WHY do I need social media for my estate agency business?

In our estate agency & property industry, there are still many business owners who do not use social media on a daily basis and feel that they are too old to learn. Every week we come across businesses that say:

“We don’t need social media”
“Our young staff can do it as part of their main job”
“We don’t get any business from social media”
“Our customers aren’t on social media”
“It’s easy, we can do it in-house”
“We have to cut costs so social media is off the agenda for now”

Firstly, all of the above are absolutely ridiculous statements in our world. Let’s look at why:~

We have a population of over 66 million people in the UK, over 12 million are under 16 years old and almost 9 million are over 70 years old – so we can assume young and elderly people are probably not the correct demographics for house selling or buying, or even renting, SO removing those from our overall population we are left with 45,000,000 people who may be thinking of moving home, selling, renting, investing, renovating etc.

Couple that with the fact that, over 50 million people use social media every single day, for an average of 2 hours and 25 minutes. So, YES, boy, oh boy, you do need to be using social media for your property business. Don’t ever take it off your marketing budget, you will regret it.

It takes a LOT OF TIME to plan the correct posts for your business, to brand them, make sure the voice is correct, that they are engaging, they are relevant to each of the different platforms you use (not one is the same and algorithms can be your make or break) and finally, you need to schedule your posts at the correct time each day, write SEO friendly content, alt text and geo-tag your images to ensure that they appear in Google, and use the correct hashtags. Every single day.

There is absolutely no way that your junior negotiator can do that along with their own job, it is a full-time job so if you do not have a Social Media Manager in your business, get one or outsource this work to a professional and knowledgeable digital marketing agency.

Social media is ‘white noise’ and it is in the background of everyone’s lives. It means you need consistency, entertaining content and lots of personality in order to win trust and gain your audience’s confidence in your brand. It does NOT happen overnight, quite often you won’t even realise that your social media presence has had a positive (or ~ sadly ~ negative) effect on your business, but if you get it right, you will be top of mind when someone is ready to do business with you when they are ready to rent, buy, sell, invest in a property.

Don’t chance getting it wrong, and definitely don’t put your juniors in the driving seat until they have brand experience and can harness that correctly.

Finally, if you don’t ask your customers or potential customers

~ if they use social media, can they follow you, or do they already & if they have seen your posts if social media ~

then how do you know if your social presence has affected their transactional decision?

If you would like to discuss this article or others like it, and voice your thoughts or discuss social media for your estate agency business, you can contact Jane on 01923 627777 or enquire below:

Contact Jane

Jane Gardner

I work all over the UK with various business owners, dedicating my creative and expert property knowledge from 35 years in the industry. I am a Level 4 ARLA Propertymark examiner, I sit on the board of Agents Giving Charity and I love everything property related! I can be contacted on 01923 627777 or by email to jane@social-angels.co.uk