4 Efforts to Maximize Your Social Media Impact as a Real Estate Professional

EPISODE SUMMARY
The importance of utilizing social media as a real estate professional cannot be overstated. With more real estate professionals actively using social media for their business, it has become an indispensable tool to establish brand presence, showcase properties, and engage with a wider audience. Furthermore, a consistent and strategic social media presence enables realtors to foster trust and forge strong relationships with their clients, ultimately driving long-term success in the industry.

Utilizing social media allows you to share engaging content, such as virtual tours and high-quality property images, which generates more leads. Social media can also be a beast, especially since most real estate professionals are independent contractors who must prioritize running their businesses.

In this episode, our host Rachel Gombosch explores four easy and practical ways to integrate social media into your routine, allowing you to maximize your social impact. Using these game-changing strategies, you will be able to manage your time efficiently and impact your real estate business for the better.

Don't miss this opportunity to learn how to make social media work for you, and stay ahead of the curve in this ever-evolving industry!

Transcript

[00:00:00] Rachel: Hey everyone. And welcome back to another episode of Curb Appeal. My name is Rachel Gombosch and I am your host. And today we have a great topic - we are going over social media. So in our recent 2023 Real Estate Marketing Trends, research and study, we found five emerging marketing efforts that real estate professionals believe they should be focusing on in this upcoming year in order to reach their goals. 

[00:00:25] And one of those efforts is building a social media presence, which is huge. We know we're all in this digital age. Real estate is traditionally considered a more traditional industry, but now we're seeing everything shift, to become more online. And so I'm giving you four efforts to maximize your social media impact. 

[00:00:43] This will be a great podcast for you, especially if you are unsure how to just incorporate social media into your routine and business efforts in general. 

[00:00:52] So with that, let's go ahead and get started. [00:01:00] 

[00:01:00] I'm so excited to be detailing with you for efforts to maximize your social media impact. So we all know that social media is a crucial component to your marketing strategy because ultimately social media is the way to help you generate new leads and ultimately new clients. Why is the big question, so why is social media an integral piece to your business?

[00:01:23] So why do you as a realtor need social media? So I really wanna point out two key reasons as to why you need to have a presence online. The first one being that 70% of people are on some type of social media platform. So for every 10 people you meet, seven of them are using social media on a day-to-day basis.

[00:01:43] With that amount of people active on social media platforms, your business can easily grow by also utilizing them as a way of digital marketing and to get your brand and your name out there. Additionally to break it down just a little bit more for you, 81% of [00:02:00] Americans are using Facebook alone on a daily basis.

[00:02:03] Again, with that amount of people on just one singular platform, you have so much potential to reach new audiences, which again is going to turn into new leads for you and ultimately new clients. If all of these people are already online, you also need to be as well. Just another tip I wanna throw out there is that buyers are vetting online.

[00:02:23] So they are making their buying decisions from findings that they are seeing based on not only what's being pushed in front of them consistently, but also what people and their peers are saying. So this includes friends and family and influencers. We are influenced by other people's opinions. So that's how people are vetting online and making their decisions, and they could ultimately be making their decision on their next real estate agent by being on social media. 

[00:02:50] So, I know you're extremely busy. I know your time is precious and it's also very limited. I know what the question you're thinking is pretty [00:03:00] much, how on earth can I, as an agent incorporate social media into my already tightly packed routine?

[00:03:06] And the answer to this is by simply planning and scheduling your social media content in an effective way so that it works for you during your busiest times. I understand that you know, as an agent, you're often under pressure to perform pretty much at every single moment of every single day. And the last thing we want is for your marketing to be neglected because you feel as if you don't have time to commit to developing a strong strategy.

[00:03:32] Ultimately, though I hate to, you know, give you this tidbit of information, but if you don't develop a social media marketing strategy that works for you and your business, you're ultimately gonna be missing out on a lot of valuable opportunities AKA new leads and new clients. So today we're gonna take some time and we're going to be going over and lifting that burden to lay out some tactics to plan and schedule your social media posts in an effective way so that your [00:04:00] impact is maximized on your social channels.

[00:04:02] So how can you strategize your social media to work best for you and your business? The first thing you're going to do is you're going to start scheduling your posts ahead of time. This is going to help you when your weeks go off plan, off path, anything crazy that comes your way, you're going to find that your schedule is going to start becoming a little chaotic during the week and by scheduling your posts ahead of time, this is going to help you, balance that out. 

[00:04:28] So if you have a few days in advance, again, I would recommend picking probably one day each week to plan out what content you want released for that week. If you don't wanna do the full week, feel free to do just a couple days in advance, like three days.

[00:04:42] Again, this is to help you plan out your schedule and be proactive. So on that note, not only are you being strategic with your posts by planning ahead of time, but you're also being proactive with your efforts by consistently having content released, even when your schedule starts to get really busy during the [00:05:00] week, which I know they always do as a real estate agent.

[00:05:03] When planning to post, or when planning out your post schedule, you really need to think about two types of things. So the first one being what content and what value do you want to share that week or those next couple days, whenever you decide that planning schedule is for you. And additionally, how frequently you want to post.

[00:05:20] Remembering that quality and consistency are always more beneficial than quantity. So one strong value-driven post each week is going to be 10 times better than having seven weak posts that people don't care about or that hold no value. Additionally, something else you can think about, when planning out your post schedule is to consider any big events or announcements that are coming up and plan these ahead of time so that you can prepare any type of special announcements you wanna make, or if you wanna plan out any videos that you want to share.

[00:05:49] You were doing that before those big events dates. By scheduling out your posts ahead of time, you're also really freeing up your time to build relationships and also a following on your platforms. [00:06:00] So what I mean by that is if you're spending so much time creating and planning content throughout the week, you actually will give your, be giving yourself less time to engage with your audience.

[00:06:10] Again, on social media, you wanna build relationships with those people so that when they are ready to buy, you're the first person that they think of. 

[00:06:17] All right, so I know what you're thinking. Okay, cool. Rachel. So I've planned out my schedule. I know what I wanna post, but honestly, I have no time to stop during the middle of the day to publish them, to create more posts, so yeah, is that where my effort stops? Like what do I do next? And I'm here to tell you that the next thing you can do to set yourself up is to start using a scheduling software to help you out. 

[00:06:41] So there are so many different types of softwares out there and available to help you manage your social media schedules.

[00:06:47] Some of them offer free versions. Others do charge monthly fees or yearly fees, but regardless, most of them offer some type of free trial period before you commit, so that way you can test out which platforms and softwares [00:07:00] work best for you. The main key to these tools in these scheduling softwares is that, um, you should ultimately be looking for something that can automatically publish on your behalf.

[00:07:09] Again, this is going to help stop you from being in the middle of the day and thinking to yourself that you have to schedule something, or have to push something or publish, they're gonna do, these platforms will do it for you. Additionally, they're gonna provide you resources to help you strategize any type of future content, which is really beneficial, and we'll get to that in a little bit.

[00:07:26] But by having a social media software, it's going to make it easy for you to keep track of everything you're publishing. And it's going to help you seamlessly push out content without stopping in the middle of your busy day to publish a post. So I wanna bring up just a couple of different ideas for you guys to look into.

[00:07:42] So these are some great platforms for you guys to start looking into and utilizing. There's Hootsuite, Buffer, Sprout Social, Loomley, and Later. Um, some additional tips when picking a scheduling software is you really need to plan out. What your main goals are for social media. So a lot of these different platforms have their own specific [00:08:00] niches.

[00:08:00] For instance Later is largely niched in Instagram. So if you're planning on really only using your Instagram to market, then maybe Later is a great platform for you. Additionally, Sprout Social is known for their incredible analytics tools. So if you're really interested in diving deep into the data and the insights of your posts and your scheduling and seeing how social media is really working for you, then maybe Sprout Social is the way to go.

[00:08:27] Regardless, when you start looking into these platforms, you really need to figure out what is most, useful for you and useful for your business. So keep all of those things in mind.

[00:08:37] The next thing to discuss, start small and build up. What do I mean by that? I'm mean, don't start posting a ton of content immediately because you're ultimately going to burn out very quickly. 

[00:08:48] Creating and scheduling content isn't necessarily hard, but it can be time consuming thinking of, and then taking the time to create schedule and post the content.

[00:08:58] So the last thing you wanna do is [00:09:00] overload your schedule, which again, we already know is very stuffed, full of tasks and things to do. You wanna make sure that you balance it out. If you start off by trying to do all of the things, you're gonna burn out because it's not sustainable for really any single person to be creating content at the same caliber that a larger company or someone with an entirely separate marketing department or team would.

[00:09:22] So start small. Don't try to set yourself impossible goals right off the bat, but instead focus on building a solid foundation first. So once you've done that, then you can move on to bigger and better things. For example, you can begin by sharing links to interesting articles. This is content that maybe someone else has created, and your goal here is to just start getting your account to become active.

[00:09:46] So any articles you find valuable or interesting, you're going to share on your own platform. And most of the social media platforms allow you to share other people's content. 

[00:09:56] So maybe this is just where you start. It's something easy. You're already [00:10:00] reviewing the content, and your goal here is to just share it with other people and to show that you are active on these social media platforms.

[00:10:06] Then as you gain experience and you get comfortable with what you're posting, you can start to maybe increase your post frequencies. Maybe you started posting once a week and that was from the articles, but now you're ready to create your own content and start posting two to three times a week.

[00:10:20] Then once you finalize that, you can expand into more complex tasks, such as maybe you wanna start filming and creating video content to push out onto your social channels. Or maybe even you wanna start writing your own blog posts that can then be transferred over to your social channels. Regardless of how you start, the important aspect to this is that your efforts work best for you and your business, and you are taking in these pieces of content and pushing them back out in a way that works for you, so that it works into your schedule, and you're not going to experience a quick burnout.

[00:10:52] Finally, do not forget about analytics. Analytics are vital for really any business. Analytics tools are [00:11:00] beneficial when it comes to scheduling and planning your social media content because they're providing you insights into the performance of your social media content and potential campaigns. And additionally, they're helping you to identify what strategies are working best for you and which ones really need improvement or need to be restrategized and redirected.

[00:11:18] So some information you should be looking into, when it comes to your own social analytics are how many people saw your latest posts otherwise known as your reach. Sometimes this is showcased as your impressions. That you should also be looking into whether they clicked through and engaged with your posts, which ultimately is gonna help you understand whether specific messages that you are providing are resonating better than others, right?

[00:11:41] So this is again, gonna help you to redirect your content because if you know, for instance, by providing for, marketing trends on a weekly basis gets the most engagement, then you need to continue providing marketing trend reports. Additionally, these tools are gonna help you understand the best times for you when it is to post on social [00:12:00] media.

[00:12:00] Ultimately, I know this is a really large question that people ask. The best times are going to pretty much depend on one your target market. So is your audience more likely to see your content in the morning, the afternoons, the evenings, maybe after work? You're gonna have to find all of that out once you start testing times for posting.

[00:12:18] And additionally, the best times are ultimately gonna depend on how busy your life is. I'm gonna take a gamble and say that it may be too much to post every single day as an agent. It would be unrealistic with your busy schedule. But when you're planning your social media strategy, it is important to remember that you shouldn't necessarily always post every day.

[00:12:36] But regardless, you need to be consistent with what you're posting. So even if you can only manage to plan out and schedule one to two posts a week, remain consistent with that. And then going back to our previous topic. Build from there. Once you find that it's working or it's comfortable for you and you can and are able to take on more.

[00:12:55] Additionally, you need to find balance again. Not only should you be giving yourself time to create and [00:13:00] schedule the content, but you should also be giving yourself plenty of opportunities to interact with your audience, respond to their comments, and engage with them. 

[00:13:07] So if you're spending too much time creating posts because you decided that you wanted to post something every single day of each week, you're not necessarily gonna always have time to engage because you're spending more time creating. As a tip, as a rule of thumb, it's beneficial for your engagement, to avoid lower periods of engagement traffic. And what I mean by that is weekends and holidays tend to get lower engagement regardless because people are spending time with their families. So maybe you shouldn't put effort towards posting around those days. Doesn't mean you can't, you absolutely can, but just keep that in mind as a rule of thumb that you need to avoid posting during low traffic period s.

[00:13:45] And that will all, you will figure all of that out as you begin to test different times to post, different frequencies of posting. It is all a trial and error period for you.

[00:13:55] So in closing, participating in social media is essential for a [00:14:00] successful marketing of your business and ultimately the generation of more leads. Without a good scheduling plan and process in place, you're going to run the risk of wasting your precious time and your energy. 

[00:14:11] Efficiency is going to be key when it comes to maximizing your social media strategy so you can ensure that you spend more time maximizing your efforts by one, planning and scheduling your content out ahead of time.

[00:14:22] Two, using a scheduling software to assist in your in publishing and pushing out your content. Three, starting with manageable task workloads and then building on that content, and those tasks and workloads. Once you have a solid and successful foundation, again, don't bite off more than you can chew.

[00:14:40] And then number four, reviewing your analytics to help you make decisions and strategize on how your content can provide the greatest impact to your audience. 

[00:14:48] Ultimately, with all of these efforts, we know you'll be crushing it on social media and maximizing your reach and impact. Thus gaining you more leads and more clients, w hich is [00:15:00] ultimately the end goal. 

[00:15:01] Thank you so much for joining me today. Be sure to follow us on our social media channels for more real estate marketing tips and educational resources. Additionally, you can go to our blog at virtuance.com/blog and we have a lot of different articles and resources there for you guys to use as well.

[00:15:20] So again, I hope this was beneficial for you and we can't wait to see how you maximize your social media impact.