As real estate agents, we’re often expected to where ALL the hats: accounting, admin, client service, transaction management, social media marketing…you name it! But, when it comes to the social stuff, the landscape changes so often, and it seems like there’s always new “what’s-working-now” strategies to discover. So, of course, we dive in, and hours later are so lost in the weeds of overwhelm that we give up on implementing any new strategies.

Sometimes, it’s helpful to take a step back and look at things from a 30,000 ft view. This Tip Tuesday, I wanted to share a high-level look the TWO types of lead generation on social media.

When it comes to social media marketing, there are really two ways to expand your reach, connect with audiences, and generate leads.

It all comes down to Paid vs Organic Lead Generation.

We’ll start with…

Paid Lead Generation

Paid lead generation is using ads to promote your content in order to get it seen by as many people as possible.

Ads and promotions can be created on Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, LinkedIn, and beyond. Basically, you’re creating a piece of content and paying these platforms to promote it so it can be seen by the right people.

You can accomplish a couple of goals using paid campaigns.

1. You can get in front of new audiences. Now when we talk about audiences, typically we think of them in terms of cold and warm. Just like leads, right? A cold audience is a group of people who hasn’t heard of you yet. Most likely, their first impression with your business will be via a target ad because you can pay a relatively small amount of money to promote your content in order to get in front of a LOT of eyes through demographic and location targeting. This is a great way to increase the effectiveness of farming, establish yourself in your market, and generally increase brand awareness.

1. You can also use paid campaigns to help make sure that you stay in front your warm audiences. There are a LOT of people on social media, and the numbers suggest that the vast majority of your database, SOI, past and prospective clients are all checking in to various social media platforms every day. Now, we know that as real estate agents, our job is to stay top of mind, so having the ability to show up where the eyes are multiple times a day is huge, right?

Paid advertising on social media, when done right, can be really effective in generating leads. As with any sort of prospecting, you just need to extend a compelling offer, in exchange for their contact information. Here are some great offer ideas:

You can run an ad to invite prospective buyers and sellers to view homes on your home search site, and have a lead capture form ready to get their email and phone number once they sign up. If you have a marketing platform that allows you to do this, you can of course also promote your new listings as well.

You can offer a free home valuation report. You could run a giveaway, where you are raffling off an item of value - try to tie that in with interests that are aligned with your audience, meaning, if you’re wanting to get buyer leads, raffle off something like a home depot gift card that they can use on settling into a new house!

You could even run an ad inviting the public to an event like an open house, a homebuyer seminar, or a community networking happy hour. The options are endless.

Now, it sounds kind of like magic, right? Throw up an ad and get contacts - great! Not so fast, there are some downsides to only doing paid advertisements.

1. This takes a lot of trial and error, which can become expensive. You really have to have clearly identified goals and a knowledge of the platforms to create high-performing ads. It’s honestly more simple than you might expect, but it does take some ground work and it’ll cost you some ad budget while you figure out what works.

2. You’re most likely to engage with cold leads. These typically will be harder to convert and some may even be completely unresponsive. Why? They don’t know you. They don’t trust you. What’s the age-old saying in real estate? People do business with those they know like and trust. You have to establish that know/like/and trust factor for this to be whildly successful. Which leads us to…

Organic Lead Generation

Organic social media just refers to building a brand strategy relying on the free tools that are already available to you from these powerful platforms.

You’re acting like a real person on social media, connecting with real people who will actually buy or sell in your favorite neighborhoods. No bots, no fake followers, no slimy gimmicks.

Building an organic presence on social media is so important. In fact, organic content on your social media profiles can convert better leads more effectively than just using paid ads alone. Bryce and I have generated far over 6-figures in the last four years using organic strategies on Instagram alone, my platform of choice,so I can tell you from experience that even if you’re wanting to get into paid ads on social media, you’re going to want to back it up with an established, authentic presence.

Why? Because if someone sees an ad from you, they are probably going to do their due diligience by looking at your social media profiles to determine if you are a trustworthy authority. If your social media strategy up until that point has looked like this -- you may have just lost a client.

An organic lead generation strategy is built on connecting, conversing, then converting.

You want to connect with the right audiences - the people on social media who are actually going to buy or sell in your area. This is a quality over quantity question: what good does 10k followers, fans, or subscribers do to you if they will never actually become a client?

My favorite rule of thumb is to just simply treat social media like an extension of your database. Connect with your friends, family, past clients, referral partners, vendors, and prospects first. Then, start posting content consistently. The most valuable content you can share is content that you think those people want to see.

Here’s a few tips to get the ideas going:

Determine your ideal audience. What clients would you procure from the perfect database? Would you niche down in first time homebuyers, luxury sellers, folks relocating to your favorite neighborhood? Get very clear on who this audience is, what they care about, and what their interests are.

Then, share content around those ideas. Maybe you’re niched down in a second-time moving up market. It’s a higher pricepoint in a great competitive neighborhood that’s known for great shopping, art, and restaurants. You want to share tips for buyers on how to make a more competitive offer, ways to stand out to have the best chance of winning the home of their dreams. Share things to do in the neighborhood, or spotlight the hottest restaurants or shops that they’ve gotta know about.

Once you do this consistently for a little while, you’ll establish a pretty good presence on social media, you can leverage that success even further with targeted paid campaigns to generate high-converting leads and gain trust and authority in your market.

That’s what I’ve got for you today - Now, question of the day, what was your biggest takeaway from this Tip Tuesday? Share it in the comments and if you have any other ideas that you’ve been thinking about around this topic, leave those in the comments too because I want to hear from you.