A Recipe For Success | The Residential Specialist

Social media marketing has become an important and necessary tool for agents looking to maximize their potential

By Michelle Huffman

Social media marketing sometimes feels like a contradiction: Anyone can use social media, but it seems like few can use it effectively.

Those who do use it swear by it, saying that it’s a lead-generation machine.

So how can you get past this inherent contradiction (and all the contradictory advice a Google search will provide) and simply get started on a simple, straightforward, effective social media marketing plan?

CRS experts shared four key pieces of advice to get started, along with all the insider pro tips you need to really get it done.

Helpful Apps and Services

Canva: The free version of this graphic design service makes posting social media graphics easier than ever with its library of images, pre-made templates and drag-and-drop functionality. For $13 a month, you can build a brand kit with your logos, fonts and colors.

Hootsuite: One of the most common social media managers, Hootsuite allows you to schedule posts for two platforms with its free version, and up to 10 with its basic $50 version.

Plann: If you want the scheduling features of Hootsuite and the design capabilities of Canva, Plann is the scheduler for you. The free version allows up to 30 posts a month on Instagram. Paid versions expand posts, platforms and analytics (which include insights into the colors your audience prefers).

Keeping Current Matters: For $30 a month, Keeping Current Matters offers a pipeline of daily blog posts, infographics, videos and visual market reports you can use to feed a personalized blog on your website and share on social media.

Make it easy

The million-dollar social media marketing question: How can I spend as little time as possible on social and still find success? The answer is through planning and scheduling. To avoid getting tripped up overthinking how, when and what to post, sit down and schedule with software.

“There’s just no way that I could manage sharing something on all the platforms every day and have it be authentic, creative and polished,” says Tracy Jones, CRS, broker associate with RE/MAX Platinum in Sarasota, Florida.

If you don’t want to schedule posts, preplan them in a spreadsheet. Ryan Rohlf, CRS candidate with Keller Williams Legacy Group in Des Moines, Iowa, uses Google Sheets to save content, so he can easily create posts later.

Pro tip: Outsource

Monique Higginson, CRS, principal broker at Market Source Real Estate in Salt Lake City, hired a local firm to create a calendar that detailed when and what to post based on the firm’s research and analysis of her metrics. After following that for a few years, Higginson hired the firm to manage her accounts. Now they pull from her Flickr account to populate posts, flag her to respond to comments and meet a few times a year to shoot videos and map out content. This translates to little effort but big rewards.

“It’s the best marketing money I’ve ever spent in my entire career, hands down,” Higginson says.

Make it consistent

Consistency is key, so don’t set yourself up to fail by being unrealistic about what you can accomplish.

“Start with the very simple goal of one post a day,” says Mark Handlovitch, CRS, associate broker with RE/MAX Real Estate Solutions in Pittsburgh.

While you will need to determine when you want your posts to be seen (morning, noon, night) and what you’ll post (list content ideas to get you started), the most important way to create consistency is to focus on building the habit of posting, regardless of your posting cadence.

Pro tip: Use “habit stacking”

Rohlf sits down every week after his open houses and posts for the entire week. This type of posting habit is called “habit stacking” or “habit chaining.” It’s when you tie a new habit to one that you already do easily and consistently, like arriving at the (home) office, eating lunch or reviewing your daily schedule.

Make it authentic

While “be yourself” is solid social media advice, the reality is that successful social media users are aware of the narrative their authentic selves are building. For example, Higginson says she wants people to see that she’s a busy, thriving agent, so when they need an agent, they know she does a lot of work in the area. There’s nothing inauthentic about this: “My life is mostly real estate,” she laughs.

Pro tip: Be the champion of your town

Many agents rightfully want to be known as the expert on the area they work in, which means providing followers with helpful information about what’s going on around them. Bob McCranie, CRS, broker associate with Texas Pride Realty Group in Plano, Texas, owns 52 public-facing pages on various online communities and employs a part-time admin to push content across them all. His goal is not to show people houses, but to show them what they will do when they live there. To achieve this, he gets out there and enjoys these places.

“Walk the trails, bike through town, go to the balloon festival,” he says. “Find out what it really means to be part of your town.”

Make it engaging

“You can’t be unsocial on social media and expect results,” Handlovitch says. “Don’t sit back and simply ‘like’ everything; it’ll do nothing for you. You have to talk to people.”

Not only is having a conversation better for developing the relationships that lead to clients, it’s also better for the algorithm. As platforms like Facebook have become more crowded, marketers must rely more heavily on the platform’s algorithm to actually show followers their content.

McCranie advises agents to create posts that encourage comments, because as more people comment, the post’s reach spreads (think about all those notifications telling you that someone replied to a post), which means more people see it over a longer period of time.

Pro tip: Create “velcro” posts

To achieve real traction on social, McCranie writes what he calls “velcro posts.” These are often questions that have little to do with real estate. They’ve included asking for his followers’ favorite songs from the 1980s or crafting an image with four different holiday candies and asking which one you prefer. These questions generate hundreds of comments among McCranie’s 5,000 Facebook friends.

At the end of the day, the goal is to be top of mind when someone needs to buy or sell. Jones thinks of this goal as achieving “propinquity,” which means being close to someone or something. Social media helps you stay close to what’s going on in your town, close to your friends, families and followers, and close to new clients.