Where success in advertising and marketing once meant perfectly staged photos and happy smiling faces, it is now profoundly established in building relationships and customer experiences, supported by measurable data. Clients have become savvier and more immune to the noise of advertising that engages in every element of their lives.
So, where can agents turn to, to reach a target audience, create meaningful relationships and develop their real estate sales pipeline? In 2019, it’s Social Media.
But first, quick disclaimer:
What Is a Real Estate Lead?
A real estate lead is a person who has indicated interest in your service to sell or buy a home.
As a lead, you’d hear from an agent or a broker with which you’ve already opened communication, instead of getting a cold call from someone who purchased a list.
What Is Real Estate Lead Generation?
Real Estate Lead generation is the process of attracting and converting strangers and prospects into someone who has indicated interest in real estate services you are offering. Some examples of lead generators are job applications, blog posts, coupons, live events, and online content.
Social media for real estate lead generation
Social Media for Real Estate Lead Generation
Facebook for real estate lead generation
Facebook and others the social media communities rely on the power of word-of-mouth. Although it doesn’t require actual speaking, word-of-mouth distribution exists within the different social activities users can participate in to engage with real estate professionals or brands.
With all the buzz of Facebook deprioritizing company pages and cleaning up the newsfeed, so users see more from their close ones, agents and brokers don’t just have to become smarter, they need become more “social” and participate in the conversation.
It’s a social network after all, right? Agents and brokers should be active across their personal pages, interact in Facebook groups and contribute to the local community, not just as an agent or brand, perse, but as a trusted professional. In Facebook, the best way to communicate with your audience is to tell short meaningful stories. Share stories about your work, life, and other professional experiences. And you will not wait a lot until people start reaching out for real estate advice or services.
Instagram for real estate lead generation
While agents use Facebook to build relationships telling stories, Instagram is all about pictures and visual communication. Of course, you may think it’s just a place for pretty photos of travel and food, but it’s the ideal stage to paint an attractive picture through images and video stories to further enhance your brand and business. Check out an account of Ryan Serhant or Steve Gold. For many those under thirty, Instagram is the most used app and the best way of interaction with new brands.
The question then is how do you profit from building a relationship with Instagram followers? If you only have a few of posts within a story, it can be hard to encourage loyalty and ensure followers really see the benefit of your offering.
To build those relations, you have to redirect your real estate leads to your website or landing page. Instagram is an acquisition channel in the first place. And while it’s excellent for building engagement and loyalty, your goal should always be driving incremental demand.
Even though social media are incredibly high engagement channels, according to Hubspot, users still prefer to engage with brands through their website.
LinkedIn for real estate lead generation
LinkedIn is not only a place to find a job or catch up with your ex-colleagues. As other social network platforms evolve, so does LinkedIn.
A particular benefit of LinkedIn is that knowing where people work and spend most of their daytime you can better understand their location and neighborhood preferences. For example, if you know that a person is working in Google at the NYC office, it could be interesting to target this segment of prospects with interesting Chelsea or Hudson Square listings. Sounds like a perfect match, right?
Twitter for real estate lead generation
Twitter is also an excellent choice for real estate marketing. Why? Because it’s open and it’s public (usually). People frequently ask their community and connections for real estate advice. Check out hashtags #renthome or #sellhome in your area. Best of all, Twitter is an awesome place for agents to find the people who are interested in the services they’re providing.
At this point, there’s plenty of options when it comes to using Twitter to promote your brand and find real estate leads.
In general, there are three approaches to generating leads on Twitter:
- Use Twitter’s in-house advertising options
- Manually identify your target audience by interests and location, reach out to individuals one on one.
- Use a social demand generation system that leverages Twitter data and allows you to interact with your audience on a deeper level.
Snapchat for real estate lead generation
Snapchat may be a service initially designed to share dessapearing photos, but it is much more today. However, there is a lot of news around losing its popularity to Instagram; Snapchat is still enormously popular among Millenials.
Similar to Instagram, you can bring in experiences with your real estate services with Snapchat’s “Stories.” When you implement Snapchat into your lead generation process, you put your current connections in the spotlight while targeting new clients in the process.
Snapchat stories are perfect for topics like:
- Home buying and selling Q&A
- Real estate expert tips
- Funny facts about area or neighborhood
Conclusion
Social media become a must have in real estate lead generation.
Real estate professionals need to be willing to open up to their community, through sharing stories and valuable content. Each network needs its special approach and unique content, but as a result value you can get, will be enormous.
By the way, converting leads is sometimes even more important than generating ones. With Propertymate you can be sure, that every lead that sent you a Facebook message or commented your Instagram post will be logged into our built-in CRM. So you can focus on communication with people or something you love most, and Propertymate will take care of your working routine. Sign up here or just drop us a line on team@propertymate.ai.
