Best Practices: LinkedIn for Real Estate
With more than half a billion professionals using the platform, LinkedIn has built a solid reputation as the most trusted social media platform a business can use.
LinkedIn’s mission statement is to “connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful.” With a suite of advertising tools and features geared toward businesses, you could also add “connect the world’s professionals with companies in which they’re interested” as a second mission. LinkedIn is centered around facilitating connections between professionals, leaders, companies, and clients, and is a great place to build your real estate brand’s reputation online, especially given the high level of trust and credibility users associate with both the platform and the strategies you can use to connect with them.
It’s also one of the best social media platforms for generating leads.
If you’re considering how to use LinkedIn to boost your real estate business continue reading to discover what you absolutely need to know to get the most out of LinkedIn for real estate. If you’d like to get more information or have already leveled up your social media strategy, let’s connect to discuss what’s next for you and how you could go about achieving it.
The Basics: LinkedIn for Real Estate
Before you begin posting on LinkedIn, be sure to set up a business profile for your company so it can be easily searched and found by potential clients, employees, and partners. On your company page, fill out all of the information for your company name, email, phone number, and location. Make sure your company name, email, phone number, and address all appear exactly the same on LinkedIn as they do on your website and across all of the other online properties you manage (such as your Facebook page, Google My Business page, etc.). Finally, be sure to link back to your website from your LinkedIn business profile page.
7 Ways to Leverage LinkedIn for Real Estate
- Build Your Reputation. As a highly trusted social media platform, people frequently turn to LinkedIn to research companies and brands. LinkedIn is known as being a goldmine for potential customers and partners to validate decisions and get to know you. Highlighting client successes and testimonials, company recognition and awards, and team members and partners are just a few ways to positively build your brand online. LinkedIn is a platform for professionals, so you want to make sure what you’re highlighting is representative of your company’s or team’s culture, and there’s been a long trend of leaning into your authentic self, sharing values, and getting more personal to strengthen the connections you are creating on LinkedIn.
- Stay Top of Mind. LinkedIn is also a great place to share visual content that captures your audience’s attention and keeps them engaged with your brand. Post videos such as listing videos, interviews, and testimonials, and keep in mind they don’t have to be professional level quality to be highly engaging. If you’re unsure what to start, check out six tips for creating amazing videos here.
- Be an Industry and Community Thought Leader. Unique, relevant, and eye-catching content is necessary to demonstrate your expertise and ultimately attract leads. It’s also important to keep in mind that content includes both what you post for original content and what you like, comment on, and share. Share blog posts from your website with a strong call to action, link to the post, and text that adds context as opposed to just regurgitating the blog’s title. You can also upload content directly to LinkedIn, like videos and photos, and still provide a backlink to your website. Similarly, LinkedIn makes it really easy to share and engage with posts from other industry leaders, peers, partners, and more, which is essential for positioning your page as a go-to resource for all things real estate and all things related to your market. To get the most out of LinkedIn, be active. Aim to post 3x a week and make sure to interact with others, including anyone who comments on one of your posts, as well as others within your industry and community. Follow similar pages and look for other businesses that share your values. Engaging with them is a great way to be introduced to a whole new potential audience: their followers. Make sure to balance for whom you’re creating and posting content as you likely want to use LinkedIn for agent recruiting and retention, as well as to capture buyer leads and get more listings online.
- Create a Network. Perhaps the best way to leverage LinkedIn for real estate is to connect with and follow others. By connecting with leaders, peers, coworkers, and others who inspire you, you’ll be able to stay on top of trends, market updates, and best practices that will help your business. As a benefit, you’ll also strengthen your visibility and generate leads. LinkedIn has features where you can market to your connections, such as by downloading your connections’ email addresses to use for remarketing and leveraging LinkedIn advertising in-app to target your network, so spend some time every week growing your network. We recommend personalizing your messages when you reach out to connect with others as they’re more likely to accept your request to connect if you do, and you’ll be better able to grow your network accordingly. Tools do exist to reach out to potential connections, especially for recruiting purposes, en masse, though depending on your goals they may or may not make sense to add to your outreach strategy.
- Encourage Employee Engagement. Your employees are some of your best brand advocates and they may have 10 times more LinkedIn connections or followers than companies. As you post on your company page, encourage your employees to engage with the posts by liking, sharing, or commenting. Doing so will help your company extend its reach to a larger audience. We also recommend identifying personal pages to promote and testing and evaluating the level of engagement you see from those pages vs. the company page. There’s value in elevating individuals as well as the company, especially when they have a large audience. LinkedIn users generally trust content other users share so the opportunity is to lean into that and leverage both individual and company connections.
- Create Your Own LinkedIn Group. LinkedIn has the ability to create groups, similar to Facebook groups. Groups are a collection of people who share the same interest(s). By creating groups, you’ll be able to interact with members of your target audience, fellow agents and brokers, community members, leaders, and even prospective employees (think of a “Getting Started in Real Estate” group). You can also join existing groups. You’ll have access to valuable information that can help your business and can also be a resource for others. Keep in mind that some groups are private, so you’ll have to be approved before you join, and others are open to the public.
- Utilize LinkedIn’s Advertising Tools. Like with so many other social media platforms, LinkedIn has built-in advertising tools for real estate to help extend your reach against your desired audience. For LinkedIn, you can use sponsored content to boost well-performing posts to specific people. LinkedIn provides both text and visual ad formats like carousel images and video, which we highly recommend especially for mobile.
As with any real estate digital marketing channel, it’s important to test which LinkedIn strategies are best for your goals. Understanding LinkedIn insights will help you identify your best performing content so you can adjust your strategy accordingly. If you’re looking at augmenting your current social media strategies for real estate by adding LinkedIn, we also recommend developing a content calendar that helps you segment themes and messaging by audience and channel. What works on Instagram is not necessarily going to perform best on LinkedIn, so it’s definitely worth it to put in some upfront planning and be intentional about what you’re creating before you get started.
Want more information about using LinkedIn for real estate? Connect with us today to strategize on the most effective digital strategy for your business.