Real Estate Marketing & Beyond
When it comes to marketing your real estate business over the internet, social media platforms are incredibly popular. Facebook alone has more than 2 billion active users, all of whom can be reached, by some form or another, by posts on the platform.
But is Facebook marketing the best choice for your real estate business? What about Instagram? Or Twitter? Or Pinterest? Or any of the other countless social media platforms out there? Today we'll answer that question. Here's how to choose the best social media platform for your needs.
First things first: your real estate broker business should most certainly be on Facebook. Your business profile should be as complete as possible, including your address, phone number, and a link to your stand-alone website. You should post regularly, using your Facebook account to highlight properties and share related real estate content that both educates and entertains. However, you shouldn't rely exclusively on Facebook.
Yes, Facebook has a massive user base, but those 2 billion people don't live in the neighborhood that you service. You've got to ensure you reach your local audience, and that can be tricky with Facebook. In fact, there are other ways to accomplish this that don't involve Facebook at all. One is to ensure your website and business is listed properly on Google, as this makes sure you show up in not just standard results but Google Maps and the Google Plus social media network.
Beyond Facebook, though, there's also another big mover and shaker in the social media world, and that's Twitter. There may be only 328 million Twitter users, but the platform itself is much more conducive to reaching local audiences that Facebook is because of its capabilities.
Twitter is excellent for highlighting breaking news, making it an ideal platform for sharing real estate-related news items and commenting on them. Sharing local news and events in this manner is an excellent option, one you can reinforce by using hashtags properly. While Facebook also uses hashtags, they originated on Twitter -- and users of that platform pay a lot more attention to them.
Unconventional social media board Pinterest has become an untapped opportunity when it comes to social media marketing for real estate businesses. Pinterest had around 150 million monthly users as of 2016, and that number has undoubtedly grown since then, and the unique nature of the platform, which allows users to "pin" images to the platform for others to see, has become a haven for artists and crafters.
A savvy social media campaign can take advantage of this. The site is inappropriate for direct marketing efforts like sharing listings, but focusing on sharing images that showcase how to beautify a home, whether it's for an open house or not, is going to attract attention on Pinterest.
As you can see there's no clear-cut answer for choosing which social media platform you should use, as each of these different websites has varying strengths and weaknesses. This makes the "best" social media platform for your business one that is appropriate for your chosen marketing approach.
The trick is that you need to cast your net far and wide on social media if you want to attract more leads for your business. Maintaining a presence on two or more platforms, matching each one with the appropriate content, is in many ways the best choice.
Photo Credit: Geralt via Pixabay
