Social Media Marketing for Commercial Real Estate

With an appropriate social media marketing strategy, you can drive results for your commercial real estate business.

But there’s a right way to do it, there’s a wrong way to do it, and it’s not as simple as posting to Facebook every day and waiting for the phone to ring.

In this blog, we’ll shine a light on the most effective social media strategies for our commercial real estate friends. Let’s take a look:

Effective social media marketing is about targeting a specific audience (or audiences) and having a plan. Before you kick off your social media campaign, ask yourself these fundamental questions:

1. Who am I trying to reach?
2. What social channels does my audience frequent?
3. What is my action plan for reaching them?

Let’s take a look at these questions in real life:

Define Your Audience

Sketch out a profile of who you’re trying to reach. Include demographic data, location data, and when they’re online. The more you understand who you’re trying to reach, the more effective your social media strategy will be.

Focus on the Right Social Media Network

Now that you know who you’re trying to reach, you can narrow the social channels they’re likely to frequent. While it’s tempting to throw time and money into all social channels to see what sticks, don’t do it. Focus on the right social media.

For commercial real estate professionals, the most effective are LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Google My Business, each for different reasons. Today, we’re going to focus on LinkedIn. It is the single largest professional and B2B network in the world, and it offers fantastic opportunities to engage with prospects, vendors, potential partners, and so much more.

Detail Your Communication Strategy

If you don’t have a plan, don’t plan to succeed. Take the time to craft a clear strategy for your social media marketing. Consider the following in your plan:

• Define your content. What will you say? Think company updates, thought-leader pieces, industry updates, success stories, value-added content for your audience, local news, etc.
• Define your goals. What do you want to achieve? Don’t get caught up in the vanity metrics like how many followers you have. Think about your purpose of posting. Are you trying to build brand awareness? Generate leads? Looking for outreach or recruiting opportunities? Answers to these questions will shape your strategy.
• Define you posting frequency. Set aside time on your calendar to post and stick with it.

Got it? Good. Now, let’s dive into LinkedIn for commercial real estate professionals.

Why LinkedIn?

We’ll summarize the why behind the what in bullets:

• Sooooo much less clutter than Facebook.
• Your LinkedIn Professional Profile typically shows up in the top 3-4 search results when someone searches your name online.
• Your Professional Profile is your online résumé.
• Your Company Page is your company’s online brochure.
• You can gather endorsements and recommendations from prospects, partners, and colleagues right on your Professional Profile.
• LinkedIn reaches business professionals who stay out of the Facebook and Twitter games.
• The freelancer functionality can be a sort of lead generator. Here’s a sample of what that looks like.

Essentially, the world’s business leaders share their insights on LinkedIn. This makes LinkedIn rich with opportunity for thought leadership, increased brand awareness, prospect engagement, and lead generation.

That’s great and all, but how should I get started on LinkedIn?

1. Build up your Professional Profile. Think of this as your billboard to the world of LinkedIn. It’s also the first thing that prospects will see when they find you. Make sure it’s complete, consistent, and grammatically correct. Work to get the coveted “All-Star” profile status. Detail your service offerings and link to your website, property websites, and professional organizations.
2. Create a Company Page for your business and leverage it to reach your target audience. This allows other LinkedIn users to follow your company’s page. It also enables you to run targeted advertising campaigns.
3. Post great content. Updates about your business, new properties, and happenings in the industry all make sense. Also, think about articles with actionable advice that offer value to your targeted audience. Trust me, your audience will notice.
4. Post regularly. Stay top-of-mind with your audience and update your LinkedIn at least once or twice a week (more is good, too!).
5. Select or create content with images. Studies show that users are much more likely to read or engage with an image-based post.

Are you an advanced LinkedIn user? Well, pass “Go” and collect your $200!

LinkedIn is powerful! Make use of these two additional opportunities that come with LinkedIn:

• Join industry groups. These segmented groups are almost always private, and they’re fantastic spaces where you can share content, reach prospects, and build thought leadership.
• Make use of Pulse. Pulse is LinkedIn’s integrated publishing platform. It allows you to write and share content with your followers, as well as a broader audience when your content builds enough momentum.

Specific LinkedIn Groups Attuned to Commercial Real Estate Professionals

• International Council of Shopping Centers – ICSC –  Global trade association of the shopping center industry. It’s more than 70,000 members in over 100 countries include shopping center owners, developers, managers, investors, retailers, brokers, academics, and public officials.
• Pete Asmus’ Real Estate Networking Group (Investor Strategies) – LinkedIn group focused on building a global Community on LinkedIn to provide networking opportunities for those dealing in commercial or residential real estate, including acquisitions, private lending, distressed notes, construction, design, green development, asset management, etc.
• Pete Asmus’ Commercial Real Estate Investment, Development, & Property Management – A commercial real estate group, for those structuring or negotiating developments, investments, workouts, note purchases, etc.
• National Real Estate Investor – For more than 50 years, NREI has been a leading authority on trends in the real estate markets, providing top-level executives with in-depth analysis of important industry developments.
• Corporate Real Estate – Network for CRE professionals engaged in the construction, design, development, site selection, leasing, brokerage, acquisition, disposition, program/project management, tenant representation, facilities management, and asset management of office, retail, land, industrial, commercial corporate real estate assets.
• Technology for Commercial Real Estate – Sharing experience and asking questions about technology challenges and triumphs in CRE business.
• Commercial Real Estate Executives – Commercial Real Estate Executives is a group of professionals that work within the commercial real estate industry including corporate real estate executives; asset and portfolio managers; commercial real estate brokers; and developers.
• Social Media Commercial Real Estate – Who, What, How, Where and Why of Social Media for Commercial Real Estate Business.

When you have a thoughtful, consistent social media strategy for commercial real estate, you’ll be able to better engage with prospects, build brand awareness, build an industry thought-leader reputation, and ultimately grow your business.

Have a real estate marketing question? Contact our Team here!