14 Real Estate Social Media Marketing Tips
Mistakes Real Estate Agents Have Been Making on Social Media But Are Not Aware of
Social media is making its way further to the marketing efforts of real estate agents. However, many are not getting the results they wish for and with good reason. There are many common social media mistakes real estate agents make frequently that they are not aware of. As real estate agents continue to have a stronger presence on social media, they tend to observe wrong practices online. This will harm more than help them.
Due to the extensive resources social media takes from the real estate agents, we thought it best to highlight some of these common social media real estate mistakes. In doing so we hope to help agents make their efforts count. Many agents are investing in social media ads and actually spending their hard-earned cash, only to get practically nothing out of it. They blame the nature of social media, but the problem lies within the approach they take not social media itself. In fact, social media can be pretty beneficial and helpful once handled properly.
14 Real Estate Social Media Marketing Tips
Here are some of the most common social media real estate mistakes we often see online from agents. Many agents are not aware of these mistakes and so they continue to make things worse by repeating them.
1. It Is Not About You
Well, social media can come across as a place to go and boast about yourself and your achievements. It can be too tempting to make it about you and try to impress the audience by going on and on about yourself. But the truth is nobody cares about you. It’s like playing a song for a friend who is not interested in the genre and insisting that they should love it. You are hitting the wrong notes. It will never work. As people are not there to see what you think about yourself.
What people show interest in on social media is something that:
- Entertains them
- Teaches them
- Helps them with a problem
Bragging about yourself fails to land in any of the categories above. Even if they need your services, talking about yourself won’t help. Your audience wants to know how your qualifications will help them with a problem. Other than that, it is mostly blah blah blah for them.
2. Let’s See the Other Side
We appreciate that you take things seriously and do business where you do business. However, being strictly professional and heavily focused on the business will not help your audience put their trust in you. After all, whenever people need to do some sort of business they try to assess the other party to get a sense of what kind of a person they are. Many walk away if they fail to get an idea of the other person. People are spending money and they need to trust you.
It is a good idea to show your audience your other side as well. Let them know you personally. Show them what you do when you are not working. Allow them to get a peek of how you spend your day, what hobbies you have and what you care for. Revealing your personal side will help a great deal with making people feel as though they know, and can therefore work with, you.
3. No to Hate Speech
Well, we have seen it often not only in real estate but also in other fields. You will not come across as a better option if you try to make your competitors or other agents look bad. This kind of approach will not prove anything. In fact, it will make people lose respect for you. As a professional, you are expected to conduct yourself in a professional manner. This means treating your peers with respect. Otherwise, all that negativity and toxicity will bounce back at you.
4. What Is in It for Me?
Many agents keep selling on social media and wonder why their followers are unfollowing them. Social media is a place for people to unwind and relax, get entertained, and find new ideas and learn. It’s among these activities that salespeople make sales. Therefore when your social media account is just a platform where you keep promoting your listings, eventually people will get tired and will leave because what you do contradicts with what your audience is following you for.
The main content you should share on social media should serve one of the purposes mentioned above. It should entertain, inform, teach, and eventually answer a need or a problem.
However, you can go with the occasional promotional posts on the side. We recommend that agents do not exceed 2 direct promotional posts for every 10 posts they share. Go over this number and you will risk losing your audience.
5. Keep Business Where It Belongs
Let us not mix everything together. You do not do business on your personal page. Period. It does not matter how close you are to your friends or if you believe they do not mind a few business posts every once in a while. Your friends on your personal page are there to find out about you on a personal level. Chances are they are not interested in what you do for a living or what you might be offering. Most social media platforms offer business accounts with many practical business features. Even if there is no business version, create a separate account for your business. Later you can share your business page with your personal page friends and ask them to follow you there if they want to.
6. Are We Doing Business?
In contrast to the point above another mistake that agents make is to post personal content on their business page. While it is a good idea to post about your personal life occasionally to encourage a meaningful connection with your audience, going overboard will definitely make your audience wonder if you are the professional you claim to be? Why is everything in your page is not related? Well seems you are not the one!
7. Too Good to Be True
Your ultimate goal in real estate is to make money by working with clients. These clients were once leads. These leads were once members of your audience. This is a chain of stages that your audience should pass through in a proper manner, while you present honest facts. There are some agents who try to manipulate data and media they have for their listings. Or they exaggerate the features just to get the audience engaged. But once potential clients see what the property really looks like, they will be very disappointed, and you can guess what it will do with your reputation. Keep it honest and refrain from any methods to cheat your audience.
8. Do You Need A Hand?
Social media needs a lot of resources like time, money, skills, knowledge, etc. Without any one these required options, things are apt to go awry. If you have no skills or lack the time, you will not get great results and your time is practically wasted. Bear mind that social media will work only if you know what you are doing. If you are not sure you can always ask real estate social media automation services to help you with the content and also sharing. These platforms will take care of everything for you while you spend your time on things you are good at.
9. On and Off
Another mistake that is pretty common with real estate agents is that they start social media marketing and then they drop it or post irregularly. Going silent harms you. Put yourself in your audience’s shoes. How would you feel if one of the pages you are following went silent for a while and then came back for a few days and then off again? This kind of inconsistency disappoints your audience as you will not come across as a reliable source of content. We tend to follow people who show up with their content at an expected time. Once again social media automation services can make sure you have a steady and healthy flow of social media content going out.
10. Give Me A Break
Similar to the point above, another social media real estate mistake that agents make is posting too often. In the beginning of their presence on social media some agents are too motivated and try to cut the long way short and achieve quick success. That will not happen unless you are Ryan Serhant. Posting too often will annoy your audience as your unwanted content will take up most of their newsfeed and as it is expected they might mute you or word unfollow you. Do not push your luck.
11. Just Another Face in The Crowd
One of the disappointing aspects of social media in real estate is that almost everyone is doing the same thing. Go through a few agents’ profiles on different platforms. You will see they are all offering a home valuation or sharing blog posts. These are great ideas but not when everybody is doing them. In order to stand out and convince your audience that you have what it takes, you need to share unique content. Content that is not found easily and offers value. It answers the questions and needs of your audience. Social media automation platforms can help you with this too.
12. Fake Followers
Desperate times call for desperate measures. Right? We do not think so in real estate. By no means you should acquire fake followers, likes or comments to come across as popular. There are some services on the internet that offer quick and easy social media engagement but rest assured that social media platforms are getting smarter every day and can detect fake accounts easily. Every once in a while, they do a sweep and remove these fake accounts.
13. Anybody Home?
One of the key purposes and uses of social media is allowing your audience to directly contact you and voice their ideas, concerns, issues, etc. In fact many great businesses use the comments section to expand their customer services. One of the mistakes that real estate agents make is ignoring comments and direct messages. When you leave the comments unanswered how does it make your audience feel? Why would they think you would care for them if they worked with you? You do not bother to reply to their comments.
14. Videos
Videos are the new game changer in the real estate market due to the highly visual nature of the business. Other than that, videos are easier and more convenient to watch and convey a lot of content in a short time. If you take a look at the trends on social media from TikTok to older platforms like Facebook and Instagram, you see that they focus on videos. There is just more demand for this type of content. Therefore, you should also think of videos in your social media marketing efforts.
Videos are hard to make, they need professional equipment and skills. That is why search engines tend to consider them more valuable pieces of content. We highly recommend that you consider videos as a major part of your social media marketing if you think you don’t have what it takes do not worry. There are a lot of companies that offer real estate videos.
Final Words
Social media can benefit real estate agents a lot provided that they stay away from common social media real estate mistakes. The message to take from this article is that if you want to use social media you had better do it properly. To use it carelessly is just a waste of time and money. Poor performance on social media will not only not help you but it will probably harm your business and reputation.
To make sure you are not doing anything wrong, ask the professionals. You do not have to be a tech-maniac to make the most of social media. Most of the skills needed for social media are not related to real estate and you are not expected to have all of them. Instead, you can always use exclusive and specialized platforms to automate content production and share it across many social media platforms. Roomvu’s Content Factory has been designed keeping all these points in mind. Content production, automation, advertising, you name it, all can be done without the need for you to know much about social media.
1. Talking about yourself
2. Not showing your personal life
3. Hate speech
4. Selling all the time
5. Doing business on personal accounts.
I read Your blog you mention all the mistakes I did in the past but now. I am Working As a Real estate agent last 4 years but I have one question on how to give information about new rules and low about real estate in social media plz help me.