From good to great - committing to taking the social-media content strategy leap 

As we run head on in to 2017, ask yourself, will your social-media content be any different this year?

There is no shortage of people preaching at you that you need to find the time to engage your audience on social media. They tell you that if you don’t do it then you are clearly missing out on limitless opportunities to engage your audience and ultimately grow your leads and revenue. What most of the pundits won’t tell you is that to be truly great and successful on social media requires both the will to consistently participate and also a commitment to wanting to provide better, more engaging content than everyone else. In other words; at some point, you’re going to need a content strategy.

Warning, warning Will Robinson!

Let me start off by saying that if you “don’t do” social media AND you’re also a very successful agent, then that’s really fantastic (I genuinely mean that). I urge you to please keep doing what you’re doing as it’s working for you. You are a real estate rock star!

Also, you can also probably stop reading this article right about now. 

You’re back from annual leave.  You’re eager and refreshed. If in 2016 your local real estate success was moderate to good and you’re wanting 2017 to be the year when you make that leap from good to great, then now is exactly the right time to be planning your 2017 social media content strategy. 

Community engagement – start off small

Engaging your local community sounds like a pretty daunting task. But it doesn’t need to be. As you dip your toe into 2017 remind yourself that you’re already a successful agent who’s making a positive difference in the local community.  That probably means you’re busy doing your day job while benefiting your local community in some way, shape or form. You likely also struggle to devote the time you need to building the social media following that your efforts deserve.

A way for a time-poor agent such as yourself to balance both is to start off building your presence through re-posting. You’re busy making a quid and doing what you need to do. Re-posting is an easy, legitimate and credible way to starting to build your social media audience.

Re-posting helps you to connect with your community

As it turns out, agents are extremely well positioned to act as aggregation points for much of what goes on in the local community.  A big part of the agents’ day is speaking with community members and forging new relationships. Next to the local politicians, agents are probably the best positioned to act as the aggregation points for what goes on in the local area.  

From a social media perspective, the great news is this means you don’t have to invent all your posted content yourself.  This is why re-posting can be your friend.

One of the early adopter mistakes that some agents made on social media was making their posts all about themselves and their latest real estate listings. I think the lesson has been learned that “all about you” or “all about your latest listing” doesn’t translate into an engaged and loyal audience.

As a rule of thumb, your content should be 70% about your local community and 30% about you. This way, you’re making your social media presence more about the issues affecting your community and less about yourself.  These community issues are being aggregated and delivered through your social media feeds. You’re the one who’s curated the content and re-posted what makes sense as well as placed it in context.

Remember also that there’s also nothing wrong with you expressing your own opinion too. It’s all in how you phrase it though.  It doesn’t need to be a poorly worded repost like:

“Here’s an interesting post from Sally Smith… {Repost Sally here}”.

Instead content can be curated by you where you let your own opinions be heard as well as you start showing some of your own personality and belief in the issue:

“Sally Smiths post on local kindergarten placements is exactly how we all feel at times. It’s hard enough without… {Repost Sally here}” 

Beware the haters

A word of warning. There will be “haters” along the way. This is the unfortunate and ugly reality of social media. When highlighting community issues please remain cognisant there are always two sides to every issue. No matter how benign the issue, someone out there has an opposing view to you. So trolling may occur at some point.  

My only advice is to please don’t ever engage a troll. As hard as it may be, you have to accept that not everyone shares your opinions and at times this may turn into personal attacks on you through retaliatory social media posts and comments on your posts. It can get ugly. I fully appreciate that it’s easier to say this than do it in practice, but you need to find your way to rise above it and ignore them. 

How you react to a troll is perhaps the thing that people will remember about you. Be careful not to turn others in your social media community against you by making inappropriate comments to trolls.  

You don’t want to be remembered as “Oh! You’re that agent who lost it on social media over that road closure issue.”

The details will not be remembered at all, just your reaction. Be graceful and if you can, ignore, ignore, ignore, ignore till the troll loses interest in you. If you do feel the compulsion to respond, then being polite and graceful (taking the high road) is highly recommended.

This article was written by Lee Wade, head of digital CoreLogic.

The next article in this series, 'It's a social thing', will be published in The Real Estate Conversation tomorrow.

See also:

Top five tips for successful lead generation

Using targeted data to win listings

Days on market down as buyer demand gathers pace