Whether you are investing time, money or both, it is crucial to see a return on investment on your social media in terms of reach, brand building, lead generation, and yes, sales.
So to help you make the most of your social media investment, here are four best practices that Realtors need to employ when utilizing social media this year.
1. Figuring out your best platform:
There are various social media platforms that you may use to promote your brands and listings, but if your target market does not frequent a particular platform, you are most likely wasting your time if you use it. Take some time to consider who your target market is – you may even want to consider using a marketing technique called “personas” to create a number of fictional characters – each representing a demographic in your customer base.
Certain social media platforms tend to attract certain demographics. For example, women over 40 on average spend more time on Facebook, whereas millennials are more likely to be found on Instagram. And while LinkedIn may be considered a less popular place to promote your listings, it can be a good option if you are looking to attract a more professional crowd.
2. Consistency:
Because there are so many other brands vying for your audience’s attention on social platforms, you are going to need to remain consistent if you wish to gain a foothold. If there are long gaps without posting, you will lose your audience. Overwhelming them with too many posts, however, will have the same effect.
To some extent, it may take a bit of trial and error to determine how many posts per day or week is the optimum number to ensure you are attracting engagement in the form of likes, clicks, comments and shares. To help you with this, you should develop a social media calendar and plan your posts ahead of time.
3. Engagement – How to engage and why?
It is also important that your customers on social media know and feel that they are interacting with a real person and not a robot – and this means you need to engage with them. You can do this by liking and/or commenting on their comments on your page. You should also be quick to respond to private messages.
Another way you can engage with your audience is to post live videos where you can interact, in real time, with comments or questions in the chat feature.
And finally, make sure to use your audience’s questions and feedback to improve your own social media communications.
4. Monitor and tweak:
Social media is constantly evolving and so too should your approach to it. Fortunately, most social media platforms assist you with this by providing you with analytics tools. These tools let you know the demographic that is following you as well as what types of posts get the most engagement and which ones fall flat.
This allows you to regularly tweak your approach by adopting more of what is working and abandoning the things that aren’t. By playing close attention to your analytics results and adapting to them, over time, you will become a social media master.
Just like any form of marketing, it is all about trial and error, tailoring your approach, monitoring your results and tweaking again. Those who do it right stay at it!
Marly Broudie is the founder and CEO of SocialEyes Communications, a digital marketing firm based in Toronto. She works with several top-producing agents helping them with their digital marketing – everything from their brand, to social presence, data base building and lead gen.
