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!
