I was recently working with Mary, a new client of ours, on the real estate marketing system we were building for her. While we were discussing the lead generation channels we were creating for her, the topic of social media came up.
You see – Mary knew Facebook and had used Twitter and even LinkedIn before – but not for business. She thought of them as more oriented toward personal communications. As a result – she wondered if she should use these social media channels to attract leads – and questioned what she would post to them that didn’t come across as “salesy”.
So… in this article we aim to answer Mary’s question and provide some data to back up our thoughts. In short…
Going in to 2020, it’s estimated that over 3.48 billion people use and connect with each other on social media – making it the largest and most powerful marketing opportunity available for real estate professionals.
These communities empower real estate agents, brokers & industry professionals to instantly connect with and help potential clients in a casual and familiar way that works great for real estate agents.
In this article, I cover how and why real estate agents use social media, explore what tools they use and provide some suggestions on how smart real estate professionals use it to grow their business. As a bonus I include a couple lesser known social media tools that agents at our brokerage (Blue Sun Realty) use to help them generate a bunch of buyer and seller leads.
Okay – so now that you know real estate agents (and brokers) need social media – you’re probably wondering WHY they need it. Why should any real estate professional not only spend their time creating social media channels…but then spend more of their time posting and updating content to those channels? In a word… brand promotion. Okay – that’s two words.
But let’s say it again anyway – BRAND PROMOTION
This remarkable set of tools and social media sites allows any real agent the ability to communicate anything they want… in any format… instantly. Never before in the history of industrialization were businesses able to communicate effortlessly to a massive amount of people – for FREE. For example:
· Want to tell people about a price reduction – you tweet it on Twitter!
· Want to show people the new home your selling – you upload a video on YouTube!
· Want to share pictures of your million dollar listing – you pin it on Pinterest!
· Want to schedule an open house and blast it out to people – you post it on Facebook!
It’s truly mind-boggling when you consider the amount of information we share and, more importantly… how much we consume from social media sites every day. In fact, in this 2018 report from GlobalWebIndex, on average people spent 2 hours and 22 minutes online each and every day just on social media sites alone.
This average was a near 50% increase from the same measurement only 5 years prior, when the average user spent an hour and 35 minutes on social media channels. And time spent on these sites is only increasing.
What does this mean for you as real estate professional? Opportunity. MASSIVE opportunity!
People are using these channels every single day – a lot! For this reason alone, every real estate agent, broker and industry professional should at least have a presence on the major social media channels so that people can find them. If you don’t – you’re providing a fantastic way for your competitors (even the ones in the same office as you) to distinguish themselves as experts and up-to-date on these channels.
Of course by now – you’re probably wondering… “Ok great. But there are literally hundreds of social media channels to choose from. Which ones are important and worth the time”? Read on my Realtor® friend…
Like most any other question about social media – this one can have a variety of answers depending on who is answering it. To provide some context, I answered this using data I had collected from some of our real estate agent clients before they signed up for a MyRealtyWorks (real estate marketing program). I also incorporated some of the strategies we use for our own agents at my real estate brokerage, Blue Sun Realty.
The top 3 sites that are the most common for just about all our real estate agents, brokers and industry vendors we spoke to were Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. There’s probably not any big surprises here as these three sites are already deeply ingrained into our culture. However what was surprising was that most everyone we surveyed really only used one of these channels consistently. Only a handful used 2 of the channels and just one agent used all three social media sites simultaneously for real estate marketing. Amazing.
The face of social media (pun very much intended). Seriously – Facebook is a behemoth in the social media space and boasts the largest amount of monthly active users (MAU’s) at 2.375 Billion. According to this report in June 2019 by BrandWatch – 1.49 billion people use Facebook every day with nearly half of them using it ONLY on their phone. If that’s not enough, Facebook is still one of the fastest growing sites and gets an average of 500,000 new users every single day.
What’s more – the daily habit’s of the average user offer vast marketing opportunities for local businesses. For instance, the average Facebook user spends 20 minutes per day on the site and:
SOURCE: BrandWatch
Each user/friend/neighbor/colleague/lead/client does this EVERY. SINGLE. DAY!
As a real estate agent, you could be using Facebook to post information about your property listings, open houses, community news, updates to industry trends and more – to a vibrant and connected community of people who know you (or maybe who knows someone that knows someone that knows you)!
Youtube is the king of all social networks when it comes to capturing the most amount of time from its user base. It’s also the world’s second largest search engine – only behind Google and many people view YouTube as an authoritative source of information for just about any subject they are researching.
The shear volume of content is so vast that according to this report by BusinessInsider in 2017, over 400 hours of videos were being uploaded to YouTube – EVERY. SINGLE. MINUTE!!!!
In addition and according to Think With Google, 3 out 4 adults report watching YouTube on their mobile device daily – with 68% of them using it to make a purchase decision about a product.
As a real estate agent, you could be using YouTube to share property listing videos, agent video bio’s, property staging tips, area guides and more to a community of people clamoring for visual information in the form of video!
Twitter is the social media network for those looking to get short messages to large audiences. Of all the social media channels out there (with maybe exception to a fantastic video that goes viral on YouTube), Twitter offers the most potential to have a message go viral because their technology helps your message (they call them Tweets) get re-sent (they call those reTweets) to lots and lots of people. When you post something that goes viral, it’s known to be “trending” on Twitter. Now you’re in the know!
According to Twitter, there are over 1.3 Billion people using Twitter, with 80% of them using it from their mobile device. Relevant to the world of real estate a good amount of adults, especially in the US, review information received this popular micro-blogging service. For instance, check out the age demographic breakdown of Twitter users according data gathered from Statista:
As a real estate agent, you could be using Twitter to share listings and property updates, snap and share pictures during open houses, check-in at community events and telling people about that awesome blog you wrote – who are dying to reshare retweet it to others.
The massive volume of monthly active users (MAU’s) and traffic of these top three sites warrants that any serious real estate professional establish a presence on one or more of these social networks. The real estate business is a hyper local activity – and there are many potential customers in your neighborhood using these 3 primary sites. Simple posting a single real estate listing on any of these sites has great potential to generate a lead from:
· People you know who are looking for a home (your network)
· Friends & family of people you know who may be looking for a home (your extended network)
· People in your area you don’t know who are looking to buy or sell a home (your local area network)
· Other Realtors® & industry professionals with clients looking to buy or sell a home (your professional network)
— And this example only takes into consideration these Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. Imagine the potential lead generating system you could have if you incorporated one or two other relevant social media apps or sites into your real estate marketing mix.
You could absolutely DOMINATE your area and be known as the online REAL ESTATE PROFESSIONAL!
For instance, consider these other social media sites and how you might use them to your advantage:
At first glance – you might totally ignore the concept of Instagram and think it more of a “playground” for millennials. But that is EXACTLY the point.
Instagram has over 1 Billion users and according to Hootsuite 65% of them are currently between the age of 18-34. This places the site third in overall membership, only behind Facebook (who also owns Instagram) and YouTube (who wishes they owned Instagram).
What’s more, 38% of users check Instagram multiple times per day. And they’re simply clicking on cat video’s and silly “double-dare-you” compilation videos. Rather, these hipsters are finding things they like on InstaGram (perhaps maybe… an awesome house for sale)… and then they’re “liking” the brand that posted it. On other words – they’re liking YOU – the real estate agent (i.e. brand) that’s posting the content. When done frequently, this creates massive awareness for you in your local area and helps feed traffic back to websites and landing pages.
In addition, as Rockstar agents are aware – the 18-34 yr old target is the primary age bracket for first-time home buyers giving you a fantastic demographic to cater to who are looking for homes. And if that’s not enough, there are also 25 million business owners on the platform and 90+% of all users also use either Facebook or Youtube – giving you even more opportunity to network with others and cross-pollinate your brand.
As a real estate agent, you could be using InstaGram to show stories (think about it as a collection of pictures and/or videos) of your property listing, taking tours of your office and promoting why people should use you as their agent – to a community of people who want to love your brand!
LinkedIN boasts itself as the world’s largest professional networking site. And while many people use it to seek out new employment opportunities and connect up with other professionals, it has rapidly become a source of knowledge for industry news, leadership and high-quality content that actually gets read.
Okay – some numbers… as of May 2019, Microsoft (they own LinkedIN) claims that the LinkedIN community is 610 million members strong, worldwide. Of that number – about 121 million people use the platform daily [(Source: Business Insider)] In addition, 45% of LinkedIN users make $75,000 or more.
From a content sharing standpoint, Linkedin may provide the best bang for you buck across the top social media sites out there. According to this research gathered by Foundation Inc., LinkedIn had 9 billion content impression in the LinkedinIN feed every single week when measured in January of 2019.
Even more crazy is that during that same time period, only 3 million users were sharing contact on a weekly basis. Think about that for a moment. 3 Million people were generating the contact that was seen 9 billion times by the rest of the members. I’ll do the math here for you!
That equates to 3,000 views for every post that is shared – PER WEEK! That is a staggering number of average pages views per post when compared to what you get on other sites like Facebook and YouTube.
What’s more, consider the fact LinkedIN is a job-site primarily – and that may mean that users are interested in relocating. This provides an opportunity for smart real estate professionals to reach out to people who just started new jobs and ask if they need a fantastic agent to help them buy or sell a home.
As a real estate agent, you could be using LinkedIN to post property updates in your area, to inform people of great companies to work for in your town, to reach out people who just switched jobs and offer real estate assistance and to provide professional advice on real estate – all to a community of (largely employed) working professionals.
Ok – don’t frown too much here. Yes – this is a bit of a plug for the software side of our real estate marketing program called MyRealtyWorks. However, our CRM software solution has some powerful and nifty little features that make it worth considering when talking about social media. I’ll explain why!
Aside from being a pretty simple real estate CRM and marketing automation tool, MyRealtyWorks has a key capability that NO OTHER CRM system has: It includes a private real estate social network community – built directly into the system. This social community allows users to create pages, public and private groups, publish various posts like property listings, videos and events and more. So basically we took some Facebook-like features and merged them with some Salesforce-like features.
As such – real estate agents, lenders, brokers, appraisers & other industry professionals can privately connect with each other, create working groups and securely share information to move deals along and get things done. For example:
· Agents can click-to-share a buyers contact information with a mortgage lender for pre-approval
· An inspector can upload and privately share an inspection reports with the buyer & seller agents
· A broker can post her “coming soon” listings to her Realtor network and try to sell it before hitting the MLS
· A contractor can track a property repair project and communicate & share pictures with the listing agent
In addition, the MyRealtyWorks Real Estate CRM has a bunch of many useful features available to real estate professionals. It was initially designed to help agents track basic lead and listing information as well as things like notes, file storage, lead assignments, etc. Over the last two years however – we’ve added additional capabilities that help our our clients use automate their marketing and communication to websites, clients and other social media networks like Facebook.
In other words… if you’re looking for an all-in-one tool to help you manage your online real estate marketing AND track leads, this is it!
To sum it up… the MyRealtyWorks makes this list because it of its unique position in offering a combined real estate CRM, real estate website, real estate social network and real estate marketing platform.
WhatsApp (owned by Facebook ) is more of a global communication tool than a social media site. Using its business platform, smart real estate agents can join the other 5 million businesses and use it to communicate with clients using pictures, voice, chat and video-chat. WhatsApp has done an outstanding job of providing some automation and notification features in there to help agents respond quickly. And as an added bonus, you can add a button on your Facebook and webpages to allow your potential customers to start a conversation with you instantly.
NextDoor is a microcosm of a social network community when compared to somethign like Facebook. However, it does have a very simple yet powerful offering that is extremely relevant to real estate agents. The premise of NextDoor is that it is designed as a place for local communities to get together and interact with each other… which is super-fantastic for services that are locally based (hence real estate)! Agents should easily be able to create business pages and offer real estate services to the locals that are residents of this community.
As you can probably tell by now – the social media tools and platforms available to real estate professionals can provide an enormous advantage to a smart agent who uses it correctly. Aside from promoting your brand (you and your brokerage), you have unlimited opportunities to communicate to an audience of targeted customers…. For FREE. In marketing terms… this is GOLD!!!
To sum it all up…
The MyRealtyWorks real estate marketing program is provides “done for you” marketing to generate new leads for real estate professionals. Starting at only $199 per month, we do the work for you. From creating a custom and handcrafted website to hooking up to our CRM, to designing branded materials for social media sites and more. We even have programs in place to help get your site ranked in the top of search results so you can get more traffic when people conduct real estate related searches in your area…. translation = LOTS MORE LEADS.
There are various methods and techniques that a real estate agent or broker can employ when using social media channels for marketing. Basic posts such as property listings and notifications are done by most agents online whereas a handful will use more advanced tactics such as post bracketing and boosting to improve lead generation.
To be honest – this can (and usually is) a long list. Most things that real estate agents do using their social media account are tactical errors that impact the reach and impact of their posts. When we coach people in the MyRealtyWorks programs, we teach tactics that focus on what we call “The three A’s of a Good Following: Approachability, Accountability, Availability”.
We knew you’d ask… and, you’re in luck!! We created such a guide… and a bunch of other information that might help you with your real estate marketing initiatives! If you type in your first name and email address and click that fancy Send button below, we’ll email you an initial email with links to all of the available content we’ve published so far. You’ll also get these real estate marketing tips delivered straight to your inbox as we release them:
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What Social Media Sites do Real Estate Agents Use?