Real Estate: Make Social Media a Lead Generation Machine

You already have social media pages for your company. Who doesn’t?
But are you really leveraging this media to its full potential?

Social Media can become a real lead generation machine if done right.
Do you want your social media to generate actual visits in the property you are selling?

Maybe you want to find new potential sellers? Well, all of that can be successfully achieved if you know-how.
Here are a few tips to help you make the best out of your social media accounts.

1) Grow your audience

If you don’t have a lot of followers on your company page, then you can publish as much as you want... it won’t have the desired effect. Your reach will be limited and the chance that you find a potential buyer on this media is low. That’s why you always try to grow your audience. Easier said than done, right?

Then, how do you start?

Well, it depends on which social media you are leveraging.

If you are advertising your properties on Linkedin, you can invite, from your company page. Start with all your past and current prospects (with a limit of 100 invitations per month). As they have already interacted with you, they are likely to accept, and, more importantly, they are likely to be interested in buying a property. But before doing that you must have added them with your personal LinkedIn profile, as you can only invite connections in your network.

On Facebook, the process works the same. But let’s face it: most of the time you will not have your prospects in your personal friends/followers list. So you will not be able to invite them to follow your company account.

On Instagram, it is not even possible to directly invite people to follow your page. You can follow your prospects in the hope that they will follow you back, but this "follow for follow" strategy is limited and can appear unprofessional.

That’s why you need to play your cards differently.

It is a topic on its own but you can start by using hashtags related to the area (City, ZIP or Neighbourhood), to the property and real estate hashtags (e.g. #homeforsale #investing…)

You should also try to be present in local Facebook groups related to real estate.
There are a lot of them, most of the time dedicated to a region. They are full of potential buyers… But they are also full of your competitors, so you will need to stand out from the crowd. If you post interesting properties in these groups, in a well-presented way, it is likely that some of the members will start to follow you. Aim to grow by a few new followers a week as a minimum. Steady growth is the key here.

Last but not least, simply ask your prospect to follow you when you interact with them. Tell them that you put most of your listings on Instagram first - and that to follow you is the best way to never miss their dream property.

If you start doing this in a consistent way, your audience will start to grow and so will your reach, as your followers start to like and share your content.

As a consequence, every time you post a new property on your social media pages, more people will be exposed to it, and your chance of finding a buyer increases.

2) Keep posting

Consistency is at the heart of every social media strategy. Now you start to have an audience, you need to feed it with relevant content.

Of course, the most important thing to post are your listings. Every new property you get in your “portfolio” should be displayed on your pages. It should be as much a part of your routine as posting your listings on your website or on 3rd party real estate platforms. You can publish your listing as a story to highlight your new post and increase its visibility. The social media platforms LOVE stories and push them more than any other content.

If you have inspiration, you can even start to post other types of content to increase the engagement with your “community”. It can be anything relevant. You should have one focus only: to create content that generates value for your customers. For example, you could write a few tips on how to prepare a property for visits or, as another example, top things to have in mind before investing in residential real estate. Adding value is key in social media. It gives people a reason to follow you even if they’re not looking to buy or sell a home. Once you have them as part of your audience, they will think of you when they are ready – and recommend you to their friends and family too.

High-quality content can even become a way to capture information about the visitors of your page. Let’s say you created a real estate seller guide, that explains everything there is to know when you want to sell a property. Sellers might be really interested in having this kind of information. So interested that they are willing to give their name, phone number (and their consent to be contacted to get it). That’s what we call gated content.

But don’t spam them. Being consistent does not mean posting every day. If you do not have a new property to sell, or an interesting or fun thing to post, then do not post today. Low-quality content will just drive your followers away. If you want to be consistent, you can plan your content in advance, to be sure you always have interesting information to share. There are some great content management tools out there to help you with this.

3) Stand out from the crowd

Let’s not fool ourselves. Most of the time, our content is drowned in the volume of information displayed in our feeds (being on LinkedIn, Instagram or Facebook). Just like on the real estate listing platforms, if you do not stand out, you get overlooked, and your chance to attract the attention of potential customers drops to about zero.

But it doesn't have to be this way. There are a few tricks, all backed by data, that can help you to stand out from the crowd.

- Curate the visuals you use

If you are using visuals (photos, videos, virtual visits…) and you are likely to do so if you advertise a property, the visuals you’ll use will make all the difference.

In an ocean full of visuals, you need to pick yours carefully. If you go with photos, make sure you find the ones that show your property in its best light. Professional visuals can make all the difference in terms of Click Through Rate and conversion. According to a study, Professionally photographed homes sell 32 percent faster than other listings. Indeed, with the right angle, the adequate lighting and a good edition, your visuals are likely to get the attention of potential buyers and to generate more visits and more sales. Don’t forget that this is a competitive market.

- Use animated visuals

Here, you can use GIFs displaying several photos from a property or a video showcasing a house. It is proven that animated content is much more effective than static images to capture the attention of your audience on social media. Studies have shown that videos can boost the CTR of your publications by x2 -x3 and the conversion rate by 20 to 30% compared to static content. The difference is considerable can make the difference between a successful listing and one that get ignored.

If you still go with static images (and that’s perfectly fine), you should at least use 4 photos.

If the photos a well-chosen, your audience will want to see more, and will have to click on the post to do so… Guess what? You’ve won their attention!

- Use emoji on your short description

This one can look a bit simple but is actually quite powerful.

It has been demonstrated that using emojis in your posts and ads can increase the engagement of your post by 25% compared to posts without emojis. 🤩🤩

It makes your listing more visible than others with plain text. Plus, they also add a bit of fun to your marketing message and your brand.

Of course you should use relevant emojis, and please don’t use too many as you want to remain professional. 2-3 emojis positioned at the beginning of your text should do the trick.

4) Run targeted Ads

Maybe you just got a new expensive house on your books. Even more important to hit the ground running if you’re not the sole agent. Here, you need to act fast. In these cases (and in many others too), targeted ads on the different social media platforms can be a great idea.

Advertising on Facebook, Instagram or even LinkedIn allows you to precisely target people who are likely to be interested in the property you are advertising.

You can even choose to target people who visited your website, even though they did not leave their information, or who engaged with your content., even though they are not following you. There are some powerful and effective remarketing options available on all social platforms, such as Facebook Pixel.

Social Media advertising is an excellent option if you need to sell a property faster, or if you are in competition with other realtors. It can also be a good way to attract new sellers. It also allows you to reach a broader audience and to give more visibility to a specific property. And it is not expensive! If you promote properties on Facebook or Instagram, you can achieve great results with a few 100 euros / month. And you only pay for the clicks – not the people who scroll on by.

If you were not a marketing expert already, we hope this article has given you a few ideas to improve your social media strategy. The goal is simple, leverage these channels to attract more buyers but also more sellers. If you want us to do a deep dive one of the topic above, please let us know by contacting us at : hello@bkbn.com