Here at Chronicle Republic, our mission is to help property and interior professionals create engaging and meaningful strategies in order to optimise their reach to their target market. All too often however, we see some strategies (or lack thereof) that get it completely wrong. Are you trying the social media thing but not seeing any results? Don’t give up, as social media is the most powerful tool in modern day marketing practices. So if you’re struggling – read on to see if you’ve been committing these social media mistakes!

1. No social media strategy

Like every aspect of business strategy, it is integral that the meaning of the brand is explicitly clear and is easy to understand for your target audience. Moving beyond this, if you operate in a saturated market (like real estate or interiors) then you must have a clear point of difference – how do you stand out from the rest of the competitors? If you lack this understanding, then it is important that you go back to the drawing board in order to ensure you have a strong foundation upon which to build your social strategy.

Once you are confident you know what you’re selling and why – it’s important to identify who exactly you are selling to. Don’t approach this simplistically i.e. “home owners in X suburb” as this will limit your strategy and give a superficial understanding of your target market. Rather, build an “ideal client” with various demographic, psychographic and lifestyle characteristics. For example, one possible ideal client, Jill, may have the following characteristics: young mother, income of $60,000, likes the lifestyle choices that suburb X offers such as local cafes, nearby school, swimming club, enjoys shopping at antique stores and is willing to travel to find pieces to suit her home etc.

You can reiterate this process until you have a portfolio of around 5-10 ideal clients. This an incredibly important process particularly when it comes to Facebook advertising, so make sure you take the time to do your research and complete this step properly!

Finally, you’ve got to have a clear idea of your business goals so set targets, KPI’s and implement processes to measure your efforts. You may think you’re doing well but numbers don’t lie!

2. Lacking an objective behind every content piece

While you may think your posts are engaging and funny – with an odd meme here and maybe a low-quality photo of you and friends there, lacking an objective behind each content piece is serving your channels a huge injustice. As such, it is paramount to your social media success that you implement a clear strategy – and this should be more involved than simply “list more properties”. In fact, every image, video, blog etc. must have an objective and this should be to engage, entertain, build awareness, inspire, or anything else that relates to your business.

3. No consistency – must develop anticipation from customer base

Without consistency, you overlook the opportunity to develop anticipation from your customer base, giving your target audience no real reason to return to your page. It’s best to avoid leaving your content post scheduling to the day before. Instead, have a structured, holistic approach to your content each month, maybe implementing subtle changes in order to see what response your audience is giving. Further to this – you can start to identify the best posting times relevant for your market, optimising your potential reach.

4. Not dedicating enough resources (time and money) to social media – this is not a free advertising platform!

Social media has evolved to so much more than just a networking platform – it is now a powerful marketing tool, and by properly harnessing it, your business can achieve a huge competitive advantage. As such, resources for social media marketing should be allocated from your marketing spend. In this day and age, it is as important (perhaps more so) than print, direct mail, newsletters, email, advertising or any other marketing initiative.

However what a lot of business owners overlook is the required time to effectively manage this tool – approx. 25 hours per month is required, which does not include the production of original content such as videos, photography and live videos.

5. Leaving it to the ‘young people’

It’s easy to think that social media is only for the tech savvy millennials who seem to spend the majority of their time on the network. In reality, however, social media marketing is not simply posting a few images and listings onto Facebook anymore, and it takes a lot of effort to stay on top of the new technology, rules, and trends to ensure that you are implementing the optimal strategy to reach your target market. If you don’t know what you are doing and how social media algorithms work you could be doing long term damage to your social media reach or missing out on potential opportunities.

Social media for business is complex – it is very different to personal social media. It can’t be taught in a simple one day course and the systems are constantly evolving and changing. Getting it right takes time and effort, which is why there are now entire businesses dedicated to social media marketing.

6. Not connecting with people

So let’s say you’ve created yourself an Instagram profile that is high quality, value based and well thought out and you may still not be achieving the results you deserve!

Why? Engagement is the key to success!

We aren’t going to lie, this is a laborious, time-intensive process that requires patience. In order to get the best engagement, you must connect and interact with your audience one-to-one on a regular basis – and don’t expect them to come to you. This process can’t be entirely automated, may be slow to see results and definitely requires time dedicated to it EVERY DAY.

7. Not targeting the right people – or no targeting at all

All too often, accounts never gain traction due to the methods they employ when trying to reach their audiences. Similarly, accounts may seem to have a big following – but it is all for nothing if it’s not targeting the RIGHT audience. You want people who are going to consider your services as an option in their decision-making process, not just follow for the sake of following or liking and never even looking at your page. As such, it is paramount for you to know who EXACTLY you are going to target, and the tools and methods you are going to utilize in order to reach them.

Don’t let a lack of social media strategy impede your business ambitions!

Chronicle Republic is a boutique Sydney marketing consultancy for real estate and interiors professionals.

We help our clients tell their brand’s story through engaging and meaningful marketing that captures the attention of new and potential clients.

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