While Instagram and Facebook are usually the go-to social media platforms for real estate, here are four reasons to ditch them in favour of LinkedIn in 2020.
1. Organic reach on Facebook and Instagram is dropping, but LinkedIn is rising
Facebook and Instagram have well and truly become ‘pay to play’ social media platforms with organic reach dropping to as low as two per cent, according to Ogilvy.
This means it costs you money to reach the audience you’ve worked hard to build. On the other hand, LinkedIn still has tremendous organic reach.
If you post a useful piece of content, it is not uncommon for it to reach between two and eight times more people than you are connected to.
Say you have 500 connections, you can easily get 1,000 to 4,000 views on a single piece of content, often more. The great news is this is organic reach, which is free and you don’t need to spend a cent on boosting posts.
2. You can now post documents on LinkedIn
Speaking of content, on LinkedIn you can now publish documents, like PDFs, along with these forms of content:
- text
- image
- video
- long-form articles
This means you can repurpose each content idea into five different formats and get more mileage from your content efforts.
When you combine this with the significantly higher organic reach on LinkedIn, you’ve got a recipe for much better results.
But what content should you post on LinkedIn?
Publish information that is useful to your market rather than purely self-promotional.
I agree that videos are the hottest format for content on any social media platform, because it allows people to get to know you at scale, but they can be quite confronting to produce.
If videos aren’t for you, that’s ok because on LinkedIn you can post documents like PDFs.
This is a straightforward option to share content, and it isn’t available on Facebook or Instagram.
The good news is that since document posts are a relatively new feature on LinkedIn, they are giving them extra organic reach.
3. On LinkedIn, you can search for people according to their profession, location or industry
Most people use Facebook and Instagram socially, so you don’t know who they are in a professional sense.
Yet this information is incredibly valuable to an agent.
On LinkedIn, if you know who you’re after as potential vendors or referral partners, you can easily find them.
Additionally, a Google search for local businesses or professionals will provide a handy list of people to look up on LinkedIn.
You should also invite people you meet at open homes to connect on LinkedIn.
From here you need a nice friendly connection invitation to help grow your network.
There are many ways to approach this, including identifying mutual connections or common interests, but a go-to script is:
“Hi John, congrats on what you’re doing at XYZ. I’d like to invite you to my ‘local suburb’ network.”
I advise real estate agents to be the local champion of their particular farm area.
Nurture relationships with people in your area, help them and become their go-to agent.
A great way to do this is to learn more about them, their business, professional life or hobbies.
As an agent, you speak to many people in the area, so you can be a great connector. When you are generous and make meaningful introductions, you’ll position yourself as a trusted and popular member of the community.
4. On LinkedIn, you can contact people via email or phone
Once you are a first-degree connection with someone, you’ll typically have access to their email address and phone number simply via clicking on their contact information.
While you should never add contacts to your email newsletter without their consent, you can contact them individually via phone or email.
This contact info is one of the most valuable prospecting features of LinkedIn compared to Facebook and Instagram.
After all, the secret to success on social media is to get people off social media and engage them on email, phone and in person.
You’ll need to develop a system to move people beyond LinkedIn and into appraisals or referral partnerships.
What are the drawbacks and pitfalls of LinkedIn?
LinkedIn takes effort and commitment since you are building relationships.
I recommend allocating 15 to 20 minutes per day to do it properly.
Add the time in your calendar as additional prospecting and stick to it.
The LinkedIn mobile app means you can reach out to people, initiate conversations and post content from wherever you happen to be.
The benefits of LinkedIn far outweigh the other social media platforms.
However, regardless of which social media platforms you decide to embrace in 2020, remember not to hide behind your computer or smartphone.
Use the tools strategically to form meaningful relationships and win more listings.
