As a real estate agent, when you’re fleshing out your real estate marketing ideas and building your personal brand, you must have a social media marketing strategy in place. Get started and let social networking work for you by taking advantage of the five Cs of social media marketing.

1 – Community

Social media marketing is all about building community. But before you can do this – and do this well – you need to know who that community, your audience, is.

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Researching the demographics for your local area is a great place to start. Look to your online networks, such as Facebook, and Instagram to see who is engaging locally and what they’re posting about. Among these social updates is where you’ll find your ideal home sellers and begin to understand their beliefs, values, behaviours, and patterns.

2 – Content

Once you know who you’re talking to, you want to provide your audience with compelling information that’s useful to them and demonstrates that you are a trusted source for information on the property sales process or localised information about the community.

This content can take many forms, including blog posts, client case studies, home selling ebooks, memes, statistical infographics, and videos. You can provide this material to your audience in two ways:

  • Content creation: developing your own unique content.
  • Content curation: gathering relevant content from other sources to share with your audience.

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By doing so, everybody wins: You’re not only creating brand name recognition for yourself and strengthening your presence but also providing valuable insights with your target audience and building rapport with them.

To get started:

  • Keep track of common questions that each new vendor asks you, then produce or gather content that answers these questions.
  • Understand what your own area of knowledge and specialisation is, then play to those strengths and create thought-leadership content that highlights this expertise.
  • Determine the best way to convey each piece of content. Is it written, visual, or video?

3 – Channels

Then, once you have some great, high-quality content, you need to post it and promote it both on your own website and across your social media channels (key channels being LinkedIn, Facebook, Google plus, Instagram and Twitter – wherever you know your audience is hanging out).

But more than just putting it up there, you need to make sure that people can find it. That means optimising your content for Google by using relevant keywords.

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And finally, you want to amplify your content across social media, which can involve using:

  • Owned media (your own assets, such as your own website or your agency’s).
  • Earned media, which draws on other people liking, commenting on, or sharing your content.
  • Paid media, which you pay for to extend your reach, such as Facebook ads or sponsored content.

4 – Consistency

Once you’re up and running with content, you must be consistent with your message, and this applies on a number of levels.

First, you must always be true to your brand message. Does each piece of content genuinely reflect you, your business, and your expertise? Having a well-thought-out content calendar with pre-planned topics and themes can help ensure this consistency.

So can establishing a tone-of-voice document, so your content also ‘sounds’ consistent.

Second, consistency of content frequency is also important. Following these rules of thumb can ease you into content consistency:

  • Blog once a week.
  • Post on Facebook three times a week.
  • Share on LinkedIn three times a week.
  • Post on Instagram daily.
  • Tweet to Twitter daily.

Third, you want to be consistent with the times of day and days of the week that you post.

Google Analytics and other analytics tools can help with this, and you may have to experiment with different days and times for a bit to see what works best for your audience and their tendencies for visiting and engaging with your content.

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For example, you may learn that your audience looks at content first thing on Monday mornings on their mobile whilst commuting to work, during lunchtimes from their desktop computer, or at 9pm when they’re on their tablet in front of the TV. That’s when you want to get fresh, engaging content in front of them.

5 – Conversations

Finally, social media marketing is about starting conversations across your social networks. That’s what makes it ‘social’, after all! So it’s important to pay attention, again, to what questions people have and what they’re most concerned about when it comes to buying or selling their homes and engage with them on those topics. Then, if and when it’s appropriate, you can contact them directly and start building a rapport outside the realm of social media.

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Written by Melanie Hoole

My team and I specialise in helping real estate and property professionals perfect their personal brand, build a first-class digital profile and implement inbound marketing activities to attract leads. If you are unsure which direction to take with your digital marketing contact me for help.

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