The secret to becoming your brokerage’s powerhouse team? Social media.

Today’s top-performing real estate teams have honed in on their social media efforts to really reach their market, and it should come as no surprise that it works. With 72% of Americans currently active on social media, it’s the perfect channel to not only reach your market, but to also help with brand recognition and team growth.

Benefits of Capitalizing on Social Media Marketing

Using social media as a real estate marketing platform holds immense value and potential for teams looking to raise the bar. Social media is an influential and dynamic network that allows agents to build trust, assert their online presence, and gain authority within the local market.

Additionally, the popularity of social media platforms helps agents get discovered by buyers and impress their seller clients with astute digital property marketing. It’s cost-effective, making it a fabulous choice for small agent teams. And, as a group of agents, social media is even more potent. Each agent is able to bring their individual client sphere to the profile — making it a superpowered way to connect and grow!

Why Real Estate Embraces Social Media

In terms of digital connectivity, social media and real estate are a match made in heaven. Social media combines stunning imagery, a strong propensity for sharing, and the atmosphere of casual networking; all of which make it such a good and natural fit for real estate.

Engagement and authenticity are so important in social media marketing. People aren’t necessarily using social media to get bombarded with sales pitches. Instead, social media is a place to discuss nearly everything. Real estate professionals get the chance to interact with their sphere while adding value to the industry conversation. The human element of social media is truly what gives this tactic its heart — and also its power.

Social media is people-centric, and actively bridges the gap between clients and industry professionals. Platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn offer small boutique teams the chance to flaunt their brand’s personality while honing the culture of your brokerage. All of this is available for little to no cost — the only requirement is effort and strategic planning.

Ready to start shining within your brokerage? Here’s a list of Propertybase’s best-practices for upping your real estate team’s social media game… plus free templates so you can get started right away. Here we go!

#1. Consider the Anatomy of a Great Social Post

There’s an art to crafting the perfect social posts. An update on your social profile isn’t just about the message’s information. It’s the look, language, and overall flow of the shared content that packs the punch.

A great standard to follow is to keep it simple. Social media posts are quick bursts of information, so you won’t want too much verbiage. Adding high-quality imagery, emojis, hashtags, and CTA’s can all up the power of your posts.

Creating a draft of the post for each social channel is also recommended. Twitter is quick and hashtag centric, LinkedIn is professional-oriented, and Facebook posts love emoji’s and are often longer in nature.

Download this template to ensure all your social posts are effective:

#2. Remember Timing is Key

Social media is time-sensitive. These platform’s publishing streams are live, meaning that agents will want to gear their posting schedule to high-traffic hours, such as mornings and afternoons.

Teams also need to be careful about oversaturation. The quickest way to get unfollowed is to post too much, too frequently. Avoid posting multiple posts at one time. Spread out the content by coordinating a social media schedule.

Download this social media calendar to keep your cadence consistent:

#3. Create Diversity with Content Categories

A strong and engaging social media feed is always mixing things up. When you’re planning out your monthly social content, you’ll want to think about the categories that each post falls into. Brokerages should be focusing on 3 types of posts: curated, created, and culture.

Curated posts — or those pulled from other sources — keep you a part of the conversation. Sharing blogs, infographics, eBooks, and videos on trending topics will keep your profile current on the industry’s latest movement.

Created posts include content generated in-house. Blogs, infographics, eBooks, reports, or videos that your brokerage creates and shares will establish your page as a resource for insights and market news.

Don’t forget to show off your culture with people-focused posts. This gives your team’s social identity an important dose of humanization, helping you to come off as approachable experts. Flaunt your team’s unique personality with photos, memes, or other entertaining content… it’s the kind of fun that your audience likes.

This social posting rule is guaranteed to show off the best of your team while keeping content fresh and exciting.

Follow this cadence to organize your content:

#4. Have Consistent and Complete Profiles

As a real estate team, it’s important to keep your professional profiles looking clean, concise, and consistent. Remember, this profile is a reflection of your team. There should be no missing information or incorrect information.

Your team’s social media profiles will become a part of your larger online presence. This relationship means that a real estate team’s digital identity needs to be consistent across their entire web footprint.

The challenge here is to remember that each online portal has its own culture — making the content of each facet unique. But, your brand needs to be using the same ‘voice’, tone, and graphic style. This builds trust and allows prospects and clients to virtually get to know your brand.

You can use this checklist to make sure that all of our team’s social media profiles are top-notch:

#5. Set Up Automatic Responses

Being responsive and engaging with prospects that reach out to you on social media is a vital part of generating client turnover. We all know that there is a sea of real estate information (and agents) online. So, if you’re not responding at lightning speed, the prospect will likely move on to find the information they’re looking for.

Busy real estate teams can benefit from setting up automatic messages and responses on the social media channels that support these systems, such as Facebook. This gives you the chance to immediately let them know that you’ll be responding as soon as possible — which is far superior to letting messages sit unread for hours or days. Learn more about how you can generate leads and followers from social media in this post.

Here’s a quick “how-to” on setting up auto-responses on Facebook:

And, here’s a quick draft of what you can say in your auto-response:

#6. Plan Distribution for Your Content

Don’t forget to have a plan for how you’ll distribute your content and grow your reach. 

By gearing your social activity and content ideas towards growth, your social strategy can establish its own organic expansion system. Always encourage sharing, such as reposts, retweets, and ‘adding to stories’. Think ‘relatable’ when writing these posts: what can you say that will appeal to people at large or a niche group? By doing so, you’ll naturally be able to expand your profile’s reach. 

Engagement is the key to getting noticed. Joining local groups, interacting with influencers and local leaders, liking and commenting on posts, posting stories, and messaging your sphere will all prompt your followers to engage right back with you. 

Here’s a quick downloadable checklist you can use to make sure you’re getting the most reach out of your posts. 

Download the Template Bundle

Ready to become your brokerage’s strongest real estate team? These 5 social media best-practices will effectively supercharge your social media game — and with these free downloads, you can easily and quickly start climbing the ladder of success within your brokerage.