As a land agent, social media can be your best friend or your worst enemy. When used correctly, land real estate social media marketing can be a great (and free or low cost!) way to stay connected with people in your industry and drive traffic to your business. However, it can be very easy to lose potential clients or waste hours of your day if you don’t know what you are doing. Below, we’ve listed some tested and true ways to make sure you are in control of your social media, not the other way around.
1. Don’t Spread Yourself Too Thin
Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, Tumblr – who has time for all of it? Trying to have a presence on all of those platforms can be overwhelming and take up all your free time. Remember: the companies that are on all of those platforms (Google,McDonald’s, Geico) all have entire departments dedicated to Twitter alone. Your best bet is to pick two or three different platforms and focus on those. “You don’t need to be everywhere, you just need to be in the places online where your time and effort will have the most impact,” says Jessa Friedrich, MBA, RLI’s Marketing Manager. “You need to find your audience on social media. To get started, take a look at where your competitors are and what channels they are spending the most time engaging on to get an idea of where you need to be to have the most impact.”
2. Use Tools like Hootsuite to Make Social Media Less Time Consuming
One of the biggest problems with social media is how much time it eats up. You’ll post something on Facebook in the morning, scroll through some friends’ photos, comment on a funny video of a cat riding a horse, and before you know it it’s time for dinner.
Tools like Socializer and Hootsuite can help. These easy-to-use apps allow you to schedule posts on various social media platforms. You can plan out your posts days or even weeks ahead so that you don’t have to be checking Twitter every single day. Just don’t forget to be social, too!
3. Figure Out What Your Brand Is
To make the most out of your social media presence, you need to have a good sense of the image you want to project to your potential clients. Figuring out what you want your current and potential clients to see can help you determine what to post. Are you trying to:
- Raise awareness of new products/services?
- Raise awareness of current products/services?
- Network with other professionals in your business?
- Increase traffic to your website?
- Position yourself as an industry expert and resource to landowners?
- A combination of all these?
Having a clear sense of what you want to get out of land real estate social media marketing can help you focus on what sort of content to produce.
4. What Are The Best Times To Post?
Timing is everything when it comes to social media. Even if you craft the perfect post, if there’s no one online to see it, all that hard work will have been for nothing. According to Sprout Social, a social media management group, these are the best times to post on each social media channel:
- Facebook: 12-3 pm
- Instagram: 3-4 pm
- Twitter: 9-10 am
- LinkedIn: After 4 pm
Posts during these times have gotten the highest amounts of interactions and feedback from users. When you first start on social, try posting on social media during these times to increase your likes and shares. “After a while, it’s also a good idea to do some A/B Testing by posting at different times to see which posts get the most engagement. Then, start scheduling your posts at those optimal times specific to your audience,” Friedrich says.
5. Use Video
Videos are visually appealing and require very little work on the part of the consumer – you just have to press play and enjoy! Nobu Hata, the director of Digital Engagement for the National Association of REALTORS ® says that video is one of the most relevant social platforms available for land agents.
“Whether you’re speaking on camera about tips to buy and develop land, using it to convey the size and scope of a land offering or re-envisioning what that land can be via digital mock-up recorded on video, the options are many,” says Hata. “The one thing about video that makes it stand out against its brethren is that it’s not viewed as a “toy” and a time-suck like Facebook and Twitter can be, plus YouTube’s little red “play” button has universal – and multi-lingual – appeal.”
6. Keep It Professional
You might not want to go to your teenage niece for advice on your professional social media accounts. Posting personal drama or your political opinions doesn’t come off as professional and can turn off your followers. That doesn’t mean you have to be serious all the time. You can post as many funny photos as you want, but remember that once you press ‘send’, that post will be on the internet forever.
7. Follow Like-Minded Professionals
No matter what platforms you choose, there will be other like-minded professionals to follow. Here are some great social media Twitter accounts if you want to get into the land industry social media scene:
Social media can be a double-edge sword. It can be a great way to reach out to new clients and interact with other professionals, but it can also be a huge time drain if not done right. We hope these tips will help you make the most out of your land real estate social media marketing.
About the author: Laura Barker is a Marketing Assistant Intern for the REALTORS® Land Institute. She graduated from Clark University in May 2017 and has been with RLI since October 2017.