The digital world keeps getting more social by the day — are you in on the conversation? (Don’t worry, staying ahead of the social media game has nothing to do with where you sit at lunch, if you know what I mean.) Today, platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn can significantly affect your sales by allowing you to reach your target audiences and provide the exact content and information that they’re looking for.
As the year begins to wrap up, it’s wise to look ahead to 2020 and make some adjustments to your current social media plan. Have you introduced video into your content rotation yet? Are you analyzing the engagement of your posts and fine-tuning accordingly? Straight from our brilliant, hilarious, wildly perceptive and strategic social media department, here are our top 7 tips to make your home builder social media marketing plan as perfect as can be:
- Incorporate Video: 86% of prospective homebuyers say they’d use mobile video to learn more about a specific community they’re considering. So what are you waiting for? Now’s your perfect chance to utilize video ads and provide your potential buyers with the exact content they love to consume. IGTV created a function to more easily showcase series of videos. Construction Series? MIR Home Series? Keep em’ comin!
- What’s Up With Twitter?: Of course, you want to pay close attention to where your content works best. With many of our homebuilders, we find that Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn successfully drive traffic to websites, whereas Twitter doesn’t produce the same results. Is Twitter not working for you either? Take it out of your plan! As a rapid-fire source for news/opinions/quick laughs, this platform might be best for taking the time to connect to your buyers.
- Budget Wisely: Do you enjoy looking at and analyzing numbers and percentages? If your answer to that is a resounding no, don’t fret — with help from tools like Google Analytics, you can effectively budget your social plan so that it works to your advantage. But first thing’s first: if social is not driving at least 20% of traffic to your website, you need to be spending more (we ideally recommend $200 per community for all of social media).
- Social Media 101: Uh oh… was that the bell? It’s time to get to class! If you haven’t brushed up on your social media 101, our team here has you covered. With our social media guidelines available to download, you can get a strong grasp on all of the tactics and best practices that make good social media content great, from branding and photography to hashtags and beyond.
- Know Your Audience: If you walked into a giant cineplex, you’d find yourself surrounded by many demographics — that is, until everyone disperses into their movies. Social media is the same way. We may all be on the internet, but we spend our time on different platforms depending on our age and unique preferences. The takeaway: know each audience, know where each audience is, and tailor your messages the right way (i.e. there are typically older buyers on Facebook, so certain posts work better there than on Instagram).
- Analyze Your Content: Let’s face it: some posts just perform better than others. Your job is to see what content works best so you can fine-tune your strategy accordingly. For example, do home spotlights get a lot of engagement? Include more of them in your content calendar. P.S. remember to always add a CTA to your posts so that they take buyers to your website, but don’t be too salesy. The key is to maintain a strong mix of posts that reflects what your buyers are looking for.
- Find the Right Team: If you’ve been reading this blog and wondering where LinkedIn fits into all of this, we don’t blame you… But we can assure that it does an extremely important job — to find the right people for your jobs. When you’re looking to hire new team members, LinkedIn is your ticket to top contenders (AKA awesome people who will add value to your already-incredible squad). And by putting money behind your job ads, you can truly extend your reach to a wide range of qualified candidates who would love to work for you.
Now that we’ve gone through a few valuable tactics for your 2020 home builder social media marketing plan, are you ready to put it all into motion? All of us at g2 are excited to see what ya got! From our social media team to yours, happy fall and stay #blessed.
