How To Use Social Networks For Real Estate?

Published in

Entrepreneuryork

6 min readJul 13, 2018

We have seen how social networks are essential for an Inbound marketing strategy, and which media are best suited to real estate agency communication.

Now remains to know what to do with!

How to use social networks in real estate? What determines a “good” use of these media? And how do real estate professionals seize it to boost their communication?

How do real estate players use social media?

Each social network has its own features — and a real estate agent can use it wisely. Indeed: using social networks in real estate can cover many different actions.

In a previous article, we sorted through the most popular social networks to determine which are best suited for professional use : as a reminder, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube came in pole position.

But the question now is: how are these media used by professionals in your sector?

Using social networks in real estate: what professionals do

When it comes to using social networks in real estate, professionals in the sector (in the broadest sense) are used to:

To share news about the real estate sector (73%)
Publish information about their company, brand, or professional activity (43%)
Share social news (38%)
Showcase local events (34%)
Publish news about their partners’ news (23%)
To discuss the political news (3%).

Note that the frequency of publication is high: they are 77% to publish content at least once a month, and 25% to do it daily.

Using social networks in real estate: business habits

The practices of real estate companies (agencies, networks …) are somewhat different. When it comes to using social networks in real estate, these companies:

Communicate about their company or brand (71%)
Communicate about their products and/or services (57%)
Prospect clients (43%)
Promote their brand image / professional expertise (40%)
Build relationships with web influencers (16%)
Sector Watch (14%)

Assessment of the professional uses of social networks

Let’s make a quick assessment:

In terms of using social networks in real estate, note that:

Professionals in the broad sense play their role as influencers ;
Companies are taking advantage of the commercial potential of social networks (by communicating about their products, services, and expertise, and leveraging these platforms to carry out their digital prospecting ).

How can you use real estate social networks as part of your communication strategy?

How to use social networks in real estate?

Using social networks in real estate helps boost your communication strategy — but how do you get there?

The motto for a successful social strategy is “communicate”. Which means :

Make your pages and profiles live every day;
Write, publish and share on a regular basis;
Use innovative tools offered by social media (photos, videos, Facebook Live, etc.);
Interact with your prospects and customers live via messaging tools;
Know how to change your tone (a Facebook profile is not meant to be too serious);
Rely on advertising campaigns (like Facebook Ads).

You already have everything you need to succeed in your social communication!

You just need to keep in mind the 3 keywords that help to use real estate social networks in all circumstances:

The connection (with your prospects and customers)
Emotion (the human being first and foremost, marketing 3.0 requires)
The visual (because an image often says more than words)

To get to the heart of the matter, let’s take two examples of what you can do to use social networks in real estate in the right way: with Facebook and Instagram.

Connect to your community with Facebook

Facebook is a powerful connectivity tool. As long as you cleverly balance your communication between your page and your Facebook profile, you will be able to reach a maximum of prospects and customers.

Some ideas :

Use your real estate agency Facebook page to post news and information about your business;
Take advantage of your personal profile to create customer contact and maintain relationships over time: by sharing your interests with your customers, and by showing them that you are like them;
Post photos of your everyday real estate agent AND your personal life , to intimately connect the two; highlight what constitutes your existence (your home, your pet, your sports habits, your cultural tastes) in order to generate a connection with the people who follow you; these will spontaneously come to talk about them, their real estate needs, or those of their relatives;
Show your customers that you know them by publishing things that interest them directly (if one of your salesmen likes cars, post a photo of a beautiful model seen in the street and “tag” that customer to the way) ;
Take advantage of Facebook ads, home-based ads that target your prospects — and qualitative tools like Canvas (a full-screen mobile-friendly experience).

Never forget one thing:

Your customers choose you because they trust you, which is why they give you a sale or a real estate purchase.

Using social networks in real estate is, therefore, to create and maintain this connivance between your customers and you; to show that, behind the real estate agent who does business, there is, first of all, a human being who has the same desires and knows the same problems as his customers.

Rely on the visual to communicate through Instagram

Unlike Facebook, Instagram only works with pictures. This tool, therefore, implies a different way of using social networks in real estate.

Here’s how :

Use two Instagram accounts: one, personal, which aims to humanize your relationship with your customers; another, professional, who plays a more serious role, for example, to publish only photos of real estate extracted from your agency portfolio;
Find a balance (in your personal account) between light and more “pros” content;
Only publish high-quality content (this is the trademark of Instagram);
Use hashtags (#) wisely: they are the ones that allow you to hit your targets;
Capture prospects by offering attractive visuals of your properties for sale, and at the same time prove to your future sellers that you know how to develop real estate;
Do not forget that Instagram also offers videos!

We see it: in reality, Instagram is a powerful lever for the acquisition of prospects and communication.

Using real estate social networks in the best way, therefore, means taking into account the specificities of each medium, such as Facebook or Instagram.

Feedback on the use of Facebook by a real estate agent

Let’s finish with a concrete example: that real estate agent from the south of France who chose to communicate only on Facebook.

Here are the actions he has put in place (over a long period) to achieve commercially viable results:

A publication frequency of 3 to 4 posts per week;
Various contents (regional real estate news, agency news, details of mandates returned);
Advertisements focused on exclusive mandates;
A budget per publication that changes according to the potential of the property: from 5 to 15 € per sponsored link;
Regular updates (at least once every 15 days)
No price displayed on sponsored publications.

Result: a 10% click rate on its ads, which is very powerful!

To conclude the use of social networks in real estate

Conclude on this question:

Using social networks in real estate is not just posting a Facebook status from time to time and sharing an image on Instagram. It is necessary to have a real social presence and to animate one’s accounts with regularity, then to create contact and to maintain relations, by balancing the tone of the contents (lighter / more serious).

Above all, social media is just a tool: they promote your online presence. But it’s your website that will then convert your prospects and create engagement.

In short, we use social networks to build relationships and to demonstrate our know-how, not to sell.

But in doing so, you create all the conditions to make prospects want to appeal to you when they want to take the plunge!

Originally published at Entrepreneur News and Startup Guide.