It’s time for get serious about social media automation for real estate. Why? Because there are only so many hours in a day, and social media marketing is crucial to any modern real estate business.
There are multiple ways to cut back on the time you spend cultivating and tending to your social media presence. Some require sacrificing the content quality that you aspire to hold to.
However, with automation, you can still take the time to craft your winning content carefully; you just don’t need to be present for every step of its journey. Some automation platforms will also enable you to curate your updates using your favorite RSS feeds.
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It needn’t cost the earth, either, with many automation systems offering surprisingly affordable options, not to mention the money you can save by redeeming coupons for real estate automation software.
Social media marketing is really only effective if it is regularly added to and tended to. The investment of time necessary to successfully create a social media presence worth following causes many real estate agents to avoid it completely. Others try their hand at it, only to realize that doing half a job, sacrificing the quality of the content, or failing to post regularly leaves them with less than impressive results.
Unfortunately for them, however, social media has fast become an essential marketing component in the real estate sector. If you are a real estate agent or business and you are yet to cultivate a solid social media presence, then the time to get started is yesterday.
The key to achieving success in the world of real estate social media marketing without it consuming too much of your day is to automate it. Cultivating a reliable social media automation system is the way to go.
Why is social media so important in real estate?
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last decade, you know just how powerful the role of social media has become in our daily lives. As the generations evolve, more and more of the population live by it for their news, leisure, business, and consumer needs.
Given that real estate is by nature a very visual business, it lends itself perfectly to thriving on social media platforms when it comes to popular content. This makes Instagram a great platform for Realtors, as potential clients can get a great indication of your business’s style and instantly see your available properties and team.
Use quality photo editors like Pixlr to brighten images and create designs and logo overlays. You can find Pixlr coupon codes online, and you can save your favorite filters and overlays to automate and quicken the process, keeping everything on your feed consistent.
After all, websites alone struggle these days without colossal SEO work. Even then, it’s hard to compete with businesses that spread across multiple social media platforms, drawing clients in via these connections. If you’re not an SEO expert, your best bet might be to hire an agency to work alongside you. For example if you had a legal office you might want to hire some legal SEO companies, or in real estate an SEO company that’s focused on the niche completely.
Position yourself in front of your audience
Frankly, these days, any business’s audience is on social media. Nevertheless, it most certainly applies to the real estate sector specifically. It’s imperative for any business to get in front of their target audience to grow, and the more visual the product, the more vital it is to create a solid social media presence.
Build connections and trust
Social media marketing enables real estate agents to build a solid foundation for their target audience to interact with them directly. This interaction makes it easier for them to contact you directly to make inquiries and ask any questions regarding concerns or issues. Communicating via social media can also help you reach more people with one response if you have discussions with potential clients on comment threads that anyone can see.
Why automate?
As mentioned, the key to successful social media marketing is to post great content regularly and at the most opportune times. Successful real estate agents tend to create multiple social media accounts, but then fail to tend to them regularly. It is understandably hard to effectively manage multiple accounts, such as LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook, etc., so they tend to fall to the wayside.
Automating your real estate social media takes care of all of this for you, automatically content using a dedicated automation calendar. Some software even goes one step further and creates content on your behalf. The more sophisticated your social media automation, the more time you have to engage with your clients and potential customers. It also allows you more time to focus on the rest of your business tasks.
When you automate your social media, you have more free time to ensure that your direct engagements with your audience are meaningful and helpful. The more you can focus on quality interactions, the more you build trust and relationships that drive your business forwards.
Consistency is crucial
To say that social media platforms are inundated with content and competing brands is a colossal understatement. One of the fundamental ways to maximize your reach and influence on social media is to regularly post and engage with your audience. If you periodically abandon your social media account activity for prolonged periods, followers drop off, as they favor businesses and agents that provide them with reliably regular content.
Social media automation ensures that this does not happen. The only thing that you must then manually commit to is engaging directly with them in the comments and direct messages you receive from your automated posts.
Without automation, it would take a team to manage it
Social media marketing is so critical to the success of most businesses these days, that it is often foolish to rely solely on one platform. Creating and managing content across multiple platforms successfully would ideally take a team of people to achieve.
Social media marketing is so critical to the success of most businesses these days, that it is often foolish to rely solely on one platform. Creating and managing content across multiple platforms successfully would ideally take a team of people to achieve.
Social media automation effectively takes the job of a team and turns it into a task that one person can manage. Automation not only frees up time but can save you money in outsourcing costs. With a solid social media automation system in place, you can post many quality branded content pieces that no single real estate agent could realistically keep up with.
Collaboration automation
That being said, while social media automation can certainly turn a team job into a one-person show, if you do have a team to collaborate with, automation can make it that much easier.
By automating the team’s workflow of your social media content, you can assign certain members to specific roles – such as content creator or approver – and set it up so that content automatically moves through the process to the next designated person in the chain.
This level of automated team collaboration can vastly improve the efficiency of workflow and the consistency of your business’s content.
Prioritizing valuable content
Social media automation takes a lot of the hassle out of managing almost every aspect of your social media accounts. That said, it is imperative to the success of your marketing that you never compromise on quality.
The internet is crammed full of content, so it pays to make sure that you create content that is worthy of being posted. There is no point in putting your time and money into establishing a social media automation system if you are then going to get lost in a sea of superior content.
Ideally, you want to create content that offers your audience something that they are not getting elsewhere. Research what your competitors are offering and succeeding with, and consider how you can improve upon their content and add more value for your audience.
Using chatbots for efficient inquiry responses
An increasing number of real estate agents are finding that they are seeing much higher response rates from potential clients via direct messaging as opposed to traditional email routes. However, this is all very well, but if you are busy tending to an open house inspection, you could miss out on solid leads.
That’s where utilizing the Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology of chatbots comes in. Chatbots can be set up to respond to any recognizable frequently-asked question automatically and keep the potential client on board when you are unavailable. This also highlights your professionalism and dedication to providing exceptional customer service.
Some chatbot technologies can use AI to adapt their answers to become more sophisticated each time, essentially meaning that you could engage only once the lead is more fully qualified. When using chatbot technology, however, the bot must introduce itself as an AI chatbot to avoid ambiguity in the case that the inquirer doesn’t realize this upfront.
What to look for in automation systems
There are many different features that automation systems offer. While some of them may depend on personal preference, many are essential for effective business use, particularly in the real estate sector.
Here are some of the key capabilities and features to consider when deciding upon an automation system.
Ways to curate and upload content
It is essential to have efficient and effective options when it comes to curating and uploading content. These can include:
- Simple content upload – uploading a CSV file containing hundreds of content updates with which to share to your selected social media accounts
- Content curation – populating your group with content by leveraging RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds and then curating them as you wish
- RSS automation – automating your social media account updates using pre-selected RSS feeds in order to generate automatic status updates
Social media automation features
Here are some of the most helpful social media automation features to look out for when considering what platform to utilize.
Previous post imports
It’s beneficial to be able to import your previous status updates from each of your social media account profiles, to avoid the need to recreate what you have already posted.
Randomized hashtag usage
For every social media platform that you schedule a post to, you ideally want to be able to assign multiple hashtags to be randomly added to your status updates.
Flexible management of individual accounts
Depending upon your content, you may wish to have your updates sent to just one, a variety, or all of your social media accounts.
Set start and stop dates
It’s important to be able to select a start and/or end date when it comes to managing your status updates during focused time frames.
Drip your social media content
You need to be able to drip your status updates into your social media accounts as you need to, whether that be multiple times per hour, day, week, or month.
Shuffling the order of your posts
The option to send your scheduled updates out to your social media accounts in a randomized order is helpful.
Drag and drop post management
You want to be able to easily arrange the order of your social media posts as you consider how they are best placed.
Group content edits
For efficiency, you need to be able to easily add, edit or delete status updates in existing groups of content.
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Final thoughts on social media automation for real estate
Some agents are still yet to join the masses and jump onto the social media automation bandwagon. Some agents are still not altogether familiar with the workings of social media as it is, never mind the automation of marketing with it. Even though social media sites continue to grow in audience figures daily, there is still time to make your content count and stand out from the crowd.
To do so, however, takes diligence. These days, success is arguably more about working smart than it is about working hard, certainly when it comes to digital marketing, anyway. Everybody is online, which means your audience is online, and that means so should you be.
But it takes more than getting online; it’s all in how you do it. Prioritizing high-value, quality content, ensuring that you post regularly across multiple platforms and that you engage meaningfully with your audience is where it’s at. Here is where automation comes in to assist, and this is also where high-quality automation systems and platforms can make all the difference.
Choosing the right path for your social media automation needs is critical, as the content upload, curation, and management features can make or break its usability, and therefore your success moving forwards.