Instagram for Real Estate is one of the most important aspects of social media marketing for every agent. Whether you like the platform or not and use it for your own personal purposes, whether you believe in social media in general, you simply cannot ignore the platform. Therefore, almost all agents have started using the platform for their business. While visiting agents’ Instagram accounts for our top agents’ lists in different cities we came across many mistakes agents make we found to be too important to ignore. That is why we have decided to make this webinar to tell you what you could be doing wrong.
Profile Photo
Instagram does not use a big profile photo and you can not view the photo in full size. Yet, this little photo is what users use to find out whose accounts they are looking at in different sections of the platform including, stories, comments, messages, etc.
Using a Logo
We know that some agents would rather use their business’s logo on their accounts. However, that is probably not a good idea since it fails to show others who you are. Unless your brand is well-known and easily recognized by a large number of people, using a logo on your profile will not help you at all. It might even make your profile feel less of a person; something you want to avoid on social media.
Professional Headshot
Therefore, try to use your photo and make sure the photo is the best you can do. First, your photo needs to be professional. This helps with your business image on social media. As a Real Estate agent, professionalism is your friend and a professional photo is the first step towards looking like a pro.
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Others in the photo
Avoid using photos in which there is somebody next to you. Regardless of how much the other person means to you, using such photos will confuse your audience to recognize the real person behind the business. Your profile photo should feature only you and you alone.
A Friendly Face
Look into the camera and smile. Although you want to look professional, posing as a serious face is less appealing to your audience than a friendly and smiling one. You need to appear approachable and a smile goes a long way.
Profile Name and User Name
Your user name on Instagram is your unique name people can find you with. Unlike your name which can be also used by others, your user name is yours and yours only.
User Name
To make it easier for people to find you, try to include your name in your user name as well and avoid using words like yourrealtor, etc. Of course, your exact name like johnsmith most probably will be taken by others, but you still can use a close alternative using underscore and numbers or even the word realtor (john_smith_realtor67).
Name
You might think that what could go wrong with your name on social media. Well, mistakes in profile names are not that uncommon. While searching for agents for our top agents’ list, we came across many agents who, to our surprise, had done a great job at making it very difficult or even impossible to find their real names. They go by nicknames or initials. Some even use a fake name.
So please, use your own name on Instagram and put it in your profile. Avoid using initials or nicknames like the Hot Agent, or Agent 007. They might sound cool but how is your audience supposed to know who you are? They might need to look you up on Google reviews, LinkedIn, etc. And finally using nicknames is not going to help you with looking professional.
Bio
Your bio on Instagram should provide your audience with a brief introduction of you and your business. It should tell your visitors who you are and what you do and where you work. Unfortunately, many agents fail to complete their bio on Instagram, or they use sentences that are not related to their business. Remember that your business account is primarily used for business and you should avoid using it for personal purposes. That means using your bio wisely.
Website
Your audience on Instagram will use the platform to get to know you. On the other hand, you use Instagram to educate your audience, provide them with valuable content, and allow them to get to know you on a personal and business level. However, the platform is not going to be enough for your audience to do business with you. It doesn’t matter how great Instagram is in delivering your content to your audience, you will always need to focus on your website first and try to get your audience to visit it. Social media platforms come and go it’s a great mistake to put all your eggs in one basket. So try to put your website in your profile or even better put links like linktree for your account where your users can access more links like a website or other social media profiles Etc.
No Link
While searching for agents, we realized that many agents do not have a website or they didn’t care enough to put it on their Instagram profile. This makes it difficult for your audience to contact you. After all, not all agents check their social media messages daily.
A Functional Website
But all that is irrelevant if you do not have a functional website in the first place. We found a lot of agents with broken websites and we found many more without one. We find it very hard to imagine how one agent can market their business online without having a website.
Your website on the internet is like your identity where people can find information about you. After all, nobody is going to present you better than yourself on your website.
Contact Info
Agents need to make it extremely easy for their audience to contact them. They need to put their contact info whenever possible and one of the places that you can use your contact info is on your Instagram profile. On a business account on Instagram users can click on the contact button while using the app on a cell phone to easily access a menu where they can choose to email the agent, send a message or call them. Again this is one of the places where we see agents have forgotten to take care of. Remember that if you make it hard for your audience to contact you you risk losing them. Not all of the interested people are stubborn enough to search around and find a way to send you a message.
City / Farming Area
You might find this one very surprising but it is true. Many agents forget to mention the city they working they just suffice to say that’s the other realtor and use the rest of the space they have on their profile to talk about their achievements and awards. But let’s be honest nobody cares about those. What they care about is if you can help them or not.
And the first step and find out the answer is if you cover their city or neighborhood. unless you are a very well-known agent people will not be able to find out where you work. Of course, when creating our top agents’ lists we have to go through agents’ content and posts to see if we can find hints of the location they work out but that’s us. It is close to impossible that your audience will do the same to find out who you are and where you work.
Content
Content on Instagram is almost the most important part of every agent’s marketing on the platform. This is what your audience sees from you. This is how you reach out and try to create a meaningful relationship. In this section, we will cover some of the most common mistakes agents make using Instagram to share content.
Few Posts
When we wizard real estate agents’ Instagram profiles we sometimes stumble upon accounts that have few posts ranging from 10 to 50. Unless you have created your account recently and have few followers, a low post number is a huge deterrent for your new audience. After all, why should people follow your account if there is not much in it? Even if you have a lot of followers you need to have a decent number of posts to show people that you take your Instagram business seriously and it is worth a follow.
Irrelevant Content
We have seen this one in the Instagram account of Experienced Realtors where the agent posts everything which is not related to real estate. They post about their personal life, fashion, family, holidays, parties, Etc but you rarely find anything that does even come close to real estate.
This is a big mistake. Unless you consider yourself to be a celebrity, you want people to follow you on Instagram for Real Estate if you want to make leads on the platform. If you do not care for its leads well that’s a different story.
Mixing Business
The next in line is when agents use a single Instagram page for another business along with the real estate business. We have seen agents who promote their fitness, fashion, cooking, art, etc businesses with their real estate business. n this case, we found images of a cake next to the images of their listing. You might find it interesting but remember that you cannot target two very different types of people on the same channel. Everything from your tone of voice to the messaging is going to be very different. Your audience for Real Estate will not even care for your other business and may even find it annoying to see its content. You like both of your businesses but that doesn’t mean it is the case with your followers.