More agents and brokers have started to use Facebook, Twitter and other social media accounts for their business. Some have even started to use social media advertising.
Some common traits of agents and brokers who use social media well are that they have developed concrete social media marketing strategies. They identify goals, track their analytics, engage in social conversations, and ultimately use the sites to help generate real estate leads. These pros know how to use social media. What many of them need to learn, however, is how not to use social media.
There are some social media marketing mistakes that agents and brokers tend to make. Here are some tips to avoid these errors.
1) Coming Off as Impersonal, Arrogant, or Unrelatable
Don’t boast about your business, it’ll make you look bad. Be proud of your work, but don’t be presumptuous. Show your appreciation to your clients instead, it’ll come across as more humble.
As well as this, it is important to not forget to show off your personality every now and again. This can be done by sharing the occassional photo or video of you with colleagues, clients or even family and friends. Doing this will make you seem more relatable and human to your audience.
2) Publishing Inappropriate Updates and Comments
There are some things you shouldn’t post on social media for your business. Posting photos or comments that would make people uncomfortable or offended will give your business a bad reputation. It only takes one poor decision to post something online that will stay there forever to ruin your business.
It’s a good idea to think carefully before clicking ‘share’ on social media. If you’re not sure whether something is suitable to post, it’s probably best not to. Even big brands sometimes make mistakes on social media, which can damage their reputation. So it’s worth learning from their mistakes.
3) Promoting Your Business Too Overtly or Too Often
You should avoid sharing too many promotional real estate posts on social media, as this can make your accounts seem stale and uninteresting. Additionally, some social media networks may filter out promotional content from users’ news feeds.
It is important to share other types of content with your promotional messages, like blog posts and infographics. If you don’t have much original, useful content to share, focus on producing content to share. You can share your content multiple times, which will increase its lifespan and get other people to share it with their networks. This will help you build your online following.
4) Embellishing Listing Features or Business Information
While it’s perfectly fine to post pictures and information about your real estate listings on visual-based social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest, some agents go overboard, exaggerating features or even doctoring photos to make them more appealing.
It’s not just that this violates the National Association of REALTORS®’ Code of Ethics – which it does – it’s that it’s clearly going to cause problems for the agent. It’s better to steer clear of any kind of modification to listing information or images.
Be honest in your social media real estate bio. Include your company name, certifications, sales history, reviews, contact info, and links to your real estate website. Do not lie about any information, as this will make prospective clients not want to work with you.
5) Giving Social Media Account Access to the Wrong People
If you have someone managing your social media accounts, or if you share login information for your accounts with others, there is a risk that misinformation, offensive content, or other problems could be posted without your knowledge. Be sure to only give your login information to people you trust completely.
The best way to control your social media channels is to do it yourself instead of trusting others to help you with publishing content and answering questions or comments.
6) Posting Only Personal Updates
The type of content you should be posting on social media for your real estate business are photos and videos of your latest listings, curated content like links to local housing market reports and business updates, and blog posts.
If you want to avoid hassles when creating and organizing content for social media, use an editorial calendar on a platform like Google Drive or Trello. This will let you compile all the content you want to share and plan when to publish it for each social channel.
7) Publishing Too Frequently/Infrequently or at the Wrong Times
The best way to figure out when to post on social media is to experiment a little bit. For the first month or two, try posting different kinds of content on different channels and see what works best. After a while, you’ll start to get a feel for which types of content should be published on which channels and when. Here’s an optimal social media schedule from our Guide to Social Media Mastery:
For social media marketing to be successful, it is important to post regularly to each social media site. This way, your posts will be more likely to be seen by your audience. However, don’t post too much, as this can overwhelm people.
The following text provides information on when would be the best time to post on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+. The post from Buffer examines the best times of day to post on each social media platform, while the article from Social Media Today takes a look at how long each update lasts on each major social channel.
8) Not Posting New, Original Content
Content from other sources can be a great time-saver for when you’re posting to social media. However, make sure that you’re still posting original content that you developed yourself as well.
Your content needs to be focused on a specific niche. By targeting those who are specifically looking to buy or sell in your market, you will be more successful in generating qualified real estate leads.
9) Not Using Images and Videos in Social Media Posts
Include photos, videos, and slideshows in your real estate social media marketing to increase engagement rates. According to data from social media insights firm Socialbakers, Facebook posts with photos have an 87 percent engagement rate. Additionally, nearly half of the top 10 percent of Twitter interactions involve tweets with photos.
Don’t worry if you aren’t confident using technology. There are plenty of tools that can help you edit photos, create graphics, and make videos easily. For example, here are 10 great video recording apps that make it easy to shoot your listings and testimonials. Meanwhile, photos can be edited using software like GIMP and Pixelmator, while Canva is a user-friendly resource for creating graphics.
10) Paying People to “Like” Pages or Post Fake Reviews
The two worst things you can do on social media are paying for fake reviews or likes. Your audience might not even notice if you’re doing these things, but it’s a waste of time and effort. It could also lead to problems with the social networks themselves.
It is better to use your resources to create ads on Facebook and other social media channels than to pay people to like your page. One of these tactics improves your social media metrics, while the other one doesn’t. Can you guess which one helps and which one hurts your real estate marketing?
11. Shift Blame
While social media can be a great platform for issuing corporate apologies, it’s not the best place to make poor apologies.
After a passenger was dragged bloodied off of a plane, United Airlines issued a poor apology to social media.
United’s apology for the incident where a passenger was forcibly removed from his seat was seen as victim blaming. This caused social media users to become outraged.
The bottom line is that if you’re going to use social media to apologize for something, you need to make sure that your apology is sincere and effective.
12. Forget to Log Out of the Corporate Twitter
If you accidentally post a personal status on a corporate Twitter account, it can range from being harmless to unforgivable, depending on the content of the post.
An employee of the American Red Cross made a mistake when she posted her plans for the night on the organization’s Twitter account instead of her personal account.
13. Make Private Public
Are you familiar with Old Man Tweets? It’s a Twitter account that is purportedly ran by an 81-year-old man who thinks Twitter is a search engine. This man publicly posts what are supposed to be private Google searches.
Companies and business owners need to be careful not to post private DMs on their public feed, like Twitter’s CFO did.
14. Automate Carelessly
But beware, automated messages are often received as disingenuous While it may appear innocuous to set up an automated Tweet congratulating your 1 millionth follower, be aware that such messages can come across as insincere. Automated messages can be a time-saver, but they can also give the impression that you’re not really interacting with your followers.
However, the same cannot be said for the New England Patriots. The team accidentally retweeted a racist message from a user with an offensive Twitter handle.
If you’re not sure whether or not you should automate your social media posts, just look at Microsoft’s TayTweets bot. After only being online for 24 hours, it turned into a pro-Hitler troll.
Don’t trust bots to post reliable and inoffensive content on social media.
15. Forget to Watch out for Trolls, Hackers, and Rogue Employees
It’s important to monitor your social media pages for trolls and hackers, who are an unfortunately common part of the social media landscape. Delete any imposter posts as soon as you see them.
This year, McDonalds got political in a famous social media post.
Conclusion
Companies that have made mistakes on social media can provide useful lessons on what to avoid. By using these worst practices as a list of “Do not’s,” you can help guide your social media team to successful strategies while avoiding those that have proven to be unsuccessful.
Everyone makes mistakes, even when it comes to social media. The key is to catch them quickly and take steps to ensure they don’t happen again.
