Linkedin is the place to be on social media right now. According to many experts, Linkedin is attempting to grow its market share as a social media platform and as a hub of content.

Leveraging Linkedin for Real Estate Success

With this in mind, organic content (anything that’s not an advert) has a great reach right now. If you can create content that provides value and gets engagement, you can quickly and effectively build your brand and reach potential clients.

Get the Basics Right

Before you start making any posts or writing any Linkedin articles, make sure that your profile is set up correctly and professionally!

Use a work-related image for your profile picture, and fill in all the relevant information, going into detail when appropriate. If you own a real estate agent’s company, create a business page for this and link it to your profile.

Make sure that all of your contact information is up to date too. Get your job title correct, too, whether that’s “real estate agent,” “realtor” – use something that people in your area will know and trust.

Use the Job Section & Notifications

Linkedin will often notify you when a connection has a new job. If they got a new job, they might be looking to move because of a promotion and corresponding pay increase or working in a different area.

You can add a thoughtful comment to get noticed and then consider following up with an inbox/email or a further comment about relevant properties in their area.

Linkedin Articles

Articles effectively blog posts hosted on Linkedin. You can use “barnacle SEO” to get your articles ranking relatively high on Google. For example, if you wanted to rank high on Google for “Property New Jersey” and you have a new website, it’s going to be tricky to get on the top of Google for that search term.

However, if you write a post called something along the lines of “The Complete Guide to Buying Property in New Jersey” and put it in on Linkedin, you have a much better chance of ranking on the first page of the Google results for related search terms.

This can work well on websites and platforms such as medium.com too.

Social Proof

Social proof is incredibly powerful. According to some media and psychology experts, there is a reason that comedy shows are filmed in front of a live studio audience – laughter is more likely to make the TV audience laugh. 

Reviews, oddly enough, have a similar effect. Tripadvisor, eBay, and amazon owe much of their success to the trust that people place in reviews from others – even people they’ve never met. While reviews from people you know nothing about can be relatively powerful, reviews from people of the same age and status influence us the most. You can read more about the power of social proof in this study.

With this in mind, if you can get reviews from people on your Linkedin profile, it can make potential clients trust you and correspond with you when they would not otherwise. Ideally, you should identify your target market and obtain reviews and testimonials from people with the same demographic characteristics, e.g., age, job role, etc.

Linkedin Ads

While you can enjoy success using free, organic methods on Linkedin, even a small ad budget can give you a substantial competitive advantage on the platform.

There are thousands of real estate agents on Linkedin, posting relevant information for every state or area in the US and the UK; however, only a small percentage of these use any form of paid LinkedIn advertising. One excellent method that works well on LinkedIn and Facebook is creating relevant lists of properties and advertising them to your target market.

For example, if you are an estate agent in the UK, you might create a list of houses for under £250,000 with a garage on the outskirts of Manchester. If you are in the US, you might create a list of homes under a specific price, with a swimming pool, within a 30-minute drive of Miami.

You can then target people who are likely able to afford those houses and work or live near those cities.

Linkedin lead generation ads can work great for real estate, as you don’t even need a website. Always give the option to call when possible, too – people tend to want to talk to someone when they are making a high-value purchase.

Keep in mind that there is a big difference between the approaches and strategies involved in successful Google Ads campaigns and successful social ads campaigns.

With Google, you can not only target an audience; you can target people based on what they are searching for. With social media, people are not actively looking to buy a product or service, so you need to grab their attention, and it is often best to ask the audience to do something “little” or “light.”

A light or little action might be to read a post on your website, as opposed to a heavier call to action such as “Buy now” or “call us today.” On social media, it’s best to warm up an audience before trying to sell them anything.

A free offer or a free list of relevant properties in their area might be promoted in an initial Linkedin ad campaign, followed up a few days later with another ad that invites people to view specific properties or call for more information.

If you cannot check Linkedin or your phone all the time, you may wish to invest in Zapier and Moneypenny’s real estate phone answering service so that you get notified when a lead comes in, and you don’t miss any calls.

Linkedin Ads are pretty straightforward to create; there are quite a few steps involved. Having great creative assets – images and videos can be the trickiest part.

It would help if you also looked to test different types of ads and different creative, to see which works best. Here is an excellent step-by-step video tutorial on YouTube to help you get started. 

Conclusion

Linkedin has a lot of potential right now, and the organic reach possible is much greater than on any other social media platform. That being said, a combination of organic and paid advertising campaigns and strategies are likely to work best for real estate agents.

Bear in mind that people are not looking to buy a house when they are on Linkedin, so you need to introduce yourself and your brand subtly at first.