A Realtor’s Introduction to Building a Social Media Campaign

Written by Posted On Wednesday, 22 August 2018 07:47
A Realtor’s Introduction to Building a Social Media Campaign Search Engine Land

Social media can be an asset to every realtor’s digital marketing campaign. This isn’t only because there will be over 27 billion social media users worldwide by 2019 (although this certainly is part of it).

Solid social media profiles can be an ultimate channel for engaging with your clients. Like blogs, they can be expressive, giving you a chance to build virtual partnerships and share content that matters to you as an agent and realtor.

If handled well, your social media campaign can leverage your other digital marketing efforts, including your blog and your website itself. It can even be an important component of your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) campaign and play a role in your Pay-Per-Click advertising efforts.

You don’t have to get intimidated by your social media campaign. I’ve already covered social media basics and the mistakes you should avoid in any campaign; in the meantime, here’s a quick guide to getting started.

Identify Your Target Client

Every marketing campaign is far more likely to succeed if it’s aimed at a specific audience. It can be difficult crafting a snazzy punchline to a joke if you don’t know who you’ll be directing it at!

Before you jump aboard social media and even choose a platform, identify your target client. Are you attempting to engage with newly retired couples? Employed millennials? Families seeking rent-to-own options? First-time homebuyers in Santa Barbara? People selling luxury properties or interested in buying international real estate?

Be as specific as possible when identifying your target audience. If you can, get to know this target client via surveys, personal research, and client feedback. The better you can understand your audience, the more targeted your content will be. Targeted, personalized content will, in the long run, resonate with your clients more profoundly and keep current clients in the game.

Know Your End Goal

It’s easy to see social media as a sort of endless campaign, in which you post content on a daily basis and continually try to rope in clients. But social media should be used to build multiple distinct campaigns with their own distinct end goals. These campaigns can have relatively short timelines (one month, six months, even two days!).

Determine what you want to get out of a specific campaign aimed at a specific audience. Are you looking for more subscribers to your newsletter? More organic traffic directed to your website? Are you hoping to turn some of your social media followers into actual clients?

Whatever the goal, be concrete. A solid end goal can help you build the coherent steps you need to reach your audience effectively.

A lot of realtors struggle with identifying a concrete goal for a social media campaign. This is particularly the case for realtors juggling multiple digital marketing campaigns at once. For this reason, it may be helpful to view your social media efforts as part of a larger digital marketing strategy.

Emphasize Rich Content

Chains of content are the building blocks of any campaign. To drive your social media marketing efforts forward, you’ll have to regularly share blog posts, status updates, links, and more.

Social media users’ news feeds are saturated with all kinds of content, some of it relevant, some of it not so relevant. To stand out in these news feeds, you need to share and promote rich content.

What does rich content look like? I’ll be diving deeper into this subject in another post, but for now, rich content should be intriguing, concise, and intelligent. It is often visual. Video content, in fact, is the hottest form of social content out there right now.

Your content should have a clear direction, an evident utility, and a solid content writer/crafter behind it all. Think about it this way: don’t share anything you wouldn’t personally want to click on!

Rich content is also an asset for any realtor interested in powerful SEO. Google actually stipulates that SEO marketers should place a premium on rich content, the kind that their customers actually want to see (and need). Social media is a great place to test out your capacity to generate rich content, especially if you're tackling content creation yourself.

Otherwise, you may want to consider hiring a content marketer or creator, one who can build effective campaigns with the kind of rich, high-level content that can turn clicks into leads.

Don’t Forget SEO

Yes, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is applicable to social media campaigns and not just the content on your website, online reviews, or Google listing. Any content you share on social media, whether it is an image or an article, can and should be optimized for keywords.

For example, a tech company sharing insight into security cameras in a blog post would benefit from sharing this post on Facebook and inserting keywords into the post’s blurbs, such as “Check out my recent post on the best security cameras in 2018!” The keyword “best security cameras in 2018” can now be searched in Facebook itself (and Google).

It's also possible to optimize video or image content. Simply incorporate keywords into the ALT description of images and media so that these can be searchable on and off social platforms.

Individual posts themselves should also circle around some buzzword, whether it's "luxury real estate in Atlanta" or "international real estate agents." Much in line with on-page SEO principles, be sure to sneak these keywords in--it shouldn't be obvious that you're optimizing!

This is where your social media campaign starts merging with others (SEO, blog writing, etc.). That’s okay. Just stay conscious of the interplay. Before you post anything, ask yourself the following questions:

  • Whom am I attempting to reach?
  • How am I attempting to reach this audience?
  • Why am I doing this?
  • What else can I bring in?

Yes, it is possible to outsource social media marketing. A number of companies are at the ready to help you craft a social media campaign in conjunction with other digital marketing efforts, or as a stand alone program. For some realtors who are wary of setting up a business profile on Instagram, this may be the best option.

Good luck!

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Kate King

Kate King is a freelance writer, editor, and blogger. 

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