My personal experience tells me that more and more, people are accessing the real estate market via the internet. Having moved four times in a year, I have found all the properties I have rented online.

With more than 2 billion users, social media can be innovative and cost-effective marketing platforms for realtors and real estate companies. Following are a number of reasons as well as tips to use social media for your business effectively.

Connect

Social Media Marketing strategies should be implemented in your business plan for a number of reasons. First and foremost, social media are born to serve one main purpose: communication between like-minded users sharing content and information they are both interested in.

Social media will give your real estate business a space to find freelancers, perspective buyers, potential clients and like-minded professionals. Networking is key: add your past and current clients on Facebook, establish a professional network on LinkedIn, make Twitter part of your customer service strategy.

By using the major social networks as part of your marketing plan you will be able to give customers a more intimate and realistic picture of your products and services. Moreover, your perspective clients and followers will feel integral part of your brand experience and personality.

Write Good Quality Content

Social Media can dramatically help you build your brand image and communicate it to potential buyers and clients. However, success on social media is entirely based on the quality of your content. Because of the range and variety of your audience, it is important to adjust the content to the customer demographic you are targeting.

It is fundamental to use your titles and descriptions well: they will appear in the organic search results and they should include all your key-words. Make them appealing and stimulate people to click on them. It is vital to make your content searchable: your online outreach will depend on the number of people clicking and navigating through your social media profiles.

Diversify Your Posts

With Twitter, the champion of ‘word-of-mouth’ and micro-blogging, you can engage with your audience through targeted and concise posts. As with Instagram, it is important to be visually captivating: add an image to your tweet and you are much more likely to be retweeted or favorited.

Twitter also gives you the chance to engage in one-to-one conversations with your audience. If a customer or a professional responds to your tweet, acknowledge them and keep the conversation going! Twitter can be a great way to demonstrate good customer service and to interact with industry experts. Last but not least, never forget your #hashtags and make sure you check which ones are trending in the real estate industry.

Picondo Homes, an Ottawa-based company, gets super interactive by tweeting beautiful images of their properties and advertising open house events for their followers to sign up to!

While Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are effective means for social media marketing, they still present a good amount of unrelated content. LinkedIn, on the other hand, is the place where you will find almost exclusively freelancers, perspective employees and industry experts. This professional networking platform will allow you to establish new and reinforce existing working connections.

It is important, therefore, to be extremely professional: Colonial Capital, for instance, promote their image as industry leaders by regularly posting authoritative updates about the real estate market.

Social Media Management Tools

There are a number of social media management tools which can help you define your social media marketing strategy. Crowdbooster, HootSuite or free ones such as Bitly (which also shortens your links for Twitter!) provide real-time analytics, they allow you to keep track of clicks and give you data such as  number of likes, comments, shares, retweets, replies, reach and more. While most of them are not free, the investment can prove beneficial for your business: you’ll be able to manage all your social accounts at once and save plenty of time.