When it comes to social media for real estate agents, there are some clear winners (and some pretty big losers). But for every app, there's someone championing it as the end all be all for marketing. Here are some things to consider before investing your time in a new platform:
Promoting your real estate business and listings on social media is one of the wisest marketing moves a real estate agent can make when considering real estate marketing.
When done right, it’s an amazing source of leads, especially now that so many Americans are using social media to keep in touch with others.
So, we here at Easy Agent Pro like to periodically take a look at the movers and shakers in the world of social media for real estate agents to help you avoid spending time and money on the wrong platforms for your social media marketing.
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Don’t latch onto the wrong statistics when looking at real estate social media
It’s odd that an industry full of people who understand that “all real estate is local,” are über-impressed with statistics that aren’t when it comes to social media marketing.
For instance, as of July this year, the “most popular” social media for real estate agents include:
An Oberlo.com chart shows the “… number of active users in millions,” and the numbers are quite impressive.
It would be far too easy to choose from among that list of five to promote your business and be done with it.
It wouldn’t be very smart though.
These numbers represent worldwide users. For instance, WeChat, known as “China’s super app,” isn’t even on the radar of most Americans.
It might be a useful choice to promote your business, perhaps, if you were selling real estate worldwide, but you aren’t.
The best numbers are those that reflect the number of users in the U.S. so that you can then drill even further into the demographics of these American social media users.
When it comes to social media for real estate agents, the most important thing to consider is the age group of the average user.
For instance, your most likely buyer and seller will be at least 40 years old.
Which brings me to LinkedIn. You won’t find it listed below because the demographics haven’t changed since our last update.
LinkedIn remains one of the best places for real estate agent marketing.
Social media platforms for real estate ebb and flow in popularity and here’s what’s hot in 2021.
With the widest reach of any of the social media for real estate agents, Facebook is ideal for real estate agent marketing. The age demographics fit neatly into the average buyer/seller age range, posting is quick, and engagement with potential real estate leads is a snap.
Consistency with the latter is the key to success. Don’t just post and run – visit your followers’ pages and comment on posts.
Sure, you’ll read about or see YouTube videos by agents who love their results from marketing on Instagram. But don’t let them sway you.
Instagram is a time-consuming platform. Photos and videos have to be almost perfect if they’re to be of interest to fellow Instagrammers.
Then, there’s the fact that the audience is all wrong for real estate agents.
If you decide to choose a time-consuming social media platform, you’ll get more bang for the time on Pinterest.
Did that last item jump out at you? If not, read it again.
Yes, Pinterest is time-consuming but it’s well worth the time you spend when looking at real estate social media, or the money you spend using an assistant, to post regularly to the platform.
I have a friend with a home improvement blog that started posting to Pinterest (with links back to her blog) and cross-posting her pins on Facebook. Within a few months, she quadrupled her blog’s page views and tripled her affiliate income.
Check out How to Kill it with Pinterest Lead Generation for real estate agents and read about how agents are generating leads and their results.
Pay close attention to the last item in the bulleted list. Slightly more than a quarter of Twitter’s users are anywhere near the age range of the average homebuyer or seller.
Furthermore, at this writing, the top 5 trending topics on Twitter are:
Twitter might be one to save for your personal, not professional use when considering social media marketing.
TikTok is a China-based video-sharing social networking platform. It is used by very young Americans, primarily, to post “… short dance, lip-sync, comedy and talent videos,” according to Wikipedia.com. How does it stack up as a platform for real estate social media?
Normally we don’t include platforms that are so obviously losers when it comes to social media for real estate agents. We decided to include it this time because a buzz is starting online about it here in the U.S.
The buzz is coming mainly from marketers for whom teenagers are the target. But, yesterday, I read a blog post about a very young agent who is supposedly “killing it” with TikTok.
Does that mean the platform is generating tons of business for his social media marketing?
Nope.
It turns out that the author is impressed with how many followers the agent has amassed (1 million), not how many leads or how much income he’s generated.
That would be, by the way, zero for both. And this is probably why:
What good is 1 million teenage followers going to do for his real estate business?
Security is the real problem with the platform when it comes to real estate, however.
Amazon, Wells Fargo, and other large companies have asked their employees to delete the app from their phones over fears that it “… might be tapping into emails,” and other security concerns, according to cybersecurity expert Zak Doffman at Forbes.com.
The U.S. military has banned TikTok from government-issued phones. India has outright banned the app and Australia and the U.S. “might follow suit,” according to Doffman.
We’ve included TikTok in this list to make you aware of the security issues. You do, after all, deal with sensitive client information in real estate.
Besides, the young audience is useless to real estate agents looking for real estate social media.
Pia Silva, who writes about small business strategies at Forbes.com nailed it when she reminded her readers that “… the purpose of marketing is to be seen by, and connect with, your target market with the hope to eventually turn them into customers.”
Choosing social media for real estate agents based on how popular you might become or anything other than the share of users in your target audience’s age range is foolish. Fish where the fish are and save the rest for personal use.
We sure hope you didn’t sink a ton of money into your Facebook real estate video marketing over the past couple of years. If you did, it was no doubt because of the amazing stats the platform was posting as a lure to add additional advertisers. Guess what? They were lying. They will now have to face a federal district court judge in California in a case brought by a number of very (and justifiably) angry advertisers who relied on the fuzzy numbers for their Facebook ad campaigns. Back in 2016, Facebook finally admitted that it had been fudging the...
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