As I sit here staring at a blank page, trying, no struggling, to form my thoughts about how to write this week's blog, I realize I am facing what so many of us confront every time we sit down to create social media posts. Especially for our businesses and how to use social media to promote listings.
Resistance.
It feels like there is so much weight to it.
Will it be understood, will it get likes, will it turn people off…
But here's the thing. For those of us marketing and selling houses (and I'm including sellers in this!) we have to cut through this because social media is here and it is a powerful tool to spread the word about us, our services, our skills, our philosophy and a way to create deep connections with our real estate partners.
Social media is a fabulous tool you have to stay in front of people in a non-salesy way and to support the in person networking that you do. It is not a replacement for being in front of people in the early stages of your business but it is a way to continue to grow your know, like and trust factor.
And while we should be posting on social media regularly, if you aren't already (no judgement) I want to make this a tiny bit easier for you and share the hack that has helped our team be more consistent with social media.
We create posts around our listings and the Realtors we work with.
It is a win-win and easy to create content around them.
But you may be thinking that you don't have enough listings to fill your feeds and that's ok.
What you do have is your knowledge about the listings that you've worked in, the questions people ask you, the dilemmas you encounter. I did an Instagram story with a question…”would you buy a house with only showers and no bathtub?” because a client asked me about that as they were contemplating a renovation. Turns out, people in my tribe still want a bathtub!
Below are some of the types of posts we have done but I encourage you to start your own running list of the kinds of posts you'd like to do whether that's in the notes section of your phone, in a google doc or in a project planning software.
Social Media Tools to Promote Listings
We have started to use stories to promote our listings because we don't want to clutter up our Instagram feed with things that feel super promotional. So here are the kinds of stories that we have been doing. And by the way, you can use several of these for the same listing to really generate interest and eyes on them.
- Coming soon stories
- Sold stories
- House tour stories
- House highlights stories
- House details stories
- Which do you like better stories
- How we do…stories
- Q & A stories
We love shouting out our sellers and Realtors on Facebook. It benefits all of us when we do this–we're in this together as a team so we like to publicly support our Realtors and sellers because of the huge team effort that has gone into getting our houses ready to list. At the same time we are leveraging the power of our collective audiences to get more attention on each listing. It generates so much buzz too which makes it extra fun!
- New listing posts
- Open House posts
- Results posts
- Testimonial posts
- Before and after posts
- Tag someone who…posts
- Congrats to our Realtor posts
- Onsite Facebook lives
- Behind the scenes posts
And a few of our favorite tools for creating those posts are:
Canva
We are addicted to Canva for making gorgeous images for Facebook and Instastories. They have beautiful pre-built templates that we just customize with our images, fonts and colors. We have created several templates so that we can just plug and chug to make life easier. The less you have to create from scratch the more efficient you will be.
Ripl
Ripl is great for creating short videos with your images and interesting graphics. We use Ripl for our Facebook posts and Instagram stories. Super easy to use which is a bonus!
Hootsuite
We use Hootsuite to automate some of our posts for Facebook and Instagram. Automated posts don't get as many eyes on them as organic posts but it helps fill in the gaps when we get busy. The point is that you want to have consistent content in your social media library for when someone comes to visit your social media pages and this will help you do it so much easier.
So that should get you started! And the point is really to just get started. You can do it and start with promoting your listings so easy to do.
If you want to learn even more, I will be going super deep into social media in my Staging Business Strategy Bootcamp course (or SB2 as I’m calling it although my teenage son says it’s corny…ah well! ; ). If you are struggling to grow your staging business or just want more tools in your toolbox, I’d love to have you join us if it speaks to you!
xo,
Lori
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