26 social media marketing tips the experts swear by

Reposted with permission from “26 Social Media Marketing Tips From 5 Real Estate Professionals.” 

If you are a real estate agent, you’ve probably been advised to embrace social media marketing. It’s a powerful way to build your reputation in your market and meet colleagues and prospects.

You simply need to make the commitment to jump into Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, Facebook Live, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest.

Oh yeah, don’t forget to build a great website and blog weekly. Are you interested?

Or are you overwhelmed at the thought of learning how to do this?

There’s a learning curve for social media marketing, and it can be steep for anyone, especially non-millennials.

But there’s a group of your colleagues who are here to help. Social media is growing their business, and they are eager to share what they’ve learned.

Five real estate professionals met online and formed a real estate mastermind. They then met in person in Salt Lake City and held a 90-minute live event on Oct. 8, 2016. Here’s the full video of the event.

Here are my 26 takeaways from the event along with my insights.

1. Effective social media marketing (“social”) in 2017 requires reaching out to your audience, being authentic in all communication and inviting participation.

2. There are two main approaches to social:

1. Be a purist. Use social media to document your day and provide value along the way.
2. Be a producer. Create and deliver valuable content.

3. Use Facebook Live to create content in real time with your audience.

4. The best way to learn Snapchat is to do it. It’s really the only way.

5. Snapchat is creating transparency in real estate. Any live video lends itself to a less staged view of the property. And commentary will also be less scripted.

6. Provide a weekly market update. Learn about developing a strategy and a schedule for delivering all your content. This morning I listened to a Perpetual Traffic Podcast by Digital Marketer featuring Laura Hanley who just published “Content That Converts.” I highly recommend the podcast and book ($0.99 on Amazon Kindle).

7. Everyone in the group is confident that social is providing an ROI.

8. Your audience response on Snapchat serves as a focus group.

9. As you build your audience on Snapchat, you are building a referral network.

10. Use Snapchat geofilters to build your brand. See Gary Vaynerchuk’s how-to article.

11. Design a geofilter that people will want to use.

12. Track how many people snapped your filter and how many saw it.

13. If you are comfortable writing, consider blogging weekly on your website. See No. 6.

14. Link to your blog post on all media channels. Here’s a great example of a successful real estate blog from Dustin Brohm.

15. When you use Facebook Live, make it public so that it can be shared.

16. Your Snapchat audience will become a referral base.

17. Create a plan to distribute your content. See No. 6 above, and confession: this article isn’t part of any plan. I just wanted to share my notes.

18. Share your content on multiple channels at different times. Especially focus on the platform where your audience is going.

19. You can repurpose video from Facebook Live and Snapchat.

20. Snaplytics.io is a tool to analyze Snapchat. However, it’s a bit pricey: $179 per month.

21. The most important aspect of social is customer experience (“CX”). Always keep customer’s experience front and center. Jason Frazier cited Brian Solis as a CX expert.

Frazier discussed the importance of consistent branding, how you respond to each message from a prospect and providing such valuable content that a prospect feels compelled to share it.

22. Show empathy, and connect on an emotional level.

23. A great tool to communicate with your team is basecamp.com. I’ve used Basecamp and agree with Frazier. You should also check out Slack.

24. You can use one account for Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest. However, you’ll need a separate business page for Facebook.

25. Learn how to use Ghost Codes to find and follow people on Snapchat. Watch this how-to YouTube tutorial by Carlos Gil.

26. Learn more about the real estate mastermind (“REMM”) leaders and follow them on social. Go to http://www.utahmastermind.com/

Rich Hopen is a real estate broker with Redfin. Follow him on Twitter.