Social media for an agent whose business runs on the sphere

The job a feed does between closings

A household buys or sells only a handful of times, and the agent who helped last time is easy to lose track of in between. Covering that gap is the job a feed is actually good at. Somebody you sold a house to four years ago hears a coworker mention moving, and whether your name comes up depends on whether you have stayed visible since: a post about their street, a photo from an open house two blocks over, a plain answer to a question buyers tend to ask at closing. It keeps you present between transactions without calling anybody.

What a feed rarely does is hand you a stranger who plans to list next month. That person is comparing agents on purpose, by searching, asking around and reading, and a post that happens to scroll past is a weak way to reach them. Catching them is the job of local search work for agents, and the wider picture for this trade is on real estate marketing.

So we treat social as upkeep on relationships you already have rather than the main source of new business, and we say early how much of it is worth building. It is easy to spend an hour a night on a feed and never learn whether it produced one call, which is why the tagging described below comes before any posting. What we do on social for any local business, before the real estate rules come in, is on the social media marketing page.

What your own site does every time a link gets shared

Most of what decides how an agent comes across on social happens before anybody posts, and it sits on your website rather than on the platforms. We build it into the site from the first day instead of selling it back to you as an add-on.

• Link preview cards that hold up in a text message. An agent's real distribution channel is a text. You send a client a listing, a neighborhood guide or your bio, and what lands on their screen is either a card with a photo, a headline and a line of description, or a bare address with nothing attached. We build those cards and test them on the pages you actually send, in the apps where they get pasted.
• Reviews where your bio link lands. The link in your bio often ends up pointing at a brokerage roster page or a search screen. Point it at a page of your own instead, where client reviews sit beside your listings and a way to reach you.
• Listing photos sized once, for both places. The photographer's files arrive large, and each platform crops them its own way, so a wide kitchen shot that looks fine on a portal gets cut through the island in a feed. We process a set once into sizes and crops that suit your site and the platforms, so the gallery on your own listing page loads before a buyer parked in the driveway gives up on it.
• Tagging, so you can tell which post did anything. The bio link and every link you post carry a tag for the platform and the post, so a social visit sits beside every other source instead of in a pile marked direct. When a past client's neighbor fills in your contact form, you can see the visit came in through the post about that street. Those visits feed the kind of first-party lead dashboards we have running on more than 20 of the sites we manage, and the setup lives under analytics and CRO.

None of it is billed monthly, and none of it has to be redone after a brokerage move. The method is on how we build.

Posts that start as a neighborhood guide

Much of the social an agent is handed is the same material the rest of the office got: a market-update tile from the brokerage, a just-sold template, a holiday card with the logo in the corner. None of it is wrong, and none of it tells a reader why they would call you rather than the agent at the next desk who posted the same tile that morning.

If content or search work is already running, most of the material problem is solved. A guide to one subdivision, a page on what happens between contract and closing, an answer about selling a house with a tenant still in it: each is already written, already approved, and good for several posts. Say the month's writing produces one town guide and two seller answers. That is three pieces of work paid for once, each good for a short post, a caption under a photo from that street, and something worth sending to a past client who lives there. That writing is our side of the work, and you can judge it before paying for any: the learning library on our blog holds 361 in-depth guides. The engine is described on content marketing.

The rest has to come from you: the street you keep showing, the permit sign on the corner lot, the question three buyers asked in the same week, answered without naming any of them. Nobody outside your car can supply that, so our part is a written routine sized to a real week, covering which neighborhood shots are worth taking between appointments, what to say under them, and what happens in the stretch when three files close at once and nothing goes up. With no content program to draw from, the starter run and the routine are quoted flat on their own. More on marketing an agent's business sits in our guide to real estate marketing.

What an agent has to think about before hitting post

A licensee posting about property is advertising, whether or not it feels like it, and several sets of rules follow the post around.

• Your license and your brokerage. Advertising rules generally reach wherever the advertising appears, a profile bio and a single post included, and state rules commonly want the brokerage identified. Your state commission's rule and your broker's policy decide the wording and where it has to sit, so settle it once and write it into the routine every post follows.
• Fair housing reaches captions and hashtags. Captions get written fast, and a hashtag is copy too. Describe the house and the street, never who you imagine living there. A boosted listing post is also a housing ad, which Meta runs under a restricted special ad category with much of the usual audience targeting removed.
• Photo rights. Listing photography is usually licensed for marketing that listing rather than owned outright. Reposting another agent's photos, or your own after the file closes, is a question for whoever holds the copyright.
• What the client agreed to make public. A sold post with the address and the price, or a closing photo with their name tagged and a location pin on it, is a fact about somebody else's life and money. Some clients are delighted, and some are moving for a reason they have not told their family. Ask first, every time.
• Review requests do not belong in a post. A post asking followers for reviews reaches friends, relatives and other agents who never did a deal with you, so the ask stays in the file, one identical request to every client, as set out on reputation management for real estate agents.