Revealed - top five social media tips for estate agents

A client called asking for advice on their social media marketing strategy. They’d thrown a lot of budget at it, but for little obvious reward.

This is an all-too-common problem among agents, who don’t get the returns they should from social media, given its power, reach and influence on all kinds of generations and demographics.

Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and LinkedIn are excellent mediums for targeting consumers and winning new business, meaning social media is a highly powerful and effective tool when used correctly.

Here are some tips on getting the most out of social media to get you started.

1. Start your budget low and know your platforms

If you throw money at, for example, a social media ad without properly testing demographics, audiences, targeting options and ad copy, it’s unlikely you’re going to see very positive results. The advice is to always begin low and gradually grow this when you’ve tried and tested.

Facebook ads, more than any other, have been proven to generate an excellent return on investment if you optimise these correctly, by concentrating on value over brand and capturing the right kind of data.

2. Targeting specifications

The targeting options on Facebook are great, and now it’s easier than ever to ensure an ad is seen by people most likely to convert. With the use of Meta for Business, you can target people on very specific demographic criteria.

Facebook’s advertising apparatus also incorporates Instagram’s advertising structure, including Facebook’s “audience network” which spans thousands of apps; therefore, you are able to target the same person across an array of ad placements.

Ad targeting on TikTok, Twitter and LinkedIn naturally reflects the intent and use of that platform. In the case of ‘young’ platforms, like TikTok, targeting tends to evolve as the platform matures, which makes the potential market enormous. TikTok, for example, was the most downloaded app on iOS in 2021. The platform, wildly popular among younger generations, enables users to create custom and lookalike audiences based on:

• Age

• Gender

• Location

• Language

• Interests and behaviours, and

• Device type, model, connection and carrier

Twitter has broken their targeting options up into three categories, some of which reflect the live and immediate nature of the platform with your audiences distinguished between targeting your followers and building a custom audience.

LinkedIn, predominantly used by the professional demographic but increasingly used for engagement, opinions, personal stories, polls and video content, puts its focus on this group to build your ideal audience. Unlike most social media, the B2B nature of LinkedIn means they offer company targeting as well as individuals, or ‘contact targeting’ in their words.

Custom audiences are also an option when using LinkedIn by uploading your own contact data, or lookalike audiences based on matching your ideal customer with their data.

3. Navigating metric tracking

If you’re using social media for sales enablement and to promote your business then you will have several metrics you need to track whether you’re a large, medium, or small business. There are a few ways to measure your social media endeavours - the simplest being to dive into the native analytics section of every platform.

While you can see the analytics section of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn by default on their native platforms, to get the analytics of Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok, you will require a business account - which hopefully you’d already have at this stage.

For instance, if we look at Facebook, then you need to know about Facebook Pixels: a little piece of code that you put on your website to track actions and goals. This is really useful if you’re looking to achieve a goal like asking people to fill in your ValPal form on the homepage of your website. Facebook will then show your ad to relevant people more likely to fill out the form and you will be charged once they convert, leaving you with much more valuable results.

It’s worthwhile to track your most vital metrics through the native platforms when you are operating on a low budget and only have an individual social account handle.

4. Keep your content punchy, short and sweet

To attract people to your social media accounts, you need eye-catching content that encourages them to stay put. Having too much content or being too obsessed with self-promotion will not land well on social media – people will simply look elsewhere – so your content needs to be fun, engaging, human and authoritative. Engagement is also crucial to proving your business or agency is interested and cares, rather than seeming more robotic in terms of endlessly posting property listings or the same generic posts day-in-day-out. Be inventive, be innovative, and capture the attention of people with a striking image, post or video.

5. Utilise Instagram Stories and reels

Instagram Stories only launched in August 2016, but it has grown massively in popularity since then. It’s a feature that enables users to take photos, add effects and layers, and add them to their Instagram stories. Images uploaded to a user’s story expire after 24 hours, in a more long-drawn-out version of what happens on Snapchat. It’s said that around 400 million people around the world use Instagram Stories daily, so there is a potentially massive captive audience there.

Meanwhile, reels on sites like Instagram and Facebook (short videos that are there to entertain or inform and help content reach new audiences) can help agencies to create engaging, modern, easily accessible content.

If you’re struggling to see conversions and would like more information on how Angels Media could help boost your social media ad campaign, get in touch at steph.rady@angelsmedia.co.uk

*Steph Rady is the head of marketing at Angels Media, publishers of the Today sites