If there is one thing that real estate agents understand, it is that there is an art to the hunt for quality real estate leads. These days, more and more people are turning to alternative house hunting methods like social media when it comes to looking for their future homes and an agent to work with. In fact, it may surprise you to know that there are many people turning to Instagram to connect with a real estate agent and begin their home search. However, if you are like most real estate agents, you are probably wondering if there is any real value to building a strong presence on the visual social platform. In today’s post, you will discover several reasons why it might make sense to invest in leveraging Instagram.
It Is The Perfect Real Estate Platform
If you are finding yourself with a little extra time on your hands right now, use some of your time to get acquainted with using Instagram. Whether you are a broker or an agent, developing a following on this platform is going to be more important than ever as you seek to develop relationships with younger generations of clients.
Instagram is all about visuals. As a real estate agent or broker, you are lucky to work in a very visually stimulating industry which makes it easy to create quality Instagram content. There are opportunities for you to take pictures and videos that will appeal to your target audience at almost every turn. The key is to create content that is both visually eye-catching and interesting. For example, rather than just show a before/after picture of a renovation, give some interesting information about the renovation and include some relevant and hyperlocal hashtags with the post to help it get found.
The Demographics Of Instagram Will Surprise You
With each new social media platform that hits the scene, it can be easy to judge its relevance by the initial audience demographics. For this reason, many people still think of Instagram as just a fun picture sharing app for Millennials. However, these statistics straight from Instagram illustrate something very different:
- 1 billion Instagram monthly users as of June 2018.500 million daily Instagram Stories users.110 million Instagram users in the US.34% of Instagram users aged 25-34; 31% are 18-24.51.2% of the global Instagram user base is female, 48.8% male.
As you can see from these numbers, there are a lot more than just Millennials on Instagram. In other words, there are members of your target homebuyer and home seller audience on Instagram and they will consume content from someone, so why shouldn’t it be you?
Instagram Is Great For Starting & Nurturing Relationships
The most important thing to understand is that the only way to be successful with Instagram marketing is to look at it as a relationship-building opportunity more than just another advertising platform. The beauty of Instagram is that it gives you the chance to connect with people you may have never met otherwise around a shared interest in real estate, as marked by hashtags
Meeting New People: Let’s say you are targeting first-time homebuyers and newlyweds in Chicago. You could search the hashtag #ChicagoNewlyweds to find a never-ending list of people that match your target market demographics. Start building relationships with these people by connecting with them, liking, and commenting on their posts with valuable feedback and sharing any relevant advice you can offer. It also helps to have a specific offering ready for the demographic you are targeting. In this case, something like a free e-book about how to go from “I do” to Homeownership in the first year would work well.
Staying In-Touch: You should make it a point to connect and interact with as many members of your sphere and database as possible. As you scroll through your feed, make a point of taking a few moments each day to leave valuable comments and start conversations. The more you focus on valuable, relationship-building interactions, the more productive the platform will be for business.
Creating Visual Content Is Easier Than Written Content
If you are someone that struggles with regularly writing thoughtful and valuable real estate blog posts, Instagram may be just the content marketing solution you’ve been looking for. With Instagram Stories, you can easily create smaller, bite-sized videos that take people behind the scenes in your world of real estate. In fact, the more you treat Instagram like a blog, the more likely you are to build an engaged audience.Weichert has recognized that in order to stay competitive at the agent or the brokerage level, you must be ready to embrace new technologies, tools, and processes that allow you to better serve your clients. In fact, when you keep an open mind to new technology, it will allow you to more efficiently invest in the relationships that lead to healthy real estate business. For more information about the technologies and systems that Weichert uses to give their affiliates an edge over the competition go to https://www.weichertfranchise.com/
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