Making time to create social media content can be a challenge when you are focused on the day-to-day operations of your real estate business. But, as Danna Hinz, a real estate agent with The Hinz Group at RE/ MAX Alliance in Louisville, Colorado, discovered there are ways to make promoting your business on social media efficient and fun.
Danna generously shared her approach for incorporating social media into her marketing strategy with us, as well as specific tips on how to get started or take your social media game to the next level if you’re a seasoned real estate professional.
Why do you need social media if you’re a real estate agent?
- It helps you establish your brand
- Promote your listings
- Stay top of mind with your potential clients.
That way, your name will be the first thing they think of when they’re ready to buy or sell a home.
Read on for Danna’s tips, suggestions, and best practices:
Listings-related social media posts
As part of her daily business, Danna creates Facebook and Instagram posts for new, under contract, and sold listings. To make the process efficient, she searched through the PosterMyWall template library to select several templates she liked. Then, she customized the templates to match her brand by adding her logo, her own photos, and other design elements.
Now whenever she wants to send something out, she opens one of her existing designs, makes minor changes to the images and copy — and has it ready to go in minutes.
An important element of Danna’s online presence is her color scheme. She uses teal-blue elements to match her logo colors. PosterMyWall makes this easy.
“What I like is that I don’t have to recreate the real estate flyer – all I have to do is change the text and colors. It’s much easier to use than some of the other programs we had,”
Danna Hinz
PosterMyWall empowers Danna not only to make Facebook and Instagram posts, but also publish directly to Facebook. This saves her valuable time that she can reinvest elsewhere.
For agents who feel like taking their social media game a step further, one option is to use Instagram Stories to create free polls with Yes/No answers. From there, you can reach out directly to the respondents.
For example, you could post a photo of one of your listings and ask: Is this your dream home? Or, if you’re looking for listings, you could ask: Would you consider selling your home this year? Then you can DM the people who responded and build the relationship from there.
Another strategy is to do a Facebook LIVE event in front of a property you’ve just sold. It shows your ability to sell houses and that you’re familiar with that neighborhood. If you had multiple offers, this is a perfect opportunity to mention that you still have several buyers interested in that area.
Office advertising
Danna also uses PosterMyWall to design all of the marketing and advertising materials for her office, including market highlight reports, sales reports, feature tabs for listings, testimonials, and closing reports. She makes sure everything looks professional and articulates the RE/MAX Alliance brand.
Danna now saves a lot of time creating standard documents. Before Danna used PosterMyWall, creating listing books that include HOA, utilities, school district, and local government information used to be particularly time consuming. Now, Danna has an edited template that she likes saved so she can quickly switch out and update information to make the sheet relevant to each listing.
Using social media templates and recurring design elements helped Danna create a uniform brand look for all her real estate office communications. Each piece looks polished and professional and at the same time, has a welcoming feel that reflects Danna’s warm personality and approach to business.
Fun posts
Not all of the content on Danna’s feeds is strictly work-related. “Sometimes we create entertaining posts just to generate engagement,” Danna said. Her advice here, is to look for videos you can customize with text. She also recommends that you recycle the most successful posts every so often.
“There’s a cool video of a drone flying up a creek. It says, ‘Happy Friday!’ so I like to send it out on Fridays,” Danna said. “There’s another one of a guy pushing another guy through the office, and papers are flying everywhere. That says, ‘It’s almost Friday! Hang in there!’ I send it out on Thursdays.”
Ongoing engagement
While it might be hard to quantify how much of Danna’s business comes directly from her social media efforts, she feels it certainly helps keep her company top of mind. “Someone approached me at an event recently and said they saw my post about white kitchens, so I know they look,” she said.
When asked to share advice on using social media for real estate marketing, Danna suggests being consistent: don’t post so often that people think you’re overly busy and would hesitate to approach you–but at the same time, post often enough to stay in their feeds.
Also, if you don’t have your own listings, offer to advertise other agents’ listings. Danna says doing this demonstrates that you are busy, shows that you know the area, and helps to create new business relationships. And of course, get your friends and family to follow you so that their followers will see your posts as well.
“Successful agents use a little bit of everything to make a complete package,” Danna said. “Your social media presence is certainly part of it.”
Senior editor at PosterMyWall.
