Social media marketing is an “organic” (meaning unpaid) form of marketing where you not only reach out to your sphere on a regular basis, but also build that sphere. Before working on building your “friends” or following however, you need to learn how to maximize on what you have already. For example, if two out of 100 people sell/buy a home every year, then you need to have at the bare minimum 100 engaged people on your social media in order to get one deal per year (but these numbers go up the more engaged followers you have).
“Active” social followers are the digital holy grail, as not all your followers will be actively checking out all your content. So…how do you get them to see your content and how do you get them to contact you when they are looking to sell or buy a home? The answer is engagement.
The point of social media marketing is to get new friends (think: contacts), to engage with them, have them like/trust you, then reach out to you when they are ready to buy or sell – or send others your way. Simply posting things on social media won’t do it. That’s talking at people, not with people.
Posting alone won’t cut it because:
- if they aren’t engaging with your content, your content will be showed less and less in their feed and
- people don’t like being talked at – it should be a two-way conversation (and you accomplish that through engaging with them).
The more you engage with your audience, the better you will do and the more business you will get. Ways to engage are replying to their comments, liking their content, commenting on their content and sending them private messages.
You should be responding to every comment on your social media, even if it’s just a quick “thanks!”, or “great idea!” or even “ha ha”.
If you aren’t sending at least 20 likes, comments and messages per week, then you aren’t connecting with your digital sphere enough. If that sounds daunting, consider that the average direct message takes less than three minutes to create.
If you spent even three minutes writing a message (and most will take less time) to 20 people per week, that would be 60 minutes per week. That is one hour per week to connect with 20 people in your sphere. This is a gift of modern technology that you can reconnect with so many people so quickly. Back in the old days, connecting with 20 people would take 20+ hours a week to go and visit them.
For those who respond, have a great conversation and reconnect, and figure out a way to casually drop into conversation that you’re a Realtor. This can be by saying how blessed you are that you have such amazing clients and that business is going so well or mentioning to a potential downsizer that you just helped a client downsize into an amazing condo with a pool and how insanely happy they are. There are ways to drop being a Realtor into conversation that will remind them (without annoying them) that you help people with real estate.
Contact 20+ people every week and it is guaranteed that your business will increase.
Expert engagement tip:
Look for your top followers/engagers. These are the people who make the most comments and like your posts the most. These are your brand supporters and can be super powerful. Figure out who they are and be sure to follow them on Facebook, engage with their content, tag them in posts and occasionally reach out to them with a Facebook private message. The validation they feel will encourage them to support you further and promote your content.
If you are continually posting without looking at how people are engaging with your content, who is engaging with that, and then bringing that into your strategy, then you are really missing the boat. And you’re working harder than you need to be. You will do much better focusing on a core audience than trying to find new people to turn them into hardcore supporters (and if you can’t support your current hardcore supporters, you won’t be able to support new ones even if you can get them to that point).
Robin Wilding is the creative mind behind The Lead Gen Factory and The Realtor Pipeline. The Lead Gen Factory is a boutique real estate online marketing company hyper-focused on lead generation; The Realtor Pipeline is a digital DIY platform showing Realtors how to generate online leads, lead conversion, Social Media Marketing, sales pipeline building, and more. She also leads The Realtor Pipeline Facebook group, a group for Realtors to learn new online techniques, technology and share best practices.
