Do you use Instagram to generate quality leads for your real estate business? Or do you simply rely on Facebook and your website for your business to handle all the hard work? Did you know that Instagram has over 500 million daily users and over a billion active monthly users?
According to a study from Oberlo, Instagram’s engagement is four times greater than Facebook’s, and 83% of users claim they found a new good or service through Instagram. You simply cannot afford to ignore Instagram when such a loyal and engaged audience is within your grasp. Due to the platform’s emphasis on visual content and user-friendliness, Instagram can be an effective strategy to raise your engagement rates.
Homebuyers, sellers, and other real estate professionals can view the kinds of listings you show, discover the geographic regions in which you excel, and keep up with your upcoming shows all from their social feeds.
Are you interested in learning how to use this platform to increase your audience and produce Instagram leads for real estate? This guide will show you how to use Instagram to market your real estate company like a pro. We should probably go over the advantages of using Instagram for real estate marketing before you start taking your real estate Instagram presence to the pinnacle. Moreover, you can also hire a social media expert to help you get started with it.
Benefits of Using Instagram for Real Estate Marketing
In addition to the outstanding reach your posts could have, Instagram is a fantastic social media channel for realtors because of the following reasons:
- It offers cost-free advertising that everyone is already accustomed to. Instagram is a fun, lovely, simple method for you and everybody else to remain in touch.
- It is very graphic and highlights your listings. Realtors may easily upload stunning photos of their listings, video walkthroughs, and other information that potential buyers would find interesting on Instagram.
- You can personally contact new leads and your current consumer base by seeing who has liked your posts in detail. Realtors typically experience 10 times more interaction on their Instagram postings than on Facebook.
- The Instagram audience is wealthier. Instagram users may be better-qualified purchasers because they make more money than Facebook and Twitter users, according to Statista.
- The new SEO is the hashtags. With the correct hashtags, you can rank better in an Instagram search than you could with your standard SEO strategy for search results pages.
- You’ll receive more engagement and traffic the more you post. Your most popular recent posts on Instagram will appear at the top of your followers’ feeds as a result of the Instagram mechanisms, increasing the likelihood that people will watch and interact with your posts.
- It’s a treasure trove for recommendations. Customers will want to stay in touch with you and recommend your services to their social and professional networks. In order to share the work with others who don’t follow your account, your clients might tag their Instagram pals in your postings.
- Marketing for events is free. You can use Instagram for all of your happy hour gatherings, open houses, and other events where attendance depends on awareness.
- You can appear skilled without any prior experience. You can add high-quality images to your listings, change them while you’re out and about on a phone or tablet, or log in and work from a desktop computer. Post your photos online wherever you have an internet connection to reach your audience.
Best Practices of Using Instagram for Real Estate Marketing
1. Switch To A Business Profile
The first thing to do is to make sure to switch to a business profile on Instagram. There are many useful elements of a business profile that a standard Instagram profile lacks. You can gain the following advantages with a business profile on Instagram:
- Instagram insights are available.
- Add details about your company.
- Clearly demonstrate paid partnerships
- Publish using a desktop PC
- Utilize Instagram’s Creator Studio.
- Run Instagram advertisements
All of these functions will further advance your Instagram real estate marketing. Go to your profile, select Settings, then tap on Account and Switch to Business Account.
2. Perfect Your Bio
Your Instagram profile functions as a kind of online business card. So you should ensure that it does everything in its power to assist you in generating leads on Instagram, as it is the first thing users see when they visit your profile. Maintaining consistency with various touchpoints is essential because your bio is also where customers take action to interact with your brand outside of the platform.
In order for the prospect to feel comfortable interacting with your company, you should keep the discussion going in their minds. For instance, if you’ve recently highlighted listings in posts, you can link to them in your bio so that readers can see them in more detail. Your viewers should be able to easily access further information from your bio if you’ve mentioned an opening day or a forthcoming event.
Visit the Instagram feed of Serenbe, a neighborhood tucked into the surrounding wilderness outside of Atlanta, to see an illustration of a potent bio that effectively conveys the essence of a company. They clearly convey who they are and what they stand for in only a few words.
3. Maintain your Instagram feed with appealing content
The requirement for excellent content is one thing that real estate sales and Instagram have in common. An effective gallery of nicely lit, tastefully styled property images and videos could make the difference between a profitable open house and a complete bust.
What we mean is that the content you post on Instagram should stop people from scrolling. The most effective way to do this is to continually share stunning, crystal-clear, and enticing content.
Source
For Instagram growth in real estate, in particular, you can upload pictures of satisfied clients, magnificent homes, community activities, and even supplementary photos highlighting the benefits of dealing with you and living in your area. VPN will help you post on your Instagram profile, wherever you are.
If you want to add additional features that can strengthen your brand, like a watermark or important details about a listing, you can check out picture editing programs like Canva and some graphic design tools as well. Instagram also offers a number of built-in filters that can make your images stand out.
4. Utilize all the features to build brand awareness
The typical photo post is the first thing that springs to mind when the majority of us think of Instagram. After all, Instagram was created as a photo-sharing platform first. However, today, you can post a variety of different types of content with the help of all the features provided by Instagram. Let’s examine each one individually.
Instagram Stories
When you don’t have content for your Instagram Feed, Instagram Stories provides you the chance to engage with your audience every day, and it’s simple to do so with its short videos and photographs format.
So how will you come up with this content? By recycling already-existing images and videos to create something new. You can also create interesting content for Instagram Stories in the form of polls, Q&As, etc. They bring in a lot of engagement.
Instagram Reels
Instagram Reels are a TikTok-derived content format and will garner you the most views. That’s because people enjoy watching short videos as they can swiftly assimilate the content. Reels work best for Instagram real estate marketing when they highlight a property’s standout qualities and distinguishing characteristics.
IGTV
Use IGTV for videos that are longer than a minute. If you upload videos to YouTube or have extended videos of your listings, they will be saved on IGTV when you post them to your Instagram feed. This is a productive technique to distribute and reuse content across platforms. Think about utilizing it for real estate listing videos.
5. Use proper hashtags
Using appropriate hashtags is an essential element of Instagram marketing. Remember that real estate brokers generally target the local market and nearby areas. So make a list of the popular hashtags in your area by doing some research on them, then use it as a resource when you write posts.
Having said that, don’t limit your selection to hashtags that have a high number of posts. It’s unlikely that you’ll receive enough likes on your content, in the beginning, to rank among the top posts for those hashtags. As a general rule, stick with hashtags that have 100 times as many posts as your number of followers.
You can choose a few hashtags with fewer posts and a few with more, but if you focus on hashtags with fewer posts, you’ll remain at the top for long periods of time and attract more non-followers.
Instagram only permits you to use a maximum of 30 hashtags in a post. This includes both the caption and the comments. We advise using no more than 1-4 hashtags in the post caption itself and up to 30 relevant hashtags in the first comment.
6. Run effective Instagram ads
Running tailored Instagram advertisements is the technique that ensures that the right people see your posts. Make sure your Instagram real estate account is a business account before you run advertisements or promote posts. Since Instagram is a subsidiary of Facebook, you might notice that its advertising interface is identical to Facebook’s.
Technically, you can advertise directly from the Instagram app. However, we advise running Instagram advertisements through your Facebook Ads Manager account for your real estate promotions. Just make sure that your Instagram business profile and Facebook page are connected. Check out this post about the Facebook Business Page to find detailed instructions.
There are several tools available on Instagram for building an appropriate target audience when it comes to advertising. Geographic location is maybe the most significant of all. Incorporating the address of the property you are selling is the most effective way to choose where and who to promote based on location.
You probably have a fairly specific demographic of purchasers depending on the types of properties you are marketing, such as multi-family homes, townhouses, or mansions. Fortunately, Instagram provides a wide range of demographics to target through Facebook.
7. Don’t forget your branding
You should put some real effort into branding your real estate Instagram feed, just like you would your website, business cards, and company logo. Your goal should be to come across as approachable, informed, professional, memorable, and kind.
To solidify your identity and make it true to what your name stands for, pick a specific filter, stick to a single color scheme, or combine a particular style.
You can choose any popular, verified Instagram account with hundreds of followers and see that it uses certain colors, fonts, images, and camera settings. They adhere to a particular brand identity, in other words. When you stick to a particular color and font theme, engagement rises since customers begin to associate these elements with your brand. Every time someone visits your Instagram page or sees your post in their newsfeed, it makes an impression on them. It helps people remember your brand.
8. Use carousel ads
When posting Instagram real estate ads, it’s a wise idea to display the property from a variety of angles. There are a variety of Instagram ad layouts available, but an audience favorite for real estate is the carousel. Multiple photographs of your property can be shown in a catalog-like format using innovative carousel advertising.
Renters and homebuyers may wish to examine the exterior of the building in addition to the various rooms. With carousel advertisements, you may artistically display a single property in a number of ways to ensure that your audience can get a proper idea with top-notch and appealing pictures.
If you already have high-def images of real estate properties, you can edit or replace the background using a background remover tool and replace it with something classy before posting it on your feed
9. Show Off your happy clients to the audience
Buying and selling real estate is more complicated than a simple business deal. Many clients find the process extremely emotional, especially if it is their first time purchasing or selling a house. A personal relationship with a realtor is crucial for this reason. It makes for intriguing content if you can record that emotion in a picture or a video at the precise time when a client is most overjoyed.
When other potential sellers come across this type of content, they might imagine how it would be to hold that “Sold” sign and put themselves in the position of your previous clients. So don’t be reluctant to take pictures of the moment when the sale is completed. It has serious power! Even better, ask your clients to post these significant occasions on their social media and develop a custom hashtag to organize the user-generated content.
10. Include The Properties’ Location In Your Posts.
Instagram’s Location Tagging feature is comparable to Facebook’s Check-in. You can either use the GPS on your phone or discover the location using the search feature. There are certain advantages to doing this, the most significant of which being that Instagram remains a search engine, and you may increase the visibility of your listings for people doing local searches.
For instance, your listings ought to show up in the search results if someone types “home for sale” + [place] into a search engine.
Conclusion
While using Instagram for real estate requires effort, the posting and online interaction processes will be enjoyable and rewarding. Build an Instagram presence that you maintain on a regular basis, and engage users with your content.
While beginning with Instagram marketing can be a good move, the enthusiasm comes from ongoing socializing. When you publish on Instagram, bear in mind the best practices mentioned in this article.
Remember that success on any social media platform, including Instagram, depends on adhering to a well-thought-out plan!