8 Ways To Improve Your Instagram Marketing As A Real Estate Agent

As a Real Estate Agent Instagram is a great way to connect and engage with the people in your local area. With over 300 million monthly users and over 2.5 billion likes daily there is a huge amount of your audience out there actively using the social platform.

If you aren’t already using Instagram it might be time to sign up for an account

I have put together eight tips to take your Instagram marketing to the next level.

1. Determine Objectives

Before starting any marketing initiative it is important to understand what your goals are and what you are looking to achieve from your marketing.

Your objectives could be a combination of:

– Grow a following

– Expand your reach

– Stay relevant to the marketplace

– Network with local businesses

– Remain top of mind

 

Here are a couple of questions to ask yourself when creating an Instagram marketing strategy.

1. What will Instagram give you that other social networks won’t?

2. Who is your target audience?

3. What types of content are they going to engage with?

4. How will Instagram integrate with your other networks in your social media strategy?

 

Instagram provides a couple of benefits over other social networks.

Firstly Instagram isn’t saturated yet. By this I mean that peoples news feeds aren’t clogged up yet like they have been on Facebook and Twitter. The frequency of content posted on Instagram is lower as the quality of the content is usually higher than other social networks.

Users are learning from other social networks where they have followed a huge amount of people and as a result see less posts from the people that matter to them and a lot more unrelated content. On Instagram people are following fewer accounts and as a result are engaging more with the ones that they are following.

 

2. Content Strategy

The content that you post on Instagram needs to be well thought through.

When somebody comes across your profile for the first time you want them to be able to easily establish what your account is about. The easier it is for them to identify what is going on in your posts and if there is a consistent theme the more likely they are to follow you.

Here are some questions to ask yourself when deciding what content you want to post to your account:

– What does my target audience want to see?

– How can I get them to engage with my photos?

– How can I make myself different from other agents in the area on Instagram?

– What will get people talking about me?

 

3. Bio

Your Instagram bio is valuable real estate that you can use to describe let people know more about yourself, the areas you operate in and other important information.

Most importantly it is the only place on Instagram that allows you to link out of it to your website.

Make sure to capitalise on this and include a link back to your personal site, where people can find out more information about you as an agent.

Here are a couple of  well written bio’s of Australian Real Estate Agents.

4. Great Images

Instagram users reward high quality pictures.

Make your images personal. Post behind the scenes images preparing for an open home. If you’re at a local business or school fete take a few snaps for Instagram.

People want to engage with real people, make sure you are relatable and interesting to your audience.

Curalate studied more than 30 image features across 8 million Instagram images. Here are the results:

– Images with high lightness generate 24% more likes than dark images

– Images with high amounts of background space generate 29% more likes than those without

– Images with blue as the dominant colour generate 24% more likes than images that are predominantly red.

– Images with a single dominant colour generate 17% more likes than images with multiple dominant colours.

– Research done by Bakshi found that photos with human faces were 38% more likely to receive likes and 32% more likely to receive comments.

Obviously there isn’t a set recipe for Instagram success, experiment with your audience and find what drives the most engagement from them.

 

5. Captions

While the image is the star of the show a clever/witty caption can take a good post and make it great. Captions are limited to 2,200 characters. Experiment with different lengths of captions to see which ones your audience connect with the most.

 

6. Hashtags

Hashtags act as keywords allowing people to find your photos through a simple search.

Below is a list of the top 25 most used hashtags on Instagram.

1. #love more than 696 million posts

2. #instagood 314 million posts

3. #me 297 million posts

4. #tbt 272 million posts

5. #cute 258 million posts

6. #follow 258 million posts

7. #followme 238 million posts

8. #photooftheday 237 million posts

9. #happy 220 million posts

10. #tagforlikes 220 million posts

11.#beautiful 212 million times

12. #girl 202 million times

13. #like 193 million times

14. #selfie 185 million times

15. #picoftheday 174 million times

16. #summer 168 million times

17. #fun 163 million times

18. #smile 161 million times

19. #friends 160 million times

20. #likeforlike 159 million times

21.#instadaily 154 million times

22. #fashion 146 million times

23. #igers 144 million times

24. #instalike 135 million times

25. #food 133 million times

 

While using some popular hashtags can bring you in more followers and likes, they aren’t necessarily the right followers if they live in another country or state. So don’t rely solely on popular hashtags on each of your posts.

Instagram allows you to use 30 hashtags per post but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you should.

A study by Track Maven found that, for Instagram accounts with less than 1,000 followers, posts with 11 hashtags received the most interactions (likes and comments). For accounts with more than 1,000 followers, posts with five hashtags received the highest average interactions.

Do some research on what hashtags are popular in your local area. Browse through your audiences accounts and see what kind of hashtags they are commonly using.

 

 

7. Add Photo Map

Also known as geotagging. Instagram allows you to attach a physical location to your images.

Use geotagging when at local events and coffee shops and engage with others who have posted images in that location.

Geotagging is a great way to show the marketplace that you are a local and are involved in the same community as they are.

 

8. Follow The Right People

Following someone in the hope that they will follow you back is a strategy used by many to grow their follower numbers.

Don’t just follow anybody, follow people directly in your target market.

Look for people who are following local sporting teams, businesses and cafes. These are the kinds of people that you.

If you want to increase your chances of people following you back, don’t just blindly follow them in the hope that they will return the favour.

Instead engage with members of the local community. Follow someone, like a couple of their photo’s, leave a comment and your chances of them following you back have dramatically increased. Plus you have started to build the relationship with that person now.

No longer are you just another account on Instagram, you are a real person that they have talked to.

Engagement with potential clients is incredibly beneficial, try it out on 100 accounts and see what your results are.

Instagram is a great way to communicate and remain top of mind with your ideal clients, but it is only one piece of the puzzle. A personal website is the hub for all your online and social media activities. Talk to us about getting your own personal website today! 0413 845 461