Tips all real estate agents should avoid when it comes to posting on social media.
As a real estate agent, it is imperative that your company has an online presence associated with them. Online marketing and especially social media has changed the way that people get information, make buying decisions and also learn about the latest news and events. Often times though, real estate professionals get caught up on social media by not knowing what to post, when to post or even how to post. Pix-l Graphx has provided 10 common mistakes that realtors often make and how to avoid those pitfalls.
1. Only posting personal updates
Making a personal connection with your audience is very important when running your real estate page. Posting a picture from a holiday party or a great weekend with friends and family is perfectly fine… occasionally. The majority of your posts should be in relation to real estate. Talk about your latest listings, any content that you’ve curated yourself or great links that resonate with your audience like housing trends or market reports. Provide information that your users will be excited to read, not just posting about how your Saturday night party was.
2. Not posting at the right times
Once you start to post more on your page, you will begin to understand when your audience is online. While there are common times that many people are on social media, your audience may be different. For example, your audience may be on LinkedIn in the morning because they are also reading about newsworthy articles and don’t use Facebook until they get home that night. In that case, schedule your LinkedIn content for the morning and schedule your Facebook posts for after dinner. This way, you are connecting with your community at the right times and can have the most amount of engagement on your posts as possible.
One way you can tell when your clients are online is to use the social analytics tools that platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram offer. They can usually be found with the ads manager tools in the settings. These tools will tell you what days and times users are looking at your content so you know when the best time to post is.
3. Not coming off as relatable
When posting on social media, it’s important to note that while talking about the success of your business is great, making outlandish statements that make you seem arrogant is not. Showcase your business in a good light by highlighting your clients, your appreciation for them and how grateful you are to work with them.
4. Publishing inappropriate comments
Your personal life and business life should have a clear line drawn in the sand between them. Publishing pictures or making comments that offend people or don’t look professional will give you a bad reputation. The last thing you want is for people to think you’re unprofessional or that you have poor judgment because once it’s online, it lives there forever.
Remember this rule when you are about to post something online: if you have to think twice about it, don’t share it.
5. Promoting your business too often
This is one problem that many businesses face, not just real estate. While promoting your business is fine, be careful how much of it you do. If you are constantly posting listings, open houses and closed deals, your social media will look stale and people will unfollow your brand.
Include content that is related to your business but also showcases your human side. If you ate at a great restaurant in a town that you have homes for sale in, post about it. Write a review and tell everyone how great it was. If you’ve attended or plan on attending an event in the area, let your audience know about it.
Make sure that you also aren’t posting too much or too little on social media. Find out when the best times for you to post are each day and make sure that you are posting then. If you don’t post enough, people will forget about you but if you post too much, people will unfollow you as they don’t want to be oversold by you.
6. Giving social media access to the wrong people
Just because you have a nephew or niece that has 1,000 Facebook friends, doesn’t mean they should be running your social media content. Posting misinformation, offensive pictures or updates with bad grammar can really hurt your business more than help it. The person running your social media should understand about when you post, what you should be posting and how you should be saying it. Being able to run the Ads Manager platform on the different social media platforms is important and can help draw in a new audience to look at your status updates. Make sure your status updates are related to your business and resonate with your audience.
7. Only publishing others’ work
In a pinch, sharing information from other real estate professionals can be a great way to save the day. Also, you may see a great post that you know your audience would love created by someone else. That’s good to share too. The majority of your content though should be your own. This is your social media account, not someone else’s. Make sure that you are creating your own content that will make other real estate professionals want to share your work instead.
8. Not embracing images/videos on social
Social media is not a novel; add some variety to your posts. Facebook has the ability for people to go live and people can tune in to what you are doing. Try doing a walkthrough of a new house you are about to list. There are also other videos you can make that focus on your industry. Do something like “Top attractions in Smalltown USA” to show what’s around a city that you have listings in.
On average, posts with photos on Facebook have over an 80% engagement rate. If you aren’t the most tech savvy person, there are many apps that can help you edit photos and post them to your social accounts for you.
9. Paying people for “likes/reviews”
There is nothing worse than buying likes or reviews online. First off, all social sites are cracking down on this and will penalize or ban users who pay for likes or reviews. Second, it doesn’t really help you that much. Eventually, the false reviews are found and they are deleted anyways. You will be paying for nothing in the long run.
It’s better to use your money to run ads on social media that will help target the users you are actually trying to connect with. This will actually help improve your social media metrics, not hurt them like false reviews do.
10. Follow These Tips
We have been working with many real estate agents that are doing things right on social media. One of them is Villa Visions. If you look at their Facebook page, they post motivational posts, houses that have been listed/just sold, they do Facebook Live walkthroughs of houses they are showing and even showcase their employees and their personal lives so that you know about them. They are a good mix of everything real estate agents should be doing on social media. Take a look at this walkthrough below with Travis from Villa Visions.
At Pixl-Graphx, we have a long standing relationship with many realtors and agents across New Jersey. If you are looking for more information on how we can assist you with your social media campaigns or any other part of digital marketing, contact us today for more information. You can visit us online or call us at (201) 553-1200.