What should you post? Where should you post it? Who should do the posting? How do you know if it’s working for your company?

Social media marketing can be a great means of connecting with your potential customers as it allows you to portray your brand message, team spirit and unique personality and values in a fun, informative and engaging way that your website can never do. Nonetheless, managing your social media can also be expensive (to outsource), frustrating, confusing time consuming, costly to outsource and potentially damaging to your reputation.

If you’re writing any kind of content – blogposts or articles – social media gives you a megaphone to amplify it, allowing you to reach huge numbers of people instantly. And even when you pay to distribute it, it’s still currently better value for money than any other advertising channel, bar none. However, managing your Social media shouldn’t be a chore but part of a systematic approach, strategically curated  to fit your needs. It is imperative to be selective about the platforms you are active on choosing the ones that can make the greatest impact, fit your brand image and crucially, the platforms where the majority of your clients are active.

Having worked with a number of Estate agents myself but also having had a short stint in the property sector myself both in the UK and Cyprus, I have often experimented to identify the best platforms and would defiantly recommend these five (5) platforms for estate and letting agents, roughly in the order of importance and relevance:

  1. Facebook
  2. LinkedIn
  3. Twitter
  4. Google Plus

 

I know what you are probably thinking..Do I really need to be on all these platforms?  This list is just designed to assist you in selecting the best ones for your company. Let’s take a brief look at each one in terms of the main:

  • Personality – the general Tone users adhere to on the platform
  • Cost – what is the cost of advertising on each
  • Main topics – which topics are most shared and engaged with
  • Frequency of use – how often do the users visit the platform
  • Key formats – which content formats work best on the platform
  • Audience – prospective vendors or landlords, or both
  • Posting guide – a brief guide to formatting your content to best fit in with the style of the platform
  • Potential – what can you gain?

1.     FACEBOOK

Personality – friendly, social, fun, focus on a success

Topics – travel, entertainment, family

Frequency of use – according to Facebook, there are 1.32 billion daily active users on average for June 2017

Key formats – images, videos,ads on newsfeed

Audience – vendors

Posting guide – image-rich, friendly tone, attention-grabbing

Potential – Merely due to the No of users, enormous. Carefully build relationships with your fans so as they think of you first in case a need ever arises

2.     LINKEDIN

Personality – intellectual, professional, successful, influencer, advisory

Cost – premium users (currently around £40 a month subscription) can perform advanced searches to contact specific company employees and job roles. LinkedIn contains a huge depth of information about the people in your community, and you can be confident the key influencers in your industry and area are listed on there.

Topics – business growth, recruitment, reviews, marketing strategy

Frequency of use – once or twice daily

Key formats – article, white paper, links to relevant articles

Audience – landlords

Posting guide – post blogposts or articles using LinkedIn Publisher, share relevant third party content using the status update

Potential – great for reaching your exact target audience.

3.     TWITTER

Personality – friendly, curious, sociable, information-seeking,

Cost – twitter is steadily improving its advertising platform now also allowing you to target specific locations and audience

Topics – tech, social media, news, law changes, local updates

Frequency of use – many times daily

Key formats – images, quotes, links, text

Audience – vendors and landlords

Posting guide – link to own and third party content with an image, post several times

Potential – huge reach and the ability to target your local issues and events with hashtags, (#) as well as find and connect with key influencers and suppliers for possible referrals.

4.    GOOGLE PLUS

Personality – articulate, knowledgeable, home worker, male

Cost – It really depends if you are spending funds on Google Adwords rather than google+ but it most certainly can have a major impact on your rankings

Topics – social media, tech, good business practices

Frequency of use – 2-5 times per week

Key formats – blogposts, images and gifs, links

Audience – vendors and landlords

Posting guide – long-form content, ie best to post your article or blogpost on the platform in its entirety, with a call to action at the end, and link back to your site

Potential – Google Plus is fantastic for search engine optimisation. In other words, if you post quality content on a regular basis, your Google Plus posts will often rank higher than your website, and hopefully that of your competitor!

Now you have the above advice in hand, make sure you choose the channels you post to carefully and curate the content for each individually to maximise exposure and awareness as well as engagement. If you have any thoughts or additional tips, join in the conversation in the comments section, subscribe to our blog for free, or simply click here to arrange a FREE Consultancy meeting, send me an email at [email protected] or Follow me below on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram