Social media marketing for real estate is all the rage these days, and it makes sense why. With the social media becoming perhaps the premier marketing channel due to the massive user bases on multiple networks, all sorts of businesses are using it to reach their target audiences. This means that many real estate companies and agents are looking for ways to extend their reach and better leverage their social media profiles to sell houses.      

While some may think that real estate marketing on social media consists simply of posting pictures of the houses you are trying to sell online, with a flood of inquiries then quickly roll in, there is MUCH more to it. In reality, real estate social media marketing takes time, effort, planning, and execution. It typically is a team effort with many different people involved, from the actual real estate agent, to marketing and social media managers, and photographers. Moreover, agencies and real estate agents are increasingly utilizing analytics to gain insights into how to better their social media performances. Because of all these challenges and needs, many in the real estate field are searching for social media tools that offer powerful analytical features and other capabilities to help them succeed.   

In this article, we will start by highlighting just how important social media is for real estate agents, and then move to discussing various best practices and approaches to help you get the most out of your real estate marketing activities. Ultimately, we want to go beyond the basics of social media marketing for real estate and talk about data-based approaches and insights, along with other best practices to keep in mind, that can make your social media activity a success. Finally, we will conclude by outlining the main features you should keep in mind when searching for the best real estate marketing social media tool that fits your needs.

The Importance of Social Media Marketing for Real Estate

Real estate is inherently visual, and social media is a great way to show off the properties you are looking to sell. While traditional forms of real estate marketing are still most likely part of your marketing repertoire, social media gives real estate agents a host of new and exciting possibilities. With social media, you can easily create a type of story around a home and illustrate how someone can make a house or apartment their home.

There are challenges with creating eye-catching content, but what is sometimes more difficult is to build a user base that not only gives you reach, but one that can help you generate engagement. This task consists of building a user base that follows and engages with your posts across different social media networks. After all, if nobody sees your content, then it won’t really help you show off your content. The importance of social media marketing is not so much that you are simply posting without any strategy, but that your activities are aimed toward helping you increase your reach and being able to use real data to better understand and communicate with your target audience.

The point of this article isn’t really to tell you that real estate social media marketing is more complicated than simply creating content that shows off a property, but rather to highlight best practices you should be aware of that go beyond the basics. Therefore, we will now move on toward discussing various aspects of social media marketing for real estate agents with a focus on what they need to build a comprehensive strategy related to their content, reach, engagement, and community building.

Finding the Best Social Media Platforms for Real Estate Agents

The first question that someone who is doing real estate social media marketing might ask is what the best platforms to advertise properties are? This is actually a complex question and depends on the demographics of the target audience you want to reach. However, to be fair, many real estate agents use multiple channels that they use simultaneously to advertise their properties. Furthermore, there is always a question about how many different social media networks you should be active on, since the more profiles you need to manage, the more work you have. The answer to this will be up to how much time you devote to real estate social media marketing. However, you should, at any rate, have an idea of what platforms are most worth your while.

So how do you find what the best social media platforms for real estate are in your market? Perhaps the best way to determine what platforms you should be focusing on is to use a specialized tool to research the success of other real estate agents, realtors, and agencies across their social media networks. Usually, these types of competitor analysis and benchmarking approaches are used to help you understand how your profiles stand in relation to others in your industry, but they can also give you good clues about what social media platforms are working best for your competitors. It is important to realize that you can track many different metrics, from the overall number of followers and follower growth rates, to engagement and post interaction rates, to the overall number of likes, comments, and reactions to posts.

Be aware that simply researching the best social media platforms for real estate agents will only get you so far. In order to really benefit from social media analytics, you need to understand effective social media marketing strategies for real estate, as well as how to follow best practices. This is what we will be focusing on in the rest of the article.

Best Practices and Strategies for Effective Real Estate Social Media Marketing

At this point, you might be wondering how to do social media marketing for real estate using the various best practices we referred to earlier. The good news is that we will highlight some important points to consider when crafting your real estate social media marketing plan and what is absolutely essential to know. Rest assured, our tips go beyond the rather common-sense recommendations you typically see, such as using visually appealing pictures and connecting with your audience. Rather, we want to focus on largely on data-based approaches that allow you to use data and research in order to help you find what approaches work best for YOU. 

When looking at any comprehensive strategy, keep in mind that social media management for real estate agents is multifaceted and does not just consist of posting and hoping that your listings get seen. Our tips and best practices are not only focused on posting and social media analytics, but take a holistic perspective of all the activities and tasks you need to focus on to make your profiles successful.

For this reason, we have put together some best practices to consider when creating social media marketing strategies for real estate. These best practices include:

1. Use Social Media Analytics to Find Optimization Opportunities
2. Focus not only on Reach but also Interactions
3. Create an Organized and Long-Term Content Strategy
4. Don’t Forget that Community Management is Essential
5. Continually Monitor and Analyze Your Own Account and Others

1. Use Social Media Analytics to Find Optimization Opportunities

Social media content optimization is a rather extensive topic that can cover many different approaches. For our purposes here, we want to emphasize a handful of analytical, data-based approaches that are important for real estate social media marketing. The core goal of any content optimization approach is to better understand the behaviors and preferences of your audience with an eye to adjusting your content accordingly. 

To start off, it is important to mention that a specialized social media tool can be a great help in conducting content optimization analyses. This is especially true of one that offers unlimited profile tracking since, as with the various approach we will discuss below, you would ideally be brining in not only your data but as that of other similar profiles into your analysis. This gives you a far larger size of data points to analyze, which should give you more confidence in your ultimate findings. We have already addressed a number of content optimization approaches you can consider in another article, but below we will go through some prime examples of this that are especially relevant for social media real estate marketing. 

The first approach we will highlight relates to researching the best times to post in your market and for your target audience. Posting at the right time (i.e. when your audience is most likely to interact with your content) can help your standing with social media network algorithms since early interaction is an important ranking factor. That is why analyzing posting times that are focused on your location and industry can give you a more accurate idea of when to post than simply broad studies. This is because you are leveraging both your own data and other profiles’ data, giving you more data points to analyze. We have covered the process of researching posting times for Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Pinterest previously, so read those if you are looking for a step-by-step guide on those networks. Below is an image that shows both the number of posts during a particular time period (corresponding to the size of the circle) as well as the average post interaction rates of posts during those times (corresponding to the color of the circle).

Another important area relates to hashtags and keyword research, which is important for two main reasons. First, in terms of hashtags, using the right ones can help people find your content more easily if they are searching for topics that are represented by a particular hashtag. Second, both hashtag and keyword research can give you ideas about the various topics and issues that interest your target audience. Generally, you would want to discover and better understand the various topics your audience is searching for so you can adapt your content accordingly. Keep in mind that you most likely would want to analyze hashtags on a per-network basis rather than analyzing all networks at once and, therefore, we have written articles on setting up hashtag research on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.

Yet another relevant topic related to social media content optimization analytics is researching top-performing content formats. For instance, if you are using Instagram to promote your property listings, you may be curious to know if your target audience prefers seeing these listing in Reel, Carousel, or Story formats. You can study how certain content formats correspond to various metrics by simply running an analysis and studying the output, as seen in the example below.   

Lastly, you may be interested in conducting a tagging analysis to explore different correlations between features or characteristics of images and certain metrics, such as post interaction and engagement rates. Does your audience like seeing photos of your properties with people in them or without people? Do images taken at night have higher average post interaction rates than images taken during the day? You can begin looking into your target audience preferences by exploring correlations between a particular characteristic of posts and a certain metric. If you are interested in learning more about this topic, you can read our article that explains how to set up a tagging analysis.

2. Focus not only on Reach, but also Prioritize Interactions

One rather narrow point, but nonetheless crucial to understand, is focused on the primary KPIs you should monitor. Of course, your overall follower numbers and growth rates are good indicators of how extensive your reach is and how fast that reach is growing. Reach is, of course, important for real estate social media marketing, since you want your posts to be seen by as many people as possible. However, you should not just be focusing solely on the reach of your posts and the number of your followers but rather engagement with your content. Overall engagement and post interaction rates are important indicators to pay special attention to for two main reasons.

First, as many of you already know, early engagement is an important factor for social media network’s ranking algorithms. In this way, focusing on interactions can help you increase your overall reach since, if algorithm’s see early interaction with your posts, it is more likely that their reach will be improved. As we just highlighted above, researching the ideal posting times, best hashtags, and top-performing content formats can help you increase interactions. However, keep in mind that there are other things you should pay attention to as well, which include optimizing CTAs that encourage action, cooperating with other profiles to promote content, and other approaches that go beyond analytical insights. There are a host of best practices to follow in terms of improving your engagement rates on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter that we have already covered.    

Second, engagement is one of the best KPIs to track and measure, since it is a good clue about the overall quality of your content. So how do you know if your engagement rates are “good” as compared to others in your industry? The answer is to conduct your own benchmarking analysis of engagement and post interaction rates, which can easily be done with the right social media tool that allows you to track dozens or more similar profiles in your industry. This way, you can find highly accurate benchmarks that help you better assess whether your strategies are working or not as compared to others in your field and/or location. Moreover, you can track your process on both engagement and post interaction rates and, as you introduce new content optimization approaches to your overall strategy, can better see if these are having the desired results.

3. Create an Organized and Long-Term Content Strategy

Any discussion about marketing for real estate about social media posts should revolve not solely on the post itself, but also the process involved around the posting process. The way a post looks is, of course, important, but there is a broader topic that we want to emphasize here. This has to do with the content organization and a content planning process itself. In many cases, planning the content is essentially in the real estate marking world, simply due to the fact that multiple people may be working on various parts of the posting process.  

There are important early components of the posting creation process such as taking beautiful pictures of the property and coming up with eye-catching captions and content that involves multiple team members and, thus, some level of planning and coordination. However, the very process of posting may include some extra important steps. For instance, once you have done your research about things like posting times, hashtags, content formats, etc., it is important that you integrate your findings into your actual strategy. This might mean that you need to set it up for automatic real estate social media posts so you know a post goes out at the right time, or identifying a specific team member to make sure the correct hashtags and best content formats are being used. You also need to take a larger scheduling view so you don’t have too many posts going out at one time and bombarding your audience with multiple listings. 

Importantly, you should find a tool that allows every member of your team to work well together so that everyone has an overview of who needs to do what and has an understanding of the posting schedule. This should have various multi-posting and project management features as well as an integrated content calendar so very remains on the same page. Additionally, it is important to monitor your performance and track how you are doing after posting. This may be a forgotten aspect of a content strategy in that it is not just about getting the next post out, but also about what has happened in the past so you can improve your performance. 

4. Don’t Forget that Community Management is Essential

So far, we have mostly addresses topics such as analytics and content strategy. However, whenever you are talking about social media management for real estate agents, community management is an essential part of the conversation. After all, social media for real estate also involves building a strong community, which is an important, but sometimes overlooked aspects that need to be included when assessing your overall performance.

Community management for many real estate agents and agencies requires more than just an occasional glance of messages or a skim through various replies. In reality, you need to make a thoughtful community management strategy that focuses on effectively and efficiency managing, and growing, your communities on different social media networks. This is important because, first and foremost, you don’t want to miss messages or comments that show interest in one of the properties you are advertising. As your number of posts grow, and are dispersed among different direct messages, user comments, etc., you need to keep an eye on everything coming and make sure that nothing is slipping through the cracks. 

This generally requires a setup that enables quick responses to people interested in properties or asking questions. For this reason, you may be working with a team that manages your profiles for your entire agency or have specific people assigned to looking for messages or comments that can be seen as showing interests in your properties. Therefore, organization and coordination are key in these situations so that responses to inquiries are made quickly and nothing is forgotten. 

Another reason to pay attention to community management is that it can help boost interactions with your content, which can then, in turn, lead to higher reach. We already covered the overall point of paying attention to interactions and not only reach above, but keep in mind that community management is an important part of your overall strategy to increase interactions. Interactions can come because you are actively having conversations with your community as well as by continually encouraging them to like, share, or comment on posts.   

With all of this in mind, we should emphasize that a long-term strategy in creating a community is an absolute must. What is important to know here is that there are a highly effective community management tools on the market that can help you and your team better organize all the messages and conversations you have on all your profiles. The best community management tools would also have automations you can set up as well as AI integrations to help you with your responses and other tasks while making your work more efficient. 

5. Continually Monitor and Analyze Your Own Account and Others 

As we already pointed out earlier when discussing ways to research the best social media platforms for real estate, learning from other profiles can be a helpful activity. However, this can go beyond simply finding out what platforms you should look to first. A benchmarking analysis can help you determine who you should be paying attention to when searching for real estate marketing ideas for social media. This is because benchmarking and competitor analysis approaches can assist you in spotting high performing profiles you should keep on eye on. Once you find the profiles with the best profiles, you can more closely analyze what makes them successful.

Moreover, continually monitoring and analyzing the performance of similar profiles in your industry can help you more accurately set goals in terms of KPIs whether it is growth rate, engagement rate, or post interaction rate. With unlimited profile tracking, you can bring enough profiles and data points into your analysis to make you feel confident that your numbers give you an accurate idea of what you should aim for and where you need to be

Lastly, benchmarking and competitor analysis should be a continuous process. Some profiles may grow faster than others and be utilizing approaches that you should know about and study. Social media moves fast, and one of the advantages of a social media tool is that you can stay on top of what is happening, whether it is keeping up with trending topics, top researching performing content formats, finding the best times to post, etc.

Finding the Best Tool for Real Estate Social Media Marketing

Now that you have an overview of core best practices, we will now explain how you should begin your search for a tool that can help you with all the activities listed above. More especially, what are the features of the best social media management tools for real estate agents? Picking the right social media tool is important, since these tools can help you conduct many of the best practices we discussed. With this in mind, here is a short overview of what you should look for:

1. Content optimization and benchmarking – finding ways to improve the performance of your content as well as analyzing your competitors can help you set more accurate goals and better your performance. For this reason, your social media tool needs to have the capabilities to perform effective social media analyses. Having the ability to track and analyze dozens or hundreds of profiles is a big help to this end.

2. Research capabilities – being able to discover new profiles to add to your data set or find influencers can be important for many real estate agents to help them better understand the voices in their field. 

3. Centralized publishing and content planning – as explained above, content creation and planning in social media marketing for real estate is generally a team effort. For this reason, the best social media management tools for real estate agents should come with planning and organization functions that allow teams to brainstorm and create inspiring content. 

4. Community Management Features made for teams – building a community takes time and effort to help expand your reach and increase interactions. Don’t forget that replying to messages and inquiries are important facets of social media management for real estate agents. For this reason, a specialized community management tool can go a long way in helping you with those tasks.

Successful Real Estate Social Media Marketing

There are significant opportunities to explore whether you are a real estate agent or realtor with regard to social media marketing since it is a proven channel to extend your reach and, hopefully, sales. With the rising importance of real estate marketing on different social media networks, it is essential that you have a well-thought-out plan and strategy. This is more than just brainstorming how to create beautiful photos or writing catchy captions. Rather, it involves many different facets of social media management that are done right over the long term. As we have covered in this article, there are a number of important areas that you should pay attention to when crafting your overall real estate social media marketing strategy.   

What can be a real help when it comes to creating and implementing a strategy is an all-in-one social media tool that has all the functions you need. This means, first and foremost, that it gives you a range of analytical features and insights to help you optimize your content with data-based approaches. What makes these data-based analytical approaches more effective is when they are powered by unlimited profile tracking, which allows you to bring in more data points. Luckily, Fanpage Karma offers powerful analytical tools and unlimited profile tracking in addition to leading research, publishing, and community management features. You can try Fanpage Karma’s free 14-day trial to see for yourself how it can help you with real estate social media marketing.

If you are interested in learning more about how to use Fanpage Karma for your real estate social media marketing activities, you can participate in our free weekly webinar to learn more about how to use our tool.