Unless you’ve been living under a rock, it is more than evident that you must be active on Social Media as a Real Estate Agent.
Social Media has proven to be one of the most effective marketing tools for realtors, loan officers, title companies, and anyone in the real estate industry. Using social media to connect, collect, and convert more people into a lead or a potential client.
Social media is a diverse tool for realtors. While it is helpful for real estate agents to be active, it is important to avoid some of the most common mistakes real estate agents make on social media today.
In no particular order, here are a few of the worst mistakes we see realtors making on social media.
1. Realtors are Too Focused on Sales
While we understand that the ultimate goal is to attain new business through social media, it’s important to understand that not everything will occur directly or right away from social media to increase sales.
Most realtors make a huge mistake online because they focus solely on getting a result (a lead). People use social media to be social, unwind, distract, and scroll between activities, tasks, and stress.
Your followers don’t like to be oversold, so from what we’ve learned in managing over 180 accounts in the last 90 days, people tend to unfollow pushy accounts in their sales pitch.
Whenever that happens, examine your content library and remove impersonal posts that push business before relationship building. Which brings us to our next point.
2. Realtors Don’t Show Their Personality
As a realtor, it’s important to remember that you are your brand, and you are who they connect with when they are ready to make a buying or listing decision.
A realtor showing off their personality, their quirks, and how they connect with people is essential. Yet most real estate agents focus on sales and fail to connect with people consistently.
You want to connect with people with your personality because that’s what and who they will get in person. It’s crucial to stand out from other realtors who are simply focused on selling real estate. This means shining through, letting your unique sales proposition (USP) be shown and amplified.
Show the world your personality by letting them see what your day-to-day life is really like. You should not box yourself inside the “real estate” category and let things die there.
Focus on executing a well-rounded content marketing strategy that highlights your core brand beliefs. In other words show your human side and people will be eager to connect with you instead.
3. Realtors Don’t Create Consistent Content
Part of sharing your personality on social media requires a certain level of consistency. As you know by now, most of these social media platforms are dependent on the famous algorithm.
This algorithm will help expose and promote your profile by staying consistent and creating consistent content.
Most real estate agents try to do this and ultimately fail to stay consistent because they want things to be too perfect. Let’s face it, perfection is unattainable; however, here’s how you can easily solve this mistake.
Start by creating imperfect content that will allow you as a real estate agent to get comfortable with putting out content consistently. Next, you want to make sure that you provide educational, motivational content that resonates with you within and outside of real estate. When you do this, you free yourself up from the thought of perfection, and you just allow yourself to be you.
4. Untargeted Real Estate Content
Trying to cater to everyone on social media is an automatic fail for anyone trying to connect with prospects. Targeting everyone online can leave a realtor with a few content ideas.
Don’t forget to prepare for the top social media trends of 2022 here.
While you may want to talk to everyone, the riches are in niches, as Strategic Coach Dan Sullivan said. Some people might be unsatisfied with who you are talking to. Yet, the more targeted and hyperlocal your content gets, the more likely your brand is to get recognized inside a particular area/niche.
Over time what people, your audience, and you will realize is that when people can recognize what you’re known for, where you’re known, you’ll gain more success both in the marketplace as well as online becoming the go-to Social Guide.
5. Over-information With No Call To Action
Most realtors want to do good online and inform their people consistently.
Yet they often worry about giving away too much information in fear that their followers will choose another realtor or skip their content altogether.
Providing value online is the best way for a real estate agent to earn trust, get known, and be liked by the potential home buyer or home seller. We’re here to tell you that although giving away value might seem scary, not giving it is even worse.
People won’t know how to consume your information if you’re not creating content and have a clear call to action.
6. Some Realtors are TOO Focused on Competition
There’s an old saying, “Winners are focused on winning, losers are focused on losers,” which couldn’t be more evident in the real estate industry. Many real estate agents are focused on what their peers are doing, and because of this, they lose focus on what really matters, their clients. While building a business, particularly on social media, where people were meant to compare themselves to others, you mustn’t fall victim to this trap.
Few agents are doing great on social media because they understand it, many of them are doing great because they outsource their services to companies like TopShotPro, but if you’re on your own and you are measuring your level of success on social media, that of others, I’ve got news for you…you’ve already lost.
Leverage Data Instead
Mastering Real Estate marketing for TopShot Pro clients began with data. We look at the most important trends, campaign metrics, and industry level feedback aggregated from multiple sources in order to form well rounded assumptions.
This approach guides our optimization decisions with details. So we know EXACTLY where we should be focused on improving in order to attain our key goals. Learn more about building a data-driven social media marketing strategy.
Focus on the content you create for the target audience you are looking to help. When you do this, you will identify yourself with the people you are looking to legitimately help, and you’ll realize how far ahead you can get when you measure your progress against yourself and not others.
7. Realtors Making Content All About Them
The best type of content is the content that you make with, for, or about other people. People on social media go viral when they create timely, relevant, and relatable content.
If you’re the agent simply boasting about the listings you’ve sold or the buyers you’ve helped. If you’re not providing any value-added from a thought leadership or even as a community leader, you’re doing yourself and your community a disservice. We recommend splitting your content into 3 pieces.
- 33% of the time, create content about your business
- 33% of the time, create content about your clients
- 33% of the time, create content about you
And that last 1% is up to your discretion to use effectively based on what type of content performs best for your business.
8. Real Estate Agents Not Going Live
Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok Live are essential tools for real estate professionals looking to increase their reach, engagement, and awareness.
Not going live on these platforms limits real estate agents to only seeing their content when and if they’ve published that day or week. Going live is an excellent method to have 1:1 with people who already follow your content.
Additionally, these platforms will favor your content immediately after you have gone Live because you are using one of their features in ways that the platform intended for you to use them.
9. Used Car Salesmen, Begging for Business Approach
When you hear the words “Car Salesman,” you automatically get an image in your head, and this has been the case very much so for real estate agents since the crash of 08’. Although you might not be a used car salesman, your content can surely make you appear like one if you are only posting things that are meant to “sell” instead of providing a consistent flow of value to the people you want to be in front of.
You must provide consistent value as a community leader and expert to the people you serve. This means expanding your reach beyond just house talk and discussing what’s really happening in the community. If there is a festival…talk about it! If any new restaurants are coming to your town…talk about it! You want to be in the know of things as much as possible so that your conversations on social media are not 100% about the market or your most recently sold property…be a guide, not a used car salesman.
10. Failing to Engage with People Online
The whole point of being on social media is to be “social” real estate agents want the leads, but many of them fail to put in the work to generate leads by engaging with others. Sure, you might be posting content consistently; you might be doing stories every day, but how exactly are you communicating with people on your feed?
Are you sending direct messages? Are you dropping thoughtful comments on people’s feeds? If the answer to this was and is NO., something’s got to change. You need to be social on social media because, again, the platforms will reward you for using them as they were meant to be used. It’s imperative to consistently show some love to those who particularly like your content and comment on your content. If you want to connect with that particular somebody, you can’t wait for them to take the 1st step.
Finally,
As you can see, all of these are avoidable mistakes, but it does require some love and attention. You are capable of becoming a Social Real Estate Professional; you simply need to be willing to put in the work. We’ve built over 100+ Real Estate Brands, and we’ve consulted with over 1500 real estate professionals across the country.
If you want to take action on social media but don’t know where to begin, talk to one of our experts at TopShotPro. You can also check us out on Instagram, and remember…stay social!
If you want to learn more about social media marketing for realtors, check out our more of free content below.
