These include:
- What are your goals? Do you want to gain followers, drive traffic to your website, or sell property and get listings?
- Who's your target market? Find out who you are targeting and post around that demographic
- What is your competition doing well? Can you do it better, or can you do something else to beat them?
- What images are going viral? There’s always trends and you need to know what they are
- How much are you going to pay to promote your posts? Set a budget and do test runs and see what you learn
- How do you measure success? You must know what you want and then aim for that goal.
What is the benefit of Instagram?
Alexandra said: “Instagram is a great tool for a real estate agent because it's image-heavy. Real estate is about selling houses with beautiful photos.
“I like to use the 30-30-30 rule. The first 30% should be about work, the second 30% should be in the sphere of real estate like how to style your home, and the third 30% is personal. This helps to humanise you and that human element is what connects you to your followers.
“Buyers aren’t going to buy a home through Instagram, but it helps show future vendors and potential buyers who will be future vendors, who you are and how you do business.”
What is the benefit of Pinterest?
“Pinterest stands for pinning your interests and is like a Google of gorgeous, stunning photos. It tracks what you want to see and shows you what you want to see.
“Real estate agents should use it as a tool to write an article about how to renovate a property. The biggest thing with Pinterest is having a really good caption because if you don't do that right it won't go very far.
“Pinterest has 150 million users and is the top referrer of traffic to websites after Facebook. You need to use it as an example of this is what you do, because it's a great way to funnel people right through to your website.”
What is your tip to get more followers?
“The best way to get new followers on Instagram is using hashtags which get you 55% more people seeing your posts outside of your followers. A hashtag takes you to a collaboration of photos from people worldwide and great hashtags get you new followers and endears you to people.
“People are lazy and when they're scrolling through they stop reading captions at a certain point, so having graphics on the top of the image can help.
“A lot of people mistake social media as a tool to get new listings and sell houses. Social media realistically is for putting your personal brand out there, and is about that time between when a person has just bought a house and is going to sell their house.”
How should I use hashtags?
Alexandra explains that you don't want to be too broad and or too narrow with your hashtags and that you shouldn’t use punctuation. However, she added you can have fun with it.
She added: “Make sure that you hashtag your name because later down the road if you’re sitting with a new listing, you can go into Instagram, click on your hashtag and show them your postings.”
Helping your brand
“You want to make sure you're promoting your personal brand as an agent by showing your personality and being authentic.
“If you want someone to list with you, you want to get along with them too, so you want to make sure that they know the real you.”