Using Social Media to Connect to your Buyers and Sellers

7 Tips to Build Your Real Estate Brand Using Social Media

One of the most important aspects of branding is differentiation.  If every option looks and sounds alike, price usually becomes the only separation turning the whole category into a commodity.  That makes the real estate struggle even tougher.  Agents don’t even have the advantage to separate by price.  There is no law requiring buyers and sellers to use an agent.  Internet technology has made it easier than ever for buyers and sellers to handle all of their real estate transactions without every consulting an agent. Not to mention there are more real estate agents than ever before.

How can you build your brand with such over saturation?

Social media.

Here are 7 tips to help you use social media to build your real estate brand:

1. Let’s define our terms – What is branding?  This is not just a logo, or the company, or the service you provide.  Your brand is the emotional connection between your target audience and you.  It’s your reputation.  So your brand has to be real, and it has to be really you,  otherwise it will feel false and fake.  

So you need to define yourself.  Who are you? What is your background? What makes you special? Why should they pick you to be their agent over everyone else?

2.  Who is your client? And do NOT say everybody.  You aren’t the perfect agent for everyone.  Do you want first time homebuyers or retirees?  Do you want recently divorced or growing families?  Determine the demographics of your target audience so you can speak directly to them.  The more you know about them the better job you will do to define who they are, and more importantly, who they are not.  

3.  What do you offer?  With the same inventory and pricing, what do you have to offer? You should share your experience, knowledge, and expertise.  Sharing who you are and staying true to your core values will build trust.  You can share this knowledge through a newsletter, webinar, “ask the expert”, and local guides (schools, restaurants, tourist attractions, sports schedules, festivals) that you create.

4.  Where do you share this information?  Your website is the place where all of the content you create should live.  This will be the best place to let people know who you are and what you are all about.  Be sure that your site is search engine optimized so that anyone looking for a real estate agent finds you first.  Your blog needs to be easy to use and simple to update so you can easily share knowledge like market predictions and trending statistics.  You will want to create landing pages to share high-level information and capture email addresses to build your database.

5.  How can you differentiate?  If you don’t want to blend in, then you have to stand out, and the only way to do that is to specialize.  What is your niche? Green certified, smarthome, recently divorced, first-time homebuyer, retired, pets, kids, veterans, etc?  

6.  Are you capturing testimonials and asking for reviews?  Word of mouth marketing can be your strongest branding tool.  Quotes are great to share on your website and through social media, but video testimonials are even better.  It’s very powerful to see a video and hear, in the client’s own words, the positive experience they had with you.  The easiest option would be to have them leave a 5 star rating and positive comment on your Facebook page.

7 – Are you set up for social media success?  Start by focusing on a platform that you know and like.  There are so many choices with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat, and LinkedIn, but don’t feel like you have to do all of them.  After you completely master one, then you should consider adding in a second one, but stick to what you know. This is definitely a case of quality being more important than quantity.  You will want to make sure that your profile has easy-to-find contact info including phone number, email, and website address.

Be sure to build out your story on your profile and let people know who you are and what you are about.  Of course, on social media, images are everything, so they need to be clear, well lit, and not too shaky.  Make photos and videos as high quality as possible.

If you want more information on how to get the most out of building your brand on social media, be sure to download our FREE ebook to learn more.

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RUSSO is a strategic branding agency that uses consumer insight to change the conversation; forming emotional connections with the target audience. To learn more, click HERE to subscribe to our podcast.