What Is a Real Estate Social Network?
Whether you’re an avid user or not, it’s undeniable that social media is here to stay. And for real estate businesses and realtors looking to attract leads, social media networks make powerful channels for promotion. Today, we’re covering what a real estate social network is and how you can use it to reach your audience.
- What Is a Real Estate Social Network?
- Top Platforms for Real Estate Social Networking
- Strategies for Real Estate Networking on Social Media
- Tips for Leveraging Your Real Estate Social Network
What Is a Real Estate Social Network?
A real estate social network is a social platform where you can find new clients, share ideas, and strengthen relationships with others in the industry. Most of the time, these social networks are actual social media accounts on a given platform, like Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. A real estate social network is effective for building a following over time and using promotional messaging to showcase homes on the market, commercial and business spaces, and other real estate opportunities.
These social networks don’t always focus on just one company. You’ll also find individual realtors on a number of social media sites. Creating profiles and contributing to social networks as a realtor or agent is extremely useful, as it can help you increase exposure, bring in new leads, and position yourself as the real estate authority in your area.
Top Platforms for Real Estate Social Networking
According to Hootsuite’s 2022 Report, around 4.75 billion people use social media globally, which means you can potentially reach your best customers by engaging in a real estate social network. Depending on your goals and current content marketing strategy, you might consider the popular platforms to test out your real estate marketing:
Image via Statista
Facebook is no doubt the most popular social network. Founded back in 2004, Facebook has grown into an international platform with nearly 3,000 million monthly active users. As you can see from the Statista graph above, this eclipses most other platforms.
Because of its popularity and online user base, Facebook is a highly effective social platform for real estate marketing. Alongside its huge user count, it also attracts an older audience. And older audiences tend to fall under homeowner demographics more often than younger audiences. Because of this, you have a higher potential of reaching the right audience and generating more qualified leads through a social network on Facebook.
Instagram is known for its photo-update format. But in recent years, it’s evolved and now allows you to post other forms of content, including videos and live streams through its “Reels” and “Stories” features. You can always add text captions to your posts, too. But because Instagram values visual content, appealing photos, graphics, and videos perform the most successfully whether you include text captions or not.
By using hashtags on videos or photos of your real estate content, you can reach a wider audience. Unlike Facebook, you cannot include links within your posts. This means that your Instagram content should almost entirely focus on raising awareness around your real estate brand. If you’re looking for a world-class platform for TOFU marketing, Instagram is a good place to start.
LinkedIn is another of the popular platforms where real estate brands and agents can see considerable success. Much like Facebook, you can find specific groups centered on real estate and use these networks to connect to your audience, generate interest in your services, and update members about local real estate opportunities. Personalize messages wherever you can, especially when connecting with potential leads directly.
As you build your own profile, use LinkedIn’s analytics features to learn more about your audience. For example, you can use the data you collect through engagements, likes, and shares to create localized segments of people who are most interested in your promotional content. Features like these make this social platform an effective tool for both real estate businesses and individual agents.
YouTube
YouTube has the advantage of being a completely visual medium. If you’re touring an office space or showing off a beautiful home for sale, YouTube could be the place to do it. Instead of having to make appointments and organize viewing schedules, a video platform can help you provide virtual tours that people can watch from anywhere.
Using videos as part of your real estate marketing strategy can boost your reach and save you the time it takes to craft a social post with text and images. You can also share links to your video tours so clients can review their options as many times as they like before booking an in-person showing.
While Twitter can be a good place for real estate social networking, it definitely isn’t the first platform that comes to mind. However, that doesn’t mean you should discount it entirely. In reality, it can be extremely useful for market research and following emerging trends. Twitter sees around 6,000 tweets every second. The sheer speed with which news and information turn over on Twitter can give you insight into current trends before they even emerge.
While this can take some work on your part, Twitter is a wonderful real estate social network for community connection. It’s easy to share articles, post photos, and start discussions with other professionals in your space. You can also use Twitter to research how your competitors are using social media. By reviewing profiles of your top competition, you can pinpoint the hashtags, audience members, and trending topics that resonate most with your ideal customers.
TikTok
TikTok is one of the most recent arrivals to the world of real estate social media. As a video streaming platform, it makes sense to add to your marketing tool stack. While some may see this as a disadvantage, many realtors and real estate businesses around the world are using TikTok to show off their properties.
The short nature of these videos works well with apartment tours. Especially if your content can speak for itself, this is a platform that you can’t afford to miss. With over 1 billion active users every month globally, a video strategy for promoting on TikTok could be worth your time.
Strategies for Real Estate Networking on Social Media
Even though social media is easy to use, it’s crucial to have a strategy in place for the content you promote. And because real estate social media surrounds a narrow selection of products and services, it can be hard to know where to begin. To start leveraging these channels for your social media network, try these strategies:
Set Your Goals Early
Launching your brand into the real estate social network and achieving success isn’t going to happen overnight. Social media can have its surge moments, but it takes more than one post to attract and engage audiences. It’s a process. With this in mind, start by setting your long-term goals and what you want to achieve with your network.
For example, your goals might relate to your social presence and reaching a certain engagement rate. Or, you might focus your strategy on achieving a higher follower count or more traffic to your website. You could set goals specifically for sales conversions. The bottom line is knowing what your long-term goals are will help you design a more effective day-to-day workflow.
Develop a Customer Persona
You won’t find the exact same customers across the top real estate social networks. For example, one platform might be better for reaching first-time homebuyers whereas another platform might be better for engaging renters. While these are only some of the demographics for audience profiling that your team could look at, factors like these can influence the success of your approaches.
Understanding the demographics and psychographics that line up with each platform will help you develop better content over time. Using this data, you can develop customer personas for each of your social channels. From there, you’ll have a better basis for creating high-impact content.
Analyze and Adjust Your Campaigns
Data-driven marketing is essential to achieve success in your real estate social network. As early as possible, set up audience listening and data analytics tools on all of your social media accounts. Most will already have an internal page that you can use to track this information. Instagram, for example, comes with a full business studio where you can dive into engagement analytics, demographic data, and location-based information about your audience. By understanding who engages with your channels and which content performs best, you’ll be able to create more effective promotions for your real estate business going forward.
Tips for Leveraging Your Real Estate Social Network
If this is a new arena for your business, diving into social media can be a little overwhelming. To point you on the right track, here are three quick tips to help you excel when using a real estate social network:
1. Be Consistent
One of the most important rules of social media is that it requires consistency. The brands that do best on platforms like YouTube and Instagram aren’t necessarily the ones with the best content—they’re usually the ones that post most frequently.
While social media experts give different guidelines on how much you should be posting, this frequency can vary depending on what your audience needs and what you’re trying to achieve. For example, you might only post one or two times each week on YouTube. But Twitter might mean you post several times each day to ensure your brand stays relevant in appears in current trends.
2. Focus on Value
There are millions of posts across social media every single day. With this much noise, it’s easy to get stuck in with the crowd. In order to set yourself apart from other realtors in the space, always focus on creating value for your audience. Whether it’s a long-form property tour or a photo for Instagram, make sure you’re delivering something that your audience can find useful or beneficial.
For example, incorporate statistics or fun facts about neighborhoods you’re featuring homes in, or answer questions to help your customers find the services they need. That way, your audience gets something of value each time you post.
3. Make Time To Engage
Just like consistent posting, consistent communication and engagement are important on any social network. Make time each day to answer questions, reply to comments, and share content and update your networks. The more present and engaged you are with your audience, the more they’ll come to trust you as a real estate expert. And this translates to higher lead generation for your business.
Ultimately, social media can be a powerful addition to your real estate marketing. By leveraging real estate social networks, you can reach wider audiences and connect with more people who are looking for that dream home.
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