How to Build an Audience on Social Media in the Property Sector
I am sure we can all agree, fan or not, that social media plays a big part of our everyday lives, this can be from simply catching up with friends and family activities to reading up on the latest global news. Both personal and business accounts are found on social media, genuine to those not so, facts to lies, censored to uncensored content, a place to complain or a place to praise – From Twitter to Youtube, TikTok to Linkedin and thousands more in between, we have a chance to both communicate easily, embrace content and engage.
Many property professionals are today relying a great deal of their hopes on social media. By this I mean we see many using personal accounts, pages, groups, live videos and more to deliver their products / services and working hard to engage with their audiences / communities. There are some great success stories out there and most of which are fully deserved of their added exposure and business via social media.
So, how can you build an audience on social media if you are in the property sector?
The subject of property can be seen both as a boring one and yet elements of it are of great interest to the public, let’s face it that there are several TV shows that are based on the subject of property so it must own some kind of attention from the public?
For me there are many ways in which we should look in to this topic, but for now I want to break social media success down in to these key elements:
- Budget: If you have an unlimited budget and you are relatively affluent with marketing then you will be a success on social media. From hiring the use of celebrities to employing filming crews to market your property listings, you will gather an audience and you will undoubtedly gain results, depending on what you are after, from social media from new followers to likes, direct enquiries to feedback. With an unlimited budget your content will be in the prominent positions on social media platforms especially with paid for ads etc. Now budget superiority wavers slightly depending on how much of it you have to put towards your social media as tighter budgets call for more awareness of your goals and target audience(s) – This takes us to the options now below:
- Time: You will need a good deal of time to dedicate to social media in order to receive a return on your efforts. Time can be simply re-sharing content or commenting on posts to filming videos and editing content in a studio ready to upload to YouTube. The more time you have the better skilled you will be, the better you will understand your audiences and the better you will be in gaining engagement. By putting in more time you will save yourself money and, sorry for the confusion, time also – By this I mean the more time you commit and the better knowledge you have for social media will mean that going forwards you will waste less time (ie know when / how to share content) and make fewer errors.
- Effort: It is hard to put in the effort, but it is needed. You can not simply rely on what 99% of the competition is doing in order to succeed on social media. You will need to be creative and relatively faultless in how and what you share, this can mean you having to work outside your comfort zone ie such as putting your voice / face on to camera or learning how to use social media platforms that might be aimed at younger / older generations.
- Consistency: Another important key to success is being consistent. Random posts here or there, unless you are a top celebrity, will not adhere people to you – Instead you need to work out how much time you have to put towards social media each day / week / month and try to remain consistent especially if releasing podcasts / live videos.
- Luck: Less and less in todays world of social media can we rely on luck, ie us stumbling upon the next viral video. There are simply too many people on social media and it is far too busy to hope that one post / update / comment / video is going to cut through all the things we have discussed above. You must forget about luck playing an important part of your social media plans as those days are over!
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