THE BEST SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS FOR REAL ESTATE AGENTS IN 2022
- Andrew Thomas Steer
- Dec 30, 2021
- 5 min read
Updated: Jan 4, 2022
When it comes to social media for real estate agents, there are some clear winners (and some pretty big losers). But for every app, there’s someone championing it as the end all be all for marketing. Here are some things to consider before investing your time in a new platform.
Promoting your real estate business and listings on social media is one of the wisest marketing moves a real estate agent can make.
When done right, it’s an amazing source of leads, especially now when so many South Africans are using social media to keep in touch with others.
So, we here at Aerial Agent like to periodically take a look at the movers and shakers in the world of social media for real estate agents to help you avoid spending time and money on the wrong platforms.
Don’t latch onto the wrong statistics
It’s odd that an industry full of people who understand that “all real estate is local,” are über-impressed with statistics that aren’t.
For instance, as of July this year, the “most popular” social media for real estate agents include:
Facebook
YouTube
WhatsApp
Facebook Messenger
WeChat
A chart shows the “… number of active users in millions,” and the numbers are quite impressive.
It would be far too easy to choose from among that list of five to promote your business and be done with it. It wouldn’t be very smart though. These numbers represent worldwide users.
For instance, WeChat, known as “China’s super app,” isn’t even on the radar of most Americans. It might be a useful choice to promote your business, perhaps, if you were selling real estate worldwide, but you aren’t.
The best numbers are those that reflect the number of users in the U.S. so that you can then drill even further into the demographics of these American social media users.
When it comes to social media for real estate agents, the most important thing to consider is the age group of the average user.
For instance, your most likely buyer and seller will be at least 40 years old. Which brings me to LinkedIn. You won’t find it listed below because the demographics haven’t changed since our last update. LinkedIn remains one of the best places for real estate agent marketing.
Social media platforms ebb and flow in popularity and here’s what’s hot this in summer 2022.
190 million active monthly U.S. users (Omnicore Agency)
The king of social media, Facebook accounts for more than half of all social media usage in the U.S. (Statista)
The largest share of American users (79%) is between the ages of 30 and 49 with 18 to 29-year-olds close behind.
With the widest reach of any of the social media for real estate agents, Facebook is ideal for real estate agent marketing. The age demographics fit neatly into the average buyer/seller age range, posting is quick and engagement is a snap.
Consistency with the latter is the key to success. Don’t just post and run – visit your followers’ pages and comment on posts.
There are 105 million active monthly Instagram users in the U.S. (Statisa)
The majority of Instagram users are between the ages of 16 and 24 (Statista)
Sure, you’ll read about or see YouTube videos by agents who are loving their results from marketing on Instagram. But don’t let them sway you. Instagram is a time-consuming platform. Photos and videos have to be almost perfect if they’re to be of interest to fellow Instagrammers.
Then, there’s the fact that the audience is all wrong for real estate agents.
If you decide to choose a time-consuming social media platform, you’ll get more bang for the time on Pinterest.
There are 86 million monthly active Pinterest users in the US (Statista)
Most U.S. Pinterest users are between 13 and 49 (Pew Research)
85% of women on Pinterest use it to plan life moments, compared to 44% for Instagram and 53% for Facebook (Sprout Social)
43% plan on getting their ideal home within the next five years (Sprout Social)
Did that last item jump out at you? If not, read it again.
Yes, Pinterest is time-consuming but it’s well worth the time you spend, or the money you spend using an assistant, to post regularly to the platform.
I have a friend with a home improvement blog that started posting to Pinterest (with links back to her blog) and cross-posting her pins on Facebook. Within a few months she quadrupled her blog’s page views and tripled her affiliate income.
Check out How to Kill it with Pinterest Lead Generation for real estate agents and read about how agents are generating leads and their results.
There are 48.35 million monthly active Twitter users in the US.
38% of Twitter users are between the ages of 18 and 29
26% users are 30-49 years old
Pay close attention to the last item in the bulleted list. Slightly more than a quarter of Twitter’s users are anywhere near the age range of the average homebuyer or seller.
Furthermore, at this writing, the top 5 trending topics on Twitter are:
Donald Trump
National Chicken Wing Day
“Karens” complaining about face masks
A new dance trend to a remix of a Taylor Swift song
Hundreds of teenagers attacked a mini golf center in Memphis
Twitter might be one to save for your personal, not professional use.
Tik Tok
Tik Tok is a China-based video-sharing social networking platform. It is used by very young Americans, primarily, to post “… short dance, lip-sync, comedy and talent videos,” according to Wikipedia.
Normally we don’t include platforms that are so obviously losers when it comes to social media for real estate agents. We decided to include it this time because a buzz is starting online about it here in the U.S.
The buzz is coming mainly from marketers for whom teenagers are the target. But, yesterday, I read a blog post about a very young agent who is supposedly “killing it” with Tik Tok.
Does that mean the platform is generating tons of business for him?
Nope.
It turns out that the author is impressed with how many followers the agent has amassed (1 million), not how many leads or how much income he’s generated.
That would be, by the way, zero for both. And this is probably why:
There are 37.2 million monthly active users of Tik Tok in the U.S.
61% of Tik Tok users are between the ages of 10 and 29 (Statista)
What good is 1 million teenage followers going to do for his real estate business?
Security is the real problem with the platform, however. Amazon, Wells Fargo and other large companies have asked their employees to delete the app from their phones over fears that it “… might be tapping into emails,” and other security concerns, according to cybersecurity expert Zak Doffman at Forbes.
Besides, the young audience is useless to real estate agents. Pia Silva, who writes about small business strategies at Forbes.com nailed it when she reminded her readers that “… the purpose of marketing is to be seen by, and connect with, your target market with the hope to eventually turn them into customers.”
Choosing social media for real estate agents based on how popular you might become or anything other than the share of users in your target audience’s age range is foolish. Fish where the fish are and save the rest for personal use.
Buyers agents should look for social media platforms with the following characteristics:
A large number of users.
Largest share of users includes those 45 years of age.
The typical user makes around R1 320,000 annually.
And here’s what listing agents should look for:
A large number of users.
The largest share of users are at least 40 years of age, but older is better.
Users have a median household income of at least R1 350,000, higher is better.
A large pool of suburban users.
Key Social Media for Real Estate Takeaways
Take the users’ earnings claims with a grain of salt. It’s widely known that self-reported income is inflated (a tendency known as “social desirability bias.”) Look at Twitter users, for instance. Teenage girls dominate the site, yet the highest reported income is in excess of R1 125,000. It takes a lot of babysitting jobs to earn that kind of money.
The key takeaway here is that when researching where to spend your time with digital marketing, ask yourself the following questions:
Where is my target audience?
Which of these platforms will return the largest investment of my time?
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