You’re doubling down on lead generation and experimenting with virtual open houses, all while balancing working remotely with your personal family responsibilities. While many things have changed in the way you run your business, the importance of connecting with your sphere has not. Now more than ever, it is important to establish yourself as a resource within your community, and leveraging your social media platforms for business is an effective and safe way to do that.
Social Media for Business: The Big Picture
Since your messaging is the guiding force of the content you create and reflection of your unique selling proposition, it’s important you get the message right. In a shift, that means coming from a place of empathy and being sensitive to the struggles your sphere might be experiencing, says Jessica Starr, rainmaker of the Starr Realty Group.
This doesn’t mean you can’t celebrate successes at all, but rather, Starr suggests, make your messaging less about the monetary results and more about how your services helped a particular client or community.
“Instead of saying, ‘We are the top agents, we sold X amount of homes for X amount of money,’ say, ‘We sold X amount of homes, and because of this, we were able to stock the pantries of X, Y, and Z,’” she says. “Ask the families you serve if they will allow you to paint a story around them in order to show your community how you are a resource.” You can also express gratitude with a post such as “In this time, I feel so grateful to be able to help X amount of families find new homes.”
Just for you – Gratitude Graphics
7 content ideas to inform, inspire, and educate your audience:
- Highlight your local market by creating a market stats graphic to show people that the real estate industry as a whole is still moving.
- Create a video highlighting the steps your team has taken to keep agents and clients safe from COVID-19 through the buying and selling process.
- Create and share your own memes by getting inspiration from popular ones and reworking them to resonate with your local community.
- Produce video content highlighting local small businesses within the neighborhood that your clients can safely support.
- Run informative Zoom seminars for your clients, such as a home staging seminar, or a pick-your-brain session with your contractors on the most common questions that arise during the buying and selling process.
- Provide self-help resources while engaging local small businesses. These can be in the form of financial planning videos with a boutique accounting firm, or a hair tutorial with a local hairdresser.
- Create a community group that encourages solidarity and optimism among your sphere. Encourage them to share daily highlights, such as the small businesses they are supporting during this time.
Related reading: 10 Social Media Posts to Show Your Clients You Care
Picking the Right Platform
With the right messages in tow, the next step is determining where to share them.
“Way too many companies try to do a one-size-fits-all strategy, where they create one piece of content and put it on all their platforms,” Haley Roisum of the Anderson Hicks Group shares. “That is really efficient, but it’s not necessarily working.”
Her suggestion? Using each individual platform for its intended purpose:
- Facebook: communication, engaging with friends and socializing;
- Instagram: visual promotion, beautiful photos and videos;
- Twitter: news;
- YouTube: videos;
- Nextdoor (a hyperlocal social networking service gaining popularity): communications with neighbors.
On Instagram, there is room for organic growth through the use of hashtags. Apps such as #HashMe and websites like besthashtags.com are free tools that can put you up to speed with what is trending and help you find relevant hashtags for your content. Make sure your content is in tip-top shareable shape by using resources such as Designs in Command to create beautiful imagery.
One thing to take into account as you leverage your social media platforms for business, both organically and with paid ads, is the difference in demographics. Instagram houses a late teens, early 20s community, while Facebook has a higher population of millennials. As you decide on the right platform, take into account the average age of the buyer within your market and the price you are trying to sell at.