5 Mistakes to Avoid on Social Media
Go Social the Right Way
It’s a great big world out there on social media, and as someone trying to serve your community and reach more people, it may seem like a daunting task to put yourself out there in an effective way. It seems like there’s a social media platform for every letter of the alphabet these days, but our team is here to give you a little guidance by informing you about these 5 mistakes to avoid for your business on social media.
Mistake #1: Choosing the Wrong Social Media Platforms
As we mentioned above, there are many social media platforms and it can be difficult choosing or knowing which platform is right for you and your business. The first mistake that a lot of people make is choosing ALL the social media platforms all at once. Choosing to invest your time into every single platform simultaneously is overwhelming. Not to mention, when you choose to divide your energy into EVERY platform, you're not giving proper attention to each specific platform. This can have some stretching impacts to your marketing and your overall presence as a realtor in the community. One platform might get ignored for longer than it should because you’re trying to juggle too many accounts at once. When this happens, your profiles that get less love and attention may appear outdated, which can cause some potential clients to shy away.
Our best advice is to start small on Facebook or Instagram—focus on keeping your accounts healthy, fresh, current, and meaningful. When your energy is less divided, you can put more effort into the content that you're putting out. Once you start nailing your first platform, then think about expanding your reach.
Mistake #2: Creating Mediocre Content
Another big mistake to avoid is not creating your own content and/or relying too heavily on stock images or videos for your social media. Let’s face it, stock can do the trick, but people want to see the real you and the real work you do. It's totally worth it to snap pictures out in the field to make your content more consumable by potential clients.
This is also a great time to mention that different types of content work best on different types of platforms. For instance, Instagram prefers to organically showcase videos over photo content right now. It’s always a good idea to adapt your content to fit the platform you’re posting to—AND another great reason to start small and then expand.
Pro-tip: Video content is currently the most popular and most optimized medium for most social media platforms these days. Quick, consumable, and educational content can be the key to more engagement and reach from organic efforts.
Mistake #3: Hashtag Mania
Hashtags are useful, but too many hashtags are not useful. Adding these tags to your posts is a great way to increase discoverability for your business and ensure it’s categorized in the right way by the platform. Be warned, using too many tags could potentially make your content feel outdated.
Best practice is to utilize unique hashtags relevant to the platform that you are on. It isn't very common to use a lot of hashtags on Facebook, you might find it more effective to use one well-planned hashtag. That being said, Instagram sees more benefits from 6-10 hashtags on each post.
Pro-tip: Utilizing more unique hashtags is the move, as many hashtags are extremely oversaturated. For example, the hashtag #RealEstate has over 81 million posts associated with it. If you want to be more discoverable, we recommend using something along the lines of #HappyValleyRealEstate which has less than 1,000 posts.
Mistake #4: Going into Autopilot
When you put effort into your social media accounts, you will definitely see some direct return, but it can be very easy to schedule posts and never actually be 'active' on your business pages and profiles. This should be an easy mistake to avoid, all you need to do is sign into your business account 1-3 times per week to engage with people, like or reply to comments, share content into local groups, or go live about a trending topic. The best way to encourage engagement from your audience is to, well, engage with your audience. If you never respond to people or show that you pay attention to potential clients on social media, it will make your page less personable and do more harm than good. So don’t be shy, get out there and be social!
Mistake #5: Not Enough Quality Content
When it comes to social media, quality is more important than quantity. If you’re posting something onto social media, just for the sake of posting something—you’re doing it wrong. Our best advice, start small. Focus on getting 3-4 posts out per week. Consider focusing on the type of content you are posting as well. If you are only posting photos of what you are selling or sold announcements, you may not be providing enough for viewers to invest in.
Try to work some magic with your content ideas! Consider educational posts that give your viewers key insight into your field or even posts about the community you work in. Our social media pages should serve to show what we do but do even more when you show how involved you are in the community and the knowledge of your audience. When you aren’t always ‘selling/marketing’ yourself, you let your audience see your values and ALL that you do.
Go Be Social!
Hopefully you have a better understanding of some of the best ways to approach social media. The main point we’d like to leave you with is that when you put yourself out there, be intentional about it. Build a plan. Create a strategy. Start small and then expand. Your social media presence is an extension of yourself, so make sure it has the same impact as talking to you face to face does.