Editor’s Note: Social Skills is a bi-monthly feature in RISMedia’s Daily News focused on social media and digital marketing tips, trends and solutions for agents and brokers.
Social media often feels like it’s all about the followers. The platforms make you feel like the more followers you have, the more successful you will be. But, for real estate agents, social media success isn’t about how many people saw your post, it’s about how many people you actually spoke to.
In order for your social media marketing to add real value to your business, you need to be turning your engagement into prospects. You have to take the time to reach out to those engaging with you, DM (direct message) them and create leads for your business.
Here is how to evaluate meaningful social media engagement and turn it into leads:
Evaluating the interactions
Beyond building trust with potential clients and showcasing your brand, you should always be aiming for engagement on your socials. This engagement is interactions with your content: votes on your polls, likes and comments on your posts and stories.
To learn more about building engagement, check out our Social Skills article: Make Every Comment Count: Building Your Online Presence Through Intentional Engagement
Some people will casually engage with profiles they see or follow, so you will need to evaluate which of these are meaningful interactions.
First off, the profiles that follow you and you see most frequently commenting, liking, voting, etc are the ones you’re going to want to reach out to. These are the ones who are most interested in your business, and have interacted meaningfully to the point of following you because they want to be tuned into what you are posting.
Next, the profiles that may not follow you, but interact on a frequent basis are strong leads. As algorithms work differently nowadays, some people don’t commit to following people they like as long as that person is appearing on their feed regularly. These are still valuable people to connect with, as they are frequently interacting with your content.
For the casual followers—those who follow you but don’t interact regularly—you should wait for more frequent engagement to reach out. If they aren’t interacting with your content, they aren’t really looking at it right now, which means they aren’t really interested in real estate at the moment. When their interactions ramp up, that’s when you have an opportunity to connect.
Sending Direct Messages
While as an agent you are a salesperson in your own right, you don’t necessarily want to approach your reach-outs to followers as one. If you go in hard off the bat with “Are you looking to buy or sell,” it can feel a little disingenuous to the authentic, trustworthy personality you have been (hopefully) crafting on your socials.
When you have identified those people meaningfully engaging, center your DM conversation with an approach based on their interactions.
For example, if they have been voting in polls, you can reach out based on their answers. Take a poll on preferred kitchen styles in a home, you can reach out to a poll voter with a DM as such: “Hey! I saw you voted for the modern farmhouse kitchen over the industrial one. Are you a fan of that style, or just browsing?”
The key is to be conversational and casual, and center the DM on what your potential client has been interacting with and what that means to them. You want to probe to find out their goals, whether they just like looking and have no current plans, someone with plans that are further out, or someone looking to do a transaction in the immediate future. All are valued leads, just with different levels of immediacy to the business they will provide you (and will help you prioritize your follow-ups as such).
Once you have opened a successful conversation, and receive interest from your DM, you now have a lead you can transfer over to your follow-up lists.
