Whether you’re a social media junky or digital wallflower, fitting in the time to post engaging content to social media media can seem downright impossible for many agents. After a stressful day of showings, pitching, and negotiating, even the hardiest agent is more likely to flip over to Netflix than plan out a great blog post. Luckily, there are some pretty amazing social media tools that make it easy for anyone to use social media like teenager.
In this article, we cover ten social media tools that will make your life a little easier and help you stay relevant, getting more leads online. However, you will still have to go through the process of finding great content to share on a daily basis. If you are looking for a service which finds great local stories and automatically posts them, we recommend CityBlast, which provides a free 14 day trial.
IFTTT (If This, Then That) is one of the most powerful, flexible, and useful tools for organizing not only your social media, but your life as well. IFTTT makes it possible to post across multiple social networks using custom rules. Even better, you can use IFTTT for other productivity automation that will help your workflow. For example, you can create a rule to always add email attachments to Google Drive or Dropbox. Great for rental agents who get emailed application paperwork on a regular basis.
IFTTT let’s you create simple conditional statements, called Applets, that trigger an event when a website, app, or web enabled device changes. For example, you can use IFTTT to open the garage when your BMW enters your driveway, start brewing your coffee when your FitBit senses you’re awake (yes really!), sync your new Instagrams to post on your Pinterest Board, share new WordPress posts to Facebook, automatically post tweets from Facebook when you use a certain hashtag, or if you’re a Craigslist user, there’s a cool Applet that can send new Craigslist leads to your inbox.
There are hundreds of Applets to choose from, or you can even try your hand at making your own custom Applet. To learn more about creating custom Applets, check out the (unofficial) IFTTT subreddit here, or the Buffer Blog, who created this great infographic of popular IFTTT social media hacks.
THE tool for social media butterflies who manage multiple account on multiple sites, Hootsuite is designed to save social media managers time and effort by letting them schedule, manage, and measure engagement from multiple social media accounts at once. In other words, if you or your team have a Facebook page, Twitter account, Pinterest page, Instagram page, etc. instead of logging in and posting to each one separately, with Hootsuite you can post to all of them with a single click.
Since it’s also the most popular social media management tool online with more than 10 million users, finding help when you’re stuck is a snap. It also means lots of new features and updates get released and implemented quickly.
Like Hootsuite, Buffer is a social media management tool that allows agents to schedule posts on social media to post at different times during the day. For example, you can load up buffer with 25 different Facebook posts or other social media posts, and it will automatically post them one at a time on a schedule you set.
For example, maybe you’ve found that you get the most engagement from your Facebook posts around noon. You load up a week’s worth of content into Buffer and it will automatically post them on your behalf while you’re out showing, driving, or (god forbid) enjoying a nice quiet lunch with friends.
While Hootsuite and Buffer are pretty similar, Buffer offers the ability to schedule posts to Pinterest, a social media site that many Real Estate Professionals are using these days.
Tailwind is one of the best social media tools for the Pinterest and Instagram junkies out there. It offers bulk image uploading. Multi board pinning, post scheduling designed for maximum engagement, and a deep dive into analytics to track your progress. It also has a handy browser extension that lets you do it with a single click.
If you’re already getting lots of engagement and leads from Instagram or Pinterest, then Tailwind should be at the top of your app list for 2017.
Curious how using Pinterest can help grow your business? Check out NAR’s great roundup of how real estate agents are using Pinterest here.
You can find the latest mortgage news, infographics, real estate market news, as well as seeing what articles are getting the most traffic to plan fun posts not necessarily related to real estate.
Even better, you can customize your reddit feed to only get the content your audience is interested in.
Reddit’s communities, called subreddits, represent a vast constellation of interests and ideas. There are subreddits for personal finance, real estate, DIY, or even fun subreddits like /r/showerthoughts where people post gems like these;
“Do crabs think fish can fly?”
“In 20 years or so, I’m going to have to jailbreak my car to drive above the speed limit.”
Or come check out /r/Realtors to trade lead gen strategies, or /r/RealEstateTechnology to check out bleeding edge real estate apps and software.
After a few hours on Reddit your audience will think you’re the coolest, best informed Real Estate Professional in town. Just remember to acknowledge your source!
Feedly is what is known as a content aggregator. What it does is allow you to gather news, images, videos, or podcasts from many different different sources and view them all on one custom web page. For example, you can set up Feedly to pull trending stories from Realtor.org, Inman News, The Wall Street Journal, or any source that will offer up-to-the-minute news and information your audience might enjoy,
Instead of browsing a few dozen websites for great content every morning, instead, just create a feed of everything you’re interested in have everything on one site. Feedly also integrates with social media tools like IFTTT, Hootsuite and Buffer so you can schedule social media posts right from Feedly.
Okay, now that you’re finding all this amazing content for your audience and have it scheduled in Hootesuite or Buffer, how do you make sure it looks great? Enter Canva, the quick and easy way to get professional looking social media posts in 2017. Canva offers gorgeous stock templates with fonts, layouts, and imagery specifically designed for posting on social media. You can create infographics (local market conditions, recent sales, steps to buying or selling etc.), Facebook headers, Linkedin posts and more. You can also use Canva to create flyers or postcards for your listings, or graphics for your email marketing.
Even better, unlike most free graphic design tools, Canva’s stock layouts are designed by talented graphic designers so making a beautiful post your audience will adore is a snap. If you ever wondered how that top producer in your office keeps posting such well designed social media content, now you know the secret.
Let’s face it. While browsing social media, a pretty picture and a giant “play” button can be pretty irresistible. The only problem is that in the past, video editing was tricky, time consuming, and since DIY results were often subpar, frankly best left to the experts.
Not anymore. Today you can stitch together pictures, video clips, and your narration to help tell your audience your story with Adobe Spark. It’s the perfect way to create quick explainer videos for your blog posts, or highlight open houses or neighborhood tours. Best of all, Adobe Spark is free. Check out the video below to see how people are using Adobe Spark to engage their audience.
For as long as they’ve been around, free stock images have had a certain reputation for looking a little bit… unprofessional. The big sites like Magnum, had incredible pictures, but they could cost $100 or more. Luckily, today we have sites like Pexels that offer pretty great quality stock images for free. Unlike many other free stock image sites, Pexels doesn’t even require attribution for a large percentage of their pictures.
While not all their pictures are Ansel Adams quality, since they seem to focus on quality over quantity, most are very usable and some are downright great. For a good example of Pexels quality, you’ve probably seen the stock image below on dozens of real estate blogs (including this one) but I’ll bet you didn’t know it was 100% free.
You can use Pexels images along with Canva in order to create awesome custom facebook posts, backgrounds, blog post headers and more. All for free.
If you find your audience is responding mostly to the nitty gritty data, then you owe it to them to start using Venngage today. Venngage allows you to quickly and easily create charts, graphs, diagrams, and infographics all from their easy to use app. You can even upload spreadsheets directly from Google Drive and create graphs and charts instantly.
Want to tell your audience about trends in the local market without boring them to death? Make a sexy shareable infographic using Venngage.
Magisto Editor is an easy to use video editor that is surprisingly powerful for it’s relatively low price. Like Adobe Spark, it allows you to stitch together photos (think listing images or local neighborhood snaps) add music and narration and create awesome videos your audience will love. Unlike Spark, you get a much larger music library and more advanced editing features. The app can also automatically reduce camera shake, add effects, transitions and can even automatically edit your video for emotional impact using advanced AI they call Emotion Sense. Pretty cool.
Render Forest is another video editing option that you may want to try. They have templates for listing videos, promotional videos, welcome videos, and more. They also don’t require a monthly subscription.
Over to You
What social media tools are you using to engage your leads on social media? Let us know in the comment section below.
Arthur
March 13, 2017 at 7:27 amHey Emile,
Awesome list.
Thanks for your article and glad to be the first to put a comment here!
Canvas is definitely helpful, we’ve been using a lot for our listing.
Have you heard of Shakr? It’s as helpful as Canvas is but for videos.
Anyways, thanks for this, always looking for new tools is a great thing to do I guess.
Emile L'Eplattenier
March 15, 2017 at 7:31 pmHey Arthur,
Glad you found the list useful. Shakr looks very cool, but maybe a little pricey. Totally workable for a team or small brokerage though.