Save time on social media by taking it one campaign at a time

Last time, we did some soul searching to uncover a social media strategy that’s a perfect fit for your audience and schedule. Finding your business objective, unique selling proposition, audience characteristics, and social media channel strategy were all essential first steps toward a plan of action. Now you’re ready to start your first social media campaign.

Below you’ll find some of the best available advice for building a manageable, measurable social campaign that’s bound to get attention.

Success tip: Bring social media down to size by thinking in terms of discrete campaigns—with a clear beginning and end.

Pick a theme.

Your active listings are a unique asset for social media marketing and an unusually rich place to start your first social media campaign. Review the properties in your portfolio. Is there one or two that seem especially attractive? What struck you about the home in your first walkthrough? Perhaps there was an unexpected openness to the living room or a charm to the dining room that you couldn’t capture in the listing description. What can you do through social media to coax this quality out of the property?

Or take the same idea in another direction: use a particularly attractive listing as inspiration to make your own architectural style book on Pinterest.

Success tip: Open house coming up? Try Facebook’s local awareness ads to draw a crowd. (Apparently it works.)

A good campaign theme could come from your company culture, too. Just as Google uses their LinkedIn page to seed their reputation for stellar HR, you might build your social media campaign around a secondary aspect of your business—like great customer service or local hospitality. Organizing a campaign around a local event is another great way to add depth to your brand—especially when the event is for a good cause that neighbors can rally around.

Whichever route you choose, shoot for share ability!

Write 3 blogs (for the month).

Once you’ve got your theme, it’s time to get down to brass tacks. Web marketing strategists agree, a good blog is essential for social media success. While Facebook and LinkedIn are both valid forums for a blog, if your goal is to drive traffic from your social accounts to your website, it’s best to house your posts on your company site.

How often should you post? For smaller companies, there’s a tipping point at 400+ posts after which engagement escalates, but that’s no reason to rush into publishing 11 posts-a-month. Give yourself a chance to develop a maintainable writing schedule. Start with three short posts a month. There’s seems to be good reason for restraint in real estate content marketing these days, anyway.

How long should your blog posts be? QuickSprout’s Neil Patel likes a generous 1,500 words, but don’t let that deter you if prolixity’s not your thing. A batch of well targeted, 300-word posts with high quality links will be just as effective to help you reach your social campaign goals.

Success tip: Consider sharing your best content more than once on Twitter and Facebook.

Schedule 1 post and 2 tweets a day.

As a Realtor®, you have a huge leg up on other content marketers in your tours and listings. They give you a store of readymade, relevant content to post each week, which you can then supplement with your campaign content.

How often should you post? Whether it’s a full 9 tweets a day or not, the important thing is to establish a routine that works for you. Start out your campaing by scheduling 1 post (Facebook/LinkedIn/Google+) and 2 tweets a day. That will give you feel for the way your audience wants to interact on the different platforms.

And keep in mind, a good social content scheduler gives you some leeway with timing. For example, you can schedule the week’s posts on Sunday evening if you like.

Whatever the frequency you choose, the 80/20 rule for self-promotion is a good yard stick: for every 8 general interest posts, send only 2 that directly promote yourself and your business.

And the optimal length for your social posts? Try to keep tweets to 100 characters and Facebook characters to 40. But why take our word for it? Ask these adorable zoo animals.

Schedule time to respond and say thanks.

Lastly, it’s good to remember that publishing on social media is an invitation to dialogue. As Florida Realtor® Avarie Hannah put it: “It is not an option to not check your social media daily. Social media is 100 percent public.”

Here again, the watchword is consistency. Whether you’re publishing every day or not, checking your account every day is a smart move from both a PR (damage control) and a customer service perspective.

Success tip: On Twitter, it’s often the little things that count the most for getting shared and earning new followers—like sending a thank you tweet for a share.

With a theme in place, blogs, posts and tweets going out, and regular time blocked off for response, your social campaign is well founded and on its way to success. Now there’s just one more (actually kind of fun) step: measuring our success!