Building Your Brand on Instagram? These Tips Can Help!

Real estate statistics consistently show that buyers do their search online. Some put it at 84 percent of Baby Boomers and 94 percent of Millennials using various websites as their primary search for real estate. With these numbers, it's no wonder so many businesses turn to social media apps to build their brand.

One popular app to build your brand online is Instagram. If you're unfamiliar with Instagram, it is a social media app that is entirely based around photography. It allows you to share pictures and short videos with people that follow you. The percent of adults using Instagram has grown from 28 percent in 2016 to 35 percent in 2018. Twenty-one percent of Baby Boomers and 34 percent of US millennials use Instagram, and overall, Instagrammers are the social networkers most likely to follow brands.

With these statistics in mind, we put together the basics to help you enhance your Instagram game and close your listings faster.

Instagram and Facebook

Because Facebook bought out Instagram back in 2012, you might notice similar functionalities across the two platforms. Sharing posts, Stories and Going Live are a few of them. Not only that, but Instagram attempts to have you connected to a Facebook account to make it easier to share posts and images across these platforms.

Having captivating pictures of your listings and posting them to an Instagram account that is paired with a Facebook business page can save you time and energy. Even if you don't have the resources for professional pictures (like an expensive camera or a professional photographer), you can still utilize Instagram's quick editing features on your phone to make your property pop and capture an audience. Instagram comes with a few easy editing tools and filters to enhance your content.

Instagram for Business

You can convert your Instagram profile to a business profile if you wish to use it to establish a business presence on the platform. You can connect your Business profile to your Facebook page. You can add a phone number, an email address and your business' physical address so that prospects can reach you easily. And, you get access to Instagram Insights, where you can learn what content is performing better and how people are engaging with your posts.

The Power of the Hashtag

Instagram is one of the more versatile tools for promoting places, products and people online. Using hashtags allows your posts to be grouped with similar trending posts and topics that people might be tracking. This feature is powerful for attracting an audience, if used correctly.

Some good ideas for this would be to include very broad and very specific hashtags in the same post. An example would be a picture of a two-bedroom cabin in Lake Tahoe with a caption like, "Beautiful 2-bed with mountain and lake view!" Then include hashtags like, "#California #LakeTahoe #Realestate #Mountainview #Lakeview #Cabins #loveyourhome" etc. You can use as many hashtags as you'd like and even tag the area of the property. (Remember to please be safe when Geotagging). Once you post it, you'll notice how fast people will start viewing the picture by the likes your post gets.

Paid Advertising

If using an abundance of hashtags isn't gaining the amount of traction you would like your post to have, Instagram and Facebook allow for paid promotion for a very reasonable price. For as little as $3 a day for a full week, a post could reach over 4,500 people and gain 1,200 likes. Any time that you pay to promote a post, you can tap on the promoted post to see detailed analytics of the post's performance. This includes the amount of money spent on the ad, amount of views, amount of likes and even audience demographics such as age, gender and location. These same analytics are also available on your Facebook Business page since they're owned by the same conglomerate.

Go Live!

The Live feature on Instagram will allow you to live stream wherever you are. This could be incredibly useful for showing off a home or property without your potential clients ever having to step foot inside. You can do a behind the scenes view of a listing and include a fun Q&A for the viewers of your live stream.

Celebrate your Success

Did you just close one of your biggest listings yet? Celebrate your success on social media. Include pictures of the property in your post and talk up your sales abilities as a means to drum up interest of what you can offer potential clients. It's also a good idea to include your other profiles in these posts so that people are more likely to add you on their different feeds. For example, if you have a video on Instagram or Twitter showing off a property a few weeks ago that you finally sold it today, you could post to Facebook, "Just sold this great home! Check out my [Instagram] and [Twitter] to view more about this property and its location!" Don't forget to add pictures. They're the key to the success of your posts!

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