Social media is a fantastic, but often neglected tool for generating leads for estate agents. With billions of users across all the different platforms, your clients are already spending time online, so it’s important that you have a presence there too.
However, some research shows that less than 6% of your followers will see the content you post, so it’s more important than ever to make sure that you are using it in the right way. Here are some tips and tricks for bringing in more enquiries via social media.
1. Optimise your profile
All good social media strategies start with optimising your profile, as it is the first thing that potential new clients will look at. What areas do you cover? Do you do lettings as well as sales?
You want to make sure that every person who visits your profile knows exactly who you are, what you do, and how they can reach you.
Make sure that you have a high resolution profile picture that is consistent across all of your accounts, as well as a location, a short description of your company and a link to your website. The easier it is to get in touch with you, the more likely potential clients are to do so.
2. Engage with potential clients
Social media has seen a shift towards engagement as opposed to content creation alone, so it’s important that you spend time connecting with people rather than just scrolling through your feed.
Follow the hashtags you use for your content and look at posts tagged with your location to see what else is out there, commenting on pictures related to your niche. Likewise, if someone leaves a comment on your photos, make sure that you leave a thoughtful reply – they might just be your next big client.
3. Offer value
Social media marketing isn’t geared purely towards selling, so if you want people to follow you, you have to offer some value in return. What are your clients interested in? What would they like to know?
Informative posts about buying and selling in amongst your new listings is a great way of sharing your expertise, and in turn builds the ‘know, like and trust’ factor between you and your followers. By establishing yourself as an expert in your field, you are more likely to be at the forefront of someone’s mind next time they are looking to buy or sell their home.
4. Include a call to action
A call to action is an easy way to prompt potential clients to go from checking out your posts to connecting with your company. You want to be driving traffic from Instagram or Facebook over to your website wherever you can, whether it’s to go and read a blog post or to take a look at a property listing.
If you have over 10k followers on Instagram, you can also use the ‘swipe up’ feature to send people straight to a page of your website from your story – a great feature to take advantage of.
5. Use video
Video content has seen a huge surge in popularity in recent years, and has a much greater chance of being seen and shared than image or text-based posts.
Property lends itself well to video, particularly if you opt for professional marketing videos, as these can be repurposed across all of your social media channels. The more visibility you have, the more likely you are to bring in enquiries from your posts.
6. Be consistent
Consistency in your social media presence is hugely important in developing the ‘know, like and trust’ factor that we mentioned earlier, and helps to grow the engagement and reach of your brand over time.
Scheduling can be a huge help with consistency, as you can batch weeks or even months of content at a time and schedule them at regular intervals. There are plenty of scheduling apps out there, but Buffer is one of our favourites – you can add all your social media accounts into one place so you can schedule everything in one go.
7. Share your reviews
People love social proof, and sharing your reviews, testimonials and awards is a great way of showing people that you are good at what you do as well as bringing a more personal touch to your feed.
You can easily transform reviews from plain text to visually appealing and on-brand graphics using free software such as Canva, or even invite people to leave video testimonials on your website for you to share.
It takes time, effort and a little bit of planning to do properly, but social media is a fantastic way of generating more enquiries for your properties. Which of these tactics will you be trying?
