How can estate agents use social media more effectively to sell homes?
Unless you live under a rock, you’re most likely already active on social media. When it comes to selling homes and finding buyers, social media for estate agents is an actual goldmine for doing so. How do people know they want to buy a newly listed house unless you plonk it in front of them, ey?
However, whilst you may be using your social media for business, are you doing it well? Are you utilising your platforms to the best of your ability? Are you promoting your estate agency as well as you could, and using the many social media marketing features and tools available to you? Are you, at worst, driving away followers and customers because your estate agent’s social media strategy is ineffective and flawed?
It’s all well and good having social profiles and posting away, but that’s not going to scratch the surface in the competitive, saturated market we are in. There is so much more to social media marketing than being present – you need social media strategies, and luckily, we have them aplenty!
Here’s how to get better at property social media marketing and sell more houses, with our well-informed social media marketing strategies.
Up the creativity of your content
Give your content a creative overhaul, even if you are not a creativity-led business. Yes, really!
Posting new properties is alright, but we need more than alright when it’s getting harder to gain a presence organically on social – organic reach has been in a state of decline since 2014.
Create, plan and execute content that adds value to your audience, alongside your property listings. Rather than curating a mini second-rate Rightmove, offer a property hub to advise, update, educate, entertain and inform.
Content marketing ideas for estate agents can include;
- Tips for selling
- Pointers for purchasing
- What to ask your estate agent or letting agent
- How-to’s
- Interior tricks when selling (turn on the bread-maker!)
- Helpful housing market insights
- Demonstratable local knowledge with facts about the area you operate in
- Interesting facts about homes
- Q & A’s
- Aspirational content, such as ‘luxury property of the week,’
- Musings on popular culture (we’re here for any opportunity to discuss Selling Sunset!)
- Industry news and property market insights
- Interior design tips
Mix up your content marketing with relatability, authenticity, aspiration, and fun.
Anybody, and any business, can use their platform to provide a wealth of exciting, insightful, or engaging content to grow a social media following and drive sales, no matter what they do or sell.
Start more conversations
If you want to acquire more followers, build your social media presence and use social media to convert sales, you need to have super-duper engagement, so get chatting.
Find out what your potential customers want and need. What do they dislike most about moving? When is the best time for them to move? Invite your audience to submit stories or questions. Send out polls, quizzes, start discussions and garner their thoughts and opinions. Ensure you are always talking to your audience. Social media networks have made it easier than ever to start conversations.
Encourage your audience to get chatting as well – ask them to tag a friend who is looking for a new house, run a competition asking them to tag someone most deserving of the prize, and so on. The higher your engagement, the better your social media profiles are going to do.
Please remember that vanity metrics should never be an area of focus – whether you have 5 followers or 500,000, engaging as much as you can on your platforms will boost your social media success at the same rate.
Improve your hyper-local social media strategy
Most estate agents are local. Therefore, if you’re one of them, you need to think hyper-locally and make local community, local people and the local area your priority on social media.
Showcase your involvement with the local community, other local businesses, your local customers, and your knowledge of the local area. If you can build up your reputation locally, you’re going to win a lot more customers and become the area go-to over competitor estate agencies. Sharing local client reviews and testimonials is also a great move, par the pun.
Focus on certain channels only
The notion that the more social media channels you use, the larger your reach, isn’t strictly true.
Spreading yourself thin across every single platform is too time-consuming and dilutes your efforts and focus. Property agencies don’t necessarily need to be on every social media channel – but they do need to have a presence on the social networks that their target audience is actively using. Whilst new social media platforms are constantly up and coming, e.g. Clubhouse, it doesn’t mean you need them, unless that is where your customers are.
Read more here about using the right social media channels for your business.
Employ a video marketing strategy
32% of businesses use video for sales, and you can too! Showcase your homes using videos and reels which you can promote across a range of channels such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube.
You don’t need to be Steven Spielberg. Simply add captions and subtitles so that videos can be watched soundlessly and are accessible to all, and use music, branded filters or geo-filters.
Videos and reels take more time to view, meaning social media algorithms will recognise that audiences are taking longer to view your content, deeming your profile as more valuable for users – which will help with your visibility. If you so wish, you can read here how to beat the Instagram algorithm if you’re finding it a struggle.
Furthermore, you can use social media story features to maintain a presence for 24 hours, give your brand a voice, go live, run property Q&A’s, and ultimately build a relationship with your audience. 74% of marketers say video has a better return on investment than static imagery.
Paid social advertising for estate agents
Organic reach is on the decline – Facebook even said it themselves!
Alongside your organic efforts, ensure you are running paid social media campaigns to generate leads, boost brand reach or drive website traffic, because posting organically isn’t going to yield huge results. As well as social media channel and marketing management, LOCALiQ offers a range of paid social advertising solutions, such as lead ads, where you can use a form within the Facebook app to gather specific information and contact details from potential house buyers, letters and sellers.
We recently ran a lead ads campaign for an estate agency and acquired 417 leads at an AOV of £100k. Social ads really do pay for themselves!
You can also apply targeting capabilities on Facebook Ads, reaching online users who fit certain demographics or demonstrate certain behaviours or interests – such as those interested in mortgages, Purple Bricks, Rightmove and so on – meaning that the online users you are reaching are much more likely to become leads, reducing wastage of your estate agent’s marketing budget.
Commit to your social media
Whilst no business needs to live on their phones at all, have you ever seen a social media profile with ‘3 months ago’ and followed it? Of course not! A social media strategy isn’t effective if it’s ad-hoc and flash-in-the-pan. Done badly, or infrequently, and social media is a waste of your time and effort!
How often should you post? There is no answer. Many marketing agencies think they have established the answer to this but the reality is, social media algorithms are always changing. The best thing to do is set a manageable, realistic goal. Avoid spamming and posting low-value content – quality not quantity! Use marketing analytics and insights tools to establish the busiest times and days for your online following, and aim to post during those times.
Commit to social media marketing for your estate agency and you will reap the rewards long-term. You don’t have to be on your phone constantly at all. Just keep your accounts refreshed, up-to-date and current. Marketing is ongoing, it shouldn’t ever come to a halt, and this applies to your social media strategy – social media isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, as tech is the fastest growing industry on planet Earth.
Social media brings in sales when done well. Start measuring and tracking your efforts today and watch how your property sales quicken and increase – why not read up on tracking leads and understanding marketing analytics?
Explore our blog further for more magical marketing tips and tricks.
