Editor’s Note: Social Skills is a bi-monthly feature in RISMedia’s Daily News focused on social media and digital marketing tips, trends and solutions for agents and brokers.
As we shift into 2025, and the digital world continues to grow and change, social media is undeniably still one of the most influential marketing tools for real estate professionals. Over five billion people in the world use social media—according to a recent Statista report—and that number is only projected to grow by millions in the coming years. So, if you want to reach the most people you can, you need to be marketing on social media.
In order to market effectively on social media—like any other marketing strategy—you first have to build a plan. Here are some of the first steps for you to start building your social media marketing plan:
Create a content calendar
Making a content calendar is a key move that will help you stay on track when it comes to creating, posting and reposting to your socials.
A content calendar takes a look at the days and weeks of the month and helps you plan when and where you want to post certain kinds of content. It is very loose and personal to the way you work and organize yourself.
An easy way to start is by creating and scheduling themes for your content. You can make every Monday a first time buyer tip, or make each week a different theme to focus all your content on. This will help you know what kind of main focus you’ll need for your content in advance in order to pre-prep content to post.
P.S.—Don’t forget to take a look at the list of holiday dates each year to help you plan content around that too!
You’ll also want to include where you will be sharing this content (meaning which apps), and if/when you will be reposting it on the same apps, or re-sharing to other apps. By creating this outline, you will be able to work efficiently on creating content in advance and having it ready to post where it’s needed exactly when it’s needed, streamlining your whole social media marketing strategy!
To learn more about re-using content, check out our Social Skills article Repurpose, Reuse, Recycle: How to Streamline Your Content.
Building a budget
You’ll need to take an objective look at your target audiences in order to determine where to allocate your ad funds. For example, if you’re looking to target the main homebuyer population of Millennials (30-40 year olds), you’ll want to push more ad money into apps like X and Instagram.
To learn more about social media audiences, check out our Social Skills article Taking Advantage of Every Social Media Audience.
Your analytics also come into play here, as you’ll want to look where you’re getting the most viewership and engagement to help you focus your funding even further. For example, your Millennial audience may engage with your content more on Instagram than X, so your budget would primarily lean in that direction with a secondary focus on X.
To learn more about analytics, check out our Social Skills article Analytics and the Tools to Track Them.
In terms of how much of your overall marketing budget should be allocated to social media ads and boosted posts, a good rule of thumb would be to allocate at least 25%. You can increase or decrease this depending on the return on investment you observe through leads.
Are you looking to boost your online presence, enhance your content and grow your real estate business? RISMedia’s ACESocial is truly simple content marketing proven to highlight your expertise, increase engagement, generate leads and build brand awareness—all in one place. To learn more or sign up today, visit acesocial.rismedia.com.