Real estate agents would agree that social media is one of the best ways to build a community and increase brand awareness.

Do you agree?

A lot of people, regardless of what business they are in, could attest to the fact that social media has contributed largely to growing their businesses, as long as it is done properly.

Success is a cycle

Industry experts suggest that success in social media is a cycle, that all begins with audience engagement and brand awareness followed by the growth of a business as a result.

It is important to understand the cycle to help real estate marketers create meaningful, effective and purposeful strategies to ensure success, achieve new business, and prepare for contingencies when the cycle starts to ebb.

Awareness and engagement are two critical elements on the path to achieving success in social media, which are critical to any social media marketing and branding strategy.

Awareness

It’s a given, regularly and consistently posting content on your social media page is by far one of the best ways to ensure brand awareness.

Two of the most popular social media platforms- Facebook and Instagram – allow account users to showcase themselves effectively and dynamically, aside from being conveniently easy and far-reaching.

A good strategy formula to effectively promote awareness is to use a good mix of promotional real estate posts and community-centric content. An effective ratio would be 80 per cent of your content focused on personal branding, offering solutions to common problems, or engaging your customers to relate and get in touch with your brand objectives, values, and mission.

The remaining 20 per cent can be allocated for listings and other business-related materials that direct attention to your business.

Remember, your presence on social media provides you with exposure and gives you more mileage to make you more visible and make people relate you to anything and everything real estate.

Engagement

Posting on social media at least once a day increases your online impressions or the amount of time that your content is displayed online and seen by people by no less than 200 per cent.

It is therefore important that you also direct your attention to engaging your audience such as getting them to like, share or comment on your posts.

While organic engagement on social media is generally low, it is not impossible to increase your numbers.

Many enterprising marketers have come up with innovative and creative ways to engage organic audiences such as holding competitions or games and then giving out prizes.

Prizes and giveaways have been found to excite people who find it fun and interesting, which also calls for them to take action on your content.

But don’t forget to consider that competitions and games are just methods of encouraging engagement, it does not focus on your core business of selling property or getting more listings.

However, do take note that engagement is a great way to make people aware of the brand and more people to recognise you, you still need to leverage social media to

Growth

When both awareness and engagement are factored into your social media campaign, rest assured that you will be able to establish your footsteps. Better yet, social media has made advertising and promotions convenient, easy, targeted, and affordable compared to traditional mass media channels.

Always remember that people get to spend more of their time on social media and the more you maintain your presence on your social media channels gives you more exposure and mileage for your brand.