It’s as simple as three little steps to improve your social media tactic in your commercial real estate marketing.
1. Remember that Instagram is a tool, not a strategy.
2. Anything that looks extremely disorganized is less credible.
3. Authenticity is an illusion.
It’s that easy, and that challenging.
Let’s look at each of these to ensure that you and your company are super successful utilizing social media as part of your commercial real estate marketing.
First, tools such as Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn are not strategies. They are social media platforms, which are just marketing tools.
No one ever says “what’s your telephone strategy?” or “what’s your in-person strategy?” The point is, social media is just one of scores of marketing platforms, distribution channels, and tactics you will want to employ.
If you’re conducting strong commercial real estate marketing, your strategy is something like “Generate awareness of the various types of industrial product and our firm’s knowledge of varying user needs in order to attract new customers.”
Then one of your tactics beneath that strategy is “Utilize social media as a rapid, cost-effective method of showing our industrial product knowledge to prospective customers.”
You can then craft specific messages for specific channels, i.e. Instagram vs. LinkedIn, as long as they all deliver the same key messages.
For Instagram and Facebook, visual representations are the highest priority. And those visuals should match the company’s brand, be it professional, whimsical, visually inspiring, or anything in between.
Second, consistency can include how your social media looks, the tone of voice, and the topic.
For an interesting example of how consistency feels, think about Saturday Night Live:
- It is consistently based on humor
- There are recurring characters.
- It’s on during a specific time.
- There is always live music.
Saturday Night Live is actually quite consistent. It’s really just the content that changes. The format is always the same.
If instead, you turned it on one night, and find that the whole hour is one long scene and the actors are doing a Shakespearean play, you would stop going to that channel.
It’s the same thing with social media followers. If you are a commercial real estate company and your social media jumps from photos of buildings, to dog parks, to people dancing in your office, to great looking tacos, to lists of legal rules surrounding lease transactions, people won’t actively follow your site.
All of these items may be interesting to your audience, but they won’t want to find all of them on your feed.
Be a consistent provider of items all about a specific key message, or geography, or product type. Select the thing that your company does differently than its competitors, and tell that story.
Third, while you should always be authentic in your commercial real estate marketing, authenticity is not the same as over-sharing.
As with your own social media, you are creating the impression you want to show the world. The most popular social media people, and companies, show positive, successful happenings.
If you have a company happy hour and a few people stay longer and enjoy additional beverages, this is also not the moment to post to Instagram.
Instead, seek authentic moments that show proof of your key messages. This will delight your audience, and serve as a great tactic in your marketing.
