In today’s digital age where technologies are constantly evolving in smarter and more efficient ways, the use of social media has never been more essential as a sales and marketing tool within the inventory of real estate marketing. For professionals and businesses alike looking to build brand awareness and reach prospective clients, social media is invaluable.
With so many platforms to manage and different content forms to create, it becomes increasingly important to ensure you plan ahead to be able to curate a great array of content that speaks to your target audience. That’s where a real estate social media content calendar becomes an absolute necessity, allowing you to map out the purpose of each piece of content, whether that’s to offer useful information, inspire, or to encourage a conversion.
In this article, we’ll explore why real estate professionals need to be utilizing social media as part of their inbound marketing strategy, and some tips to ensure your content calendar is as organized and action-oriented as possible.
Why do real estate businesses need to utilize social media?
It has never been more important for real estate professionals to utilize social media to reach a wider audience, build brand identity, and establish trust with potential clients.
Social media allows you to showcase properties in versatile and creative ways that capture the attention of users who are looking for exactly what you are posting. From reels on Instagram and short-form videos on TikTok to more informative posts on LinkedIn, crafting a social media presence can make you stand out from the real estate market, drive traffic to your website and ultimately generate your business more leads and sales. In particular, social media is a heavily visual medium and so too is the real estate industry. Posting high-quality image-oriented content of your property portfolio will allow you to reach the level of clientele you desire and build credibility around your brand.
According to a poll of 2022 realtors, social media is the second-best source for the generation of real estate leads, after referrals. The importance of social media use as a channel for real estate marketing is clear — use it and use it well, or you’ll be left behind.
Five tips for creating the perfect real estate social media content calendar
When it comes to social media content creation, a calendar is a really helpful tool. You may think it’s easy to simply publish content as and when it arises, but setting in motion a social media calendar will help you to formalize the process of creating and publishing content. It will make it far easier to create assets and schedule content around important dates and business events, capturing the attention of users in the right place at the right time.
Here are our five top tips for creating the perfect real estate social media posting schedule.
Keep important dates and seasons in mind
When you create social media content, it’s crucial to consider important dates and seasons such as holidays, local events, and property market trends. Showing your users and any potential leads that you are relevant and timely helps to increase the credibility of your brand. You’ll be able to plan ahead and ensure you’re posting content that aligns with relevant campaigns and upcoming events, driving traffic to your website with any scheduled blog posts, and even keeping your users up-to-date with relevant time-sensitive real estate news that ties in with your brand identity.
Planning your content around seasonal dates and internal business events will allow you to tailor your content to reach a broader audience and keep your posts relevant and timely, as well as injecting personality into your brand. Significantly, it will let your followers know that you’re on the pulse of the real estate industry and a source to be trusted and admired.
Rotate your topics and themes
To keep things fresh and interesting, it’s important to rotate topics and themes within your social media posts. This can be done by highlighting different aspects of the business, such as local attractions, team members, or featured properties. Cipriani Residences Miami is successful in executing this approach to their social media, showcasing their events and highlighting main features of their residences. They utilize exceptional high-quality imagery that portrays the exclusivity, expansive nature and beautiful views that are on offer to anyone who becomes an owner of one of these homes. They also excellently weave the underlying ethos of their brand, of timeless and sophisticated style and of the finer things in life, into their communications on social media.
By making use of a real estate content calendar, these concepts and messaging will begin to develop and come to life, allowing you to easily swap out content when plans change or a new event or piece of news shows up that you need to fit into the schedule. It will also ensure you’re serving your followers fresh content that keeps them engaged and more likely to convert into loyal customers.
Find the right time to post
Posting at the right time can have a significant impact on the success of the content you post. Businesses should trial different posting times to determine when their audience is most active and engaged. After you’ve been posting for a while, check the analytics of your account which will give you major insight into when your followers are most active, distinguished by age demographic and location. Particularly across different platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, engagement times may vary, so this is where a content calendar becomes a no-brainer.
Schedule posts in advance to avoid future headaches
Scheduling posts in advance using an automation tool can save real estate professionals time and help maintain a consistent posting schedule that will coincide with important dates and events. There are many tools that make the process quick and simple, including Buffer, which allows you to cross-post the same content across multiple platforms, or Later, which has a cool feature that allows you to either auto-publish your post or be sent a push notification to do so. Not only does it allow you to create content in batches and free up time for more important business tasks, it also allows you to consider whether you need to outsource any content creation, giving you plenty of planning room for photoshoots and videography sessions of your development or property.
By scheduling your posts ahead of time, everything remains in one easily accessible place. Set the publishing date and time, the content format, copy, hashtags, and location tags. Best of all, you can easily edit and make tweaks and changes as and when you require.
Reporting and tweaking
Reviewing social media analytics on a monthly basis can provide valuable insights into what’s working and what’s not. As a modern real estate business, you should be continually making changes to your content where necessary and trialing new strategies to ensure ongoing success. Scheduling content helps to increase collaboration efficiency, giving your team enough time to edit copy or provide feedback that may result in minor tweaks or even major overhauls of campaign strategy. Either way, you won’t have to worry, as you’ll have plenty of time to make appropriate changes, if you’ve scheduled ahead.
Using a social media calendar places your content in a format that is easily trackable for future reference when analyzing your posts, whether that’s testing posting frequency or the best time of day for each platform, or even copy length and hashtags. See which posts are receiving the most engagement and driving conversions and then create similar content from previous successes.
Key takeaway
Creating a real estate social media calendar can help you to stay organized, maintain a consistent posting schedule, and ultimately reach your target audience. By keeping important dates in mind, rotating topics and themes, finding the right time to post, scheduling in advance, and regularly reviewing results, businesses can establish themselves as leaders in the industry, generate more leads and increase sales.
This article should have provided you with some great tips on how to get started creating the perfect social media content calendar for real estate, but if you think you may need some extra guidance, Proven Partners Real Estate Marketing services can help you leverage social media marketing for your business to its full potential.
Author Bio
Colin Hannan, Principal at Proven Partners, a real estate marketing agency, helps bridge commercial and creative expertise to bring hotel and luxury real estate and projects to life. With a deep understanding of international development, built upon two decades of personal experience across the globe, Colin has successfully operated, repositioned, and opened resort and residential developments in Europe, North America, the Caribbean and Asia.
Author Bio
Colin Hannan, Principal at Proven Partners, a real estate marketing agency, helps bridge commercial and creative expertise to bring hotel and luxury real estate and projects to life. With a deep understanding of international development, built upon two decades of personal experience across the globe, Colin has successfully operated, repositioned, and opened resort and residential developments in Europe, North America, the Caribbean and Asia.