Turning Your Social Media Followers and Fans into Real Estate Buyers

“Your presence on social media is crucial as a real estate agent. “ (RISMedia)

Social media has become an increasingly important tool for real estate professionals, but most realtors are still learning to use it effectively.

According to the National Association of Realtors:

• 44% of home buyers looked online for properties
  for sale as their first step in the home buying process, while
  16% of buyers first contacted a real estate agent.
• 91% of realtors use social media to some degree

Despite these figures, the real estate industry has the lowest social media engagement rate of any major industry, generating an average of less than one reaction per post even though realtors post more social content than any other industry, HubSpot research shows.

Unless your social media activity is translating into conversions at some point, it’s a waste of time that’s not doing your business any good.

Here are some steps you can take to boost your social media engagement and generate conversions from your posting activity.

Track Your Engagement

In order to improve your social media engagement, you should first establish a baseline so that you know how your posts are performing.

Failing to track social performance is one of the most common mistakes realtors make, whereas realtors who are successful at social media marketing track their analytics, says Matthew Bushery, marketer for real estate digital marketing provider Placester.

The first step to track your engagement is to identify which key performance indicators you need to track.

This will vary by platform, with likes and comments being significant for Facebook, while retweets are specific to Twitter, for instance.

You can use tools such as:

• Keyhole to track your brand’s performance on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
• Google Analytics lets you see how your social posts are contributing to traffic on your company’s website.
• Oktopost specifically enables you to track conversions generated by your social media activity and the financial impact of what you post.

Provide Value Between Home Sales

One key to boosting social media engagement is posting content that provides value to your clients during the time when they’re not actively shopping for a home.

Most people only need to buy a home rarely, and most of the time they’re not in the market for buying, so if you rely exclusively on the times when they’re shopping for a home to build a relationship with them, you have a very small window.

Moreover, after they buy a home, 70 percent of people forget their real estate agent’s name within a year, according to ReminderMedia.

This makes it crucial to reach out to people during the periods when they’re not actively shopping for a home. Moreover, even when people aren’t actively shopping for a home, they will know other people who are, so getting people to share your social content can significantly increase the effectiveness of your outreach.

To attract followers who aren’t active home buyers but may be in the future or may be a good referral source to your social feed, you can post content relevant to how they live in their current home.

85 percent of the most viral social content is accounted for by:

• Food Content
• Home Content
• Lifestyle Content

Think of your blog as an online magazine for sharing general interest information of value to homeowners, including but not limited to information on home buying itself.

Follow Up

Following up with your clients and social followers between sales cycles and after posts is also key to turning your posts into conversions.

When people comment on your posts, you can take this as an opportunity to respond and build your relationship with them. Some successful realtors take this a step further by finding ways to assist clients after they’ve purchased their homes.

For instance, some realtors, such as Ina Torton, specialize in selling to older home buyers, serve as trusted advisors to their clients and assist them with issues related to buying a home at an older age, such as helping address concerns about reverse mortgages, estate sales and even housekeeping.

One way to assist clients of all ages with issues related to home buying is by pointing them towards experts who can assist them with these issues, such as:

• Banking
• Insurance
• Financial planning advisors

These resources can in turn serve as referral partners to direct active home buyers to you.

Content

I use a tool called Post Planner to schedule out my Facebook and Twitter posts for the month.

What I find is that I get the most engagement from posts that are the furthest from real estate!

I have tried local real estate news, real estate celebrations, listings, national real estate news, home and garden, HGTV, Houzz, This old house, Better Homes and Gardens, you name it…  but when I get good engagement on my Facebook Page or Twitter profile it is when I post:

• comedy
• psychology
• inspirational
• my family and personal images
• personal videos

Try creating videos, video marketing, and adding them to your WordPress website.  Make sure that you optimize your content for SEO.

Getting good social engagement to your post can boost your content and having good content can boost your social engagement.

Putting out good video content that gets shared to your sphere of influence also shows you as an authority in your industry.