryhal.
“Video is the only content you can repurpose up to 200 different ways without recreating it,” she says. “Whether you extract the video to create a podcast, blog or post-photo quotes, everyone should lead with video.”
