- Frequency plays a major role in scheduling social media posts for the highest social ROI.
- Don't play the guessing game when it comes to posting on social media. Use the data offered by social networks to post effectively.
- Avoid the one-size-fits-all posting schedule trap often shared by articles and "experts" in social media.
If you’re not scheduling your real estate posts at the right times and at the right frequency, the impact of your social media marketing will suffer. Not only will social media users be less likely to engage with your content, they may never see it at all.
Despite its importance, many real estate agents are completely lost when it comes to post scheduling for the various social media platforms.
By the end of this article, you’ll know exactly what you need to do to craft the perfect schedule for maximum reach and impact. You’ll even be able to automate a large portion of the process thanks to two social media scheduling tools covered in the last section.
Don’t fall into the one-size-fits-all trap
Before we start getting into some scheduling information for the various social media platforms out there, we need to stress one point: one size doesn’t fit all when it comes to social media scheduling.
Ignore the articles that claim to offer ideal posting times; these times don’t exist. Remember that all audiences are different, and get to know yours by digging into the data on their usage habits.
Schedule Facebook posts for maximum impact
When it comes to scheduling posts for Facebook, there are some things you can do to reach your audience more effectively. Aim to post every three to four hours during the time when your audience is most likely to see and engage with your posts. Try not to post more frequently than this as your recent posts can steal momentum from earlier ones.
Here’s a simple guideline that will help you determine the right posting frequency for your audience: Pages with fewer fans do best with a higher post frequency, and pages with large numbers of fans benefit from a lower post frequency.
To determine the best times to post for your specific audience, check your Facebook page insights. From there, you’ll want to look at your post-specific insights. Checking these post-specific insights for reach and engagement information is a great way to get a feel for the best times to make an impact on your specific audience.
If you’re posting from a personal page and don’t have access to these insights, simply think about the times when your Facebook friends are most likely to be online. Midday (lunchtime) and early evening (many people like to wind down online) are usually good options.
Find top times for Twitter
Like Facebook, Twitter offers analytics that can be used to determine which times are best for reaching your specific audience. You can start by simply checking the right-hand side of your Twitter profile where you will see a graph with tweet activity from the past 24 hours. This will give you insight into the times during the day where your tweets outperform others.
You can also dig deeper by accessing more analytics at analytics.twitter.com. Once you’ve logged in, click on “tweets” to see specific data on your individual tweets including engagement information, link clicks and more.
Using this data, you can determine which tweet types and times are ideal for top performance. Third-party tools, like Tweriod, can also be used to determine when your followers are most active.
Unlike Facebook, Twitter can be used quite frequently to engage audiences without compromising earlier activity. Because tweets are short and easy to digest, you can send them out as often as you’d like (within reason). For most people, a five-tweet-per-day schedule works well.
However often you decide to tweet, you want to ensure each tweet has value. Also, remember to mention others and spread other users’ content as well with retweets. This will help vary your content while building relationships with other users.
Learn to lineup content for LinkedIn
Scheduling with LinkedIn is different from scheduling with Facebook or Twitter as LinkedIn should involve a lower post frequency than both of these previously covered social platforms.
Your post schedule should include one or two high-quality posts on workdays. Along with your LinkedIn posts, real estate agents should also write informative, keyword-focused articles and share these articles at least one to two times per week. Not only will these articles help establish you as an authority on your local market, but they will also capture search traffic from Google.
When it comes to choosing specific times to post content on LinkedIn, think about when you check LinkedIn. Most often, like other real estate agents, you may check early morning when you get to the office prior to prospecting, again at lunchtime and once again in the evening when you finally have some downtime.
Once you’ve experimented with a posting schedule that makes sense to you, check how well it performed by reviewing your account’s statistics. Then, adjust your post timing as needed to achieve optimal results.
Plan a picture-perfect post schedule for Instagram
With Instagram, posting consistently is the best way to gain new followers and maintain the ones you already have. So, if you can’t realistically post more than two times per day on Instagram, don’t try to overshoot that goal by scheduling more. Eventually, your posting frequency will decline and your followers will notice.
To be safe, start on the low side and ramp up your post frequency later as you’re able to.
If you have an Instagram business profile, make use of the post insights available to you. These provide information similar to Facebook’s analytics and will definitely help you determine ideal times for posting. If you don’t have a business profile, there are various tools out there (many of them are free) that can be used to gather most, if not all, of this information in a slightly less convenient manner.
Save time with social media scheduling tools
Social media scheduling isn’t something you have to sink hours of your valuable time into. In fact, once you’ve worked out the best posting frequencies, times and schedules for each of your social media accounts, you can use scheduling tools to automate a large portion of the process.
Here are a couple of the most popular ones out there.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a social media management tool with a comprehensive set of features. You can use Hootsuite to schedule posts on various platforms, measure your social ROI with real-time analytics and track mentions and messages related to your profiles and brands.
Buffer
Like Hootsuite, Buffer can be used to schedule posts for the major social media platforms. Buffer also offers a social media calendar for planning out your posts in a calendar view, analytics, creating custom images and other useful features.
Like Hootsuite, Buffer offers a mobile app so you can easily schedule social media on the go.
Ultimately, the tools and scheduling methods you utilize for social media posting should be chosen based on one thing in particular: your audience. Although you do want to save time by boosting your posting efficiency, you don’t want to strive for efficiency at the cost of knowing your audience.
Knowing your audience will help you select the right content and times to post to achieve the best overall results.
Pat Hiban is the author of NYT best selling book “6 steps to 7 figures – A Real Estate Professional’s Guide to Building Wealth and Creating Your Destiny”, the founder of online real estate sales training site Rebus University and the host of Pat Hiban Interviews Real Estate Rockstars an Agent to Agent Real Estate Radio Podcast with Hiban Digital in Baltimore, Maryland. Follow him on Instagram or Twitter.
