Recently, I talked about how social media is a valuable tool for your real estate brokerage, and how you can put it to work for you on Facebook. But the thing about a social media strategy is that it rarely focuses on one platform alone!
Each social media network targets a different market, and can have a huge impact on your lead generation—which can have a huge impact on how many homes you and your agents sell.
Today, let's have a look at one of the more recent social media platforms: Instagram.
Although not as popular as Facebook, Instagram is widely considered the perfect social media platform for real estate agents because it's so visual. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, you can't post on Instagram unless you use an image.
Here's what you need to know to generate leads on Instagram!
The quick facts:
- Over 500 million people use Instagram every day
- 59% of Instagrammers in the U.S. are under 30
- 80% of users follow businesses on Instagram
- 33% of the most-viewed stories on Instagram are posted by businesses
The strategy:
So what can you use to make the most of Instagram for generating leads for your brokerage?
Images
Okay, so this one isn't a surprise. Because Instagram is so focused on the visual side of things, it's important to make sure you put the emphasis on images that make people imagine themselves in that listing. Clear, well-lit photos are your best friends here—blurry, pixelated, or poorly lit photos will not do.
It's good to use professional photography if you can, but most modern smartphones have nice enough cameras that phone pictures taken on a sunny day will work. When editing, keep the photo filter as minimal and natural-looking as possible to let the listing speak for itself.
Stories
Stories are a different type of post on Instagram. They'll stay posted for 24 hours, but then they'll disappear from view. They work surprisingly well in conjunction with regular posts, because they tend to reach a different audience—while Instagram's algorithms can be unpredictable as to what will show up in people's feeds, stories are always highlighted at the top of the app.
You can choose to save these stories on your profile as highlights, which means they'll stay posted as long as you want them to. A good strategy for these highlights is to set one up for each listing you're currently featuring, and add video and photo stories to show them off!
Links
Instagram is unique in the social media world because it doesn't let you put active links in the captions of your images. If you register as a business account, though (which is as easy as connecting it to your Facebook page), it'll let you post a link on your profile, and you can use the copy in your captions to direct people there.
If you have either a verified badge (the little blue checkmark) or over 10,000 followers, you can also put links in your stories. This is a great way to direct people to specific listings without changing the link in your bio frequently!
Organic engagement
Instagram has a surprisingly huge community of bot accounts, which are fake accounts created so their owners can sell them as "followers." These bots sit in your follower count, but aren't active accounts—they won't like or comment on your posts.
As tempting as it can be to boost your followers using a service (especially if you want the 10k follower count, because the verified badge is elusive at best), avoid it—it looks good on your profile, but Instagram will penalize accounts that have huge numbers of followers who don't interact with posts.
The more organic engagements you have, the more people Instagram will show your post to. Your best bets for encouraging organic engagement? Make your caption into a question that people will want to answer, and do your best to engage with your followers' content in return. People like a brand that engages with them, too!
These are some of the quick and easy ways you can get started generating leads with Instagram. Check out our guide for Facebook, and stay tuned next time when we talk about how to generate leads with Twitter!
PS. We're stepping up our own Instagram game! Connect with us and be part of the journey.
