Using Social Media to increase your traffic on your Real Estate Website.
Which social media is best for Real Estate?
The absolute best social media platforms to promote yourself as a Real Estate Agent is YouTube and Pinterest hands down, and I’ll tell you why. If someone searches Google for a specific topic (lets say home staging tips) and you have a YouTube video or Pinterest Picture with those specific key words, your posts will come up in Googles Organic searches (even 5-10 years later) whereas your posts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn do not appear in Google Searches and disappear quickly in peoples newsfeeds and streams. So a single well worded post in YouTube or Pinterest can benefit you for many years to come, think what many of them could do for your traffic!
Pro’s and Con’s for different Social Media Platforms
YouTube
Pro: As mentioned, YouTube does not have a shelf life, you post today, and your videos will be relevant and searchable for many years to come continuing to bring more traffic to your real estate website. YouTube has 1.9 Billion users every month and is the second most visited website in the world (Facebook is the first!). The videos on YouTube are very easy to share on other social media platform. Because the videos are stored online, you don’t have to store and host the videos yourself costing you nothing. The Platform allows people to subscribe to your channel which will notify them whenever you add a video and you can easily use these videos to embed on your website as well.
Con: YouTube has a ton of Ad’s on their site and video’s, although you can disable the ads on your video’s, there will always be Ad’s plastered on the page which is a distraction of what you are showing your readers and can easily deter them elsewhere, so it requires you to make your Description and Video very eye catching to keep people from wandering away.
Pro: Like YouTube, the Pins last forever, they don’t disappear shortly after you wrote them like the other social media platforms. Your Pins are indexed in Google Search and can be found when people search Google and Pinterest for specific key terms for many years to come, so your efforts today will reward you for a long time. Pinterest is image based and for Real Estate Agents, there are a lot of ways they can use Pinterest to drive traffic to their site as the most popular searches in Pinterest are around the industry of Fashion, Home and Garden, Food and Beauty. These are perfect for Real Estate agents who can post images of home staging, curb appeal, backyard landscaping to name a few. Each of these pins can link back to their site or blog to increase traffic which builds their website rank in Google.
Con: Searching by keywords is how people on Pinterest will see your posts. It is critical that you determine which key words will attract you the audience that can translate to clients.
Pro: Facebook is the MOST visited website in the world today, it has over 2 billion active users and the average person spends an hour a day going through their Facebook feeds. Wow, that’s a lot of time, 30 hours a month people spend on Facebook! This platform does make it easy for communication and having a simple way for people to reach out to you and find your contact information or contact you directly through the platform.
Con: In the beginning of 2018, Facebook made a change to their algorithm in an attempt to show people what interests them more and show them less all the other stuff. In this process it would show people more videos and pictures they can view right on their newsfeed (without leaving the platform) instead of showing them links that then direct them to another page such as your website or blog or listing details page. The algorithm also looks at the amount of interaction the reader may typically have with your business page and the less they have liked or commented on your posts, the less your posts will be displayed in their newsfeeds. So Real Estate Agents looking to attract people from their Facebook page to get more traffic to their site or listing updates will only get a small percentage of their posts actually to show up in the newsfeeds of their followers unless you are wanting to pay for Facebook Ad’s which can get pricey.
Pro: With only 140 characters per post, it isn’t highly time consuming to send out updates (although this can also be a con limiting the amount of information you can provide). It does have the hashtag (#) benefit where you can hashtag keywords that people can then search. With 126 Million daily users, that is a lot of potential!
Con: Although you may have a ton of followers, you may not get a ton of responses from your tweets, this is why; when you tweet something, it gets put in the stream of your followers, and the more accounts the reader followers, their streams will be packed by posts and the first in will get pushed down the list as more and more of posts get added, therefore your post may not be seen ever at all. With so many people out there tweeting, it takes a lot of work to keep your tweets noticed without spamming your followers (who will then just unfollow you).
Pro: Instagram is also a large platform of over 500 million users. The largest demographics of Instagram users are 18-34 making up 64% of users. Like Twitter you can use hashtags to boost your post visibility. Instagram users are more engaged than Facebook and Twitter as it is very easy to take a picture and post it on your Instagram so the more engaged they are on the platform, the more likely they will see your post before it makes its way down the feed.
Con: The main issue with Instagram is that it is completely photo based, so not only do you have to be very creative in which photo you post to attract a reader, you can’t link back to your site or blog from the post itself but you need to direct people to your bio to click on a link, this is an additional step which will loss many readers.
Pro: LinkedIn seems to be misunderstood by many people as to how to use it to its full potential. It is a platform for people to network and help people with job opportunities. Often with getting a new job, it helps a lot if you know someone from the inside, and with 6 degrees of separation there is a good chance you know someone who knows someone that can get you an in. As a Real Estate Agent, this can certainly help you find people to team up with and /or organizations to join.
Con: As a Real Estate Agent who is looking to increase traffic to their website and or their listings, this platform is not ideal. LinkedIn is a very passive platform where people do not check it regularly, or share or link posts like they may on other platforms. Similar to Facebook, LinkedIn has their own algorithm to show the reader what they think you would want to see based on your interests and engagement on the platform and not everyone will see all posts.
I hope this information has provided you some good food for thought when deciding how to promote your real estate website and listings online!
