You invested the time to build up and organize your social media pages on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. You frequently post updates about your brokerage, your listings, and industry news. You occasionally even write a blog post yourself and share it via Medium or LinkedIn.
Setting up and maintaining social media pages for your brand is no small feat. By the time your day is over, you may feel ready to put your feet up and let your social channels run themselves. Not so fast. If you took all that time to plan out your social posting, you should at least make sure social media is moving the needle on your business, right?
Even if your pages are garnering likes and shares, you will need to dig deeper to understand how social media is affecting your business. Which metrics lead to conversions or at least conversations, with your audience?
As a real estate agent, you should be paying attention to data across all your channels. Here are the main metrics to watch on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Facebook Metrics
While Facebook’s value for businesses is rapidly declining, the platform still has over 2 billion engaged users worldwide. Facebook business pages automatically provide you with significant information about how well your content performs, but you will need to dig beyond the basic numbers to get a real picture of your audience’s interest in your content. There are two Facebook metrics that are easy to measure and can tell you a lot about your business: volume and engagement.
Volume: This metric gauges how many people are talking about your business. You can view it on the “People Talking About This” section in your Facebook page metrics. The data shows total likes, shares, and comments, which demonstrate direct engagement. You can see how many unique people are interested in your brokerage and what times of day they are most engaged. If the number goes up, you are on the right track. If it goes down, it might be time to try something new.
Engagement: Engagement tracks how many people have directly interacted with a post. This number includes clicks, link clicks, likes, comments, video views, and shares and is broken down by each post so you can compare how individual articles measure up. You can find the percentage of engaged users, which speaks more than the number, by dividing the number of engaged people by the reach and multiplying by 100.
Facebook is still one of your best resources for marketing as an agent because it allows you to get your content in front of a large, diverse audience so you can measure how they react.
Instagram Metrics
Instagram is the perfect platform for sharing photos of your newest listings. With a smaller, but more-engaged audience than Facebook, Instagram is a great place to hook new clients who are shopping for a gorgeous home. Instagram Analytics are split into three sections: Activity, Content, and Audience. Here are some of the most telling metrics to watch.
Profile visits: Basically, how many people looked at your profile. You can look at this metric overall or for each photo that you post. A follower will only look at your profile if you catch their attention, so watch to see which posts draw the most visits.
Discovery reach: This metric shows how many people found your content, even if they were not following you. It can speak to the effectiveness of your hashtags or the popularity of your content overall.
Audience demographics: Find out exactly what kind of people are following you. As an agent, the most important part of this metric might be location. You can also learn about the gender breakdown, age, and time of day when people are most likely to interact. That’s when you should post your best content!
Twitter Metrics
One of the most challenging aspects of marketing on Twitter is the volatility of your audience. Everyone might be tweeting about you today, but they might forget about you tomorrow. Pay attention to this metric to make sure you’re getting the right traction on Twitter.
Engagement: On Twitter, people can engage by replying to your tweet, mentioning you in a tweet, retweeting your tweet, or liking your tweet. You can also find the percentage rate at which your audience engages by dividing the engagement by the number of impressions and multiplying by 100. This number tells you what percentage of the people that see your content actually respond in some way. Followers will only respond to content that really moves them, so engagement is a good sign that you are targeting the right audience.
LinkedIn Metrics
LinkedIn marketing is a way for agents to connect with other people in the industry and reach a more professional audience who might have the disposable income to become a customer. Here’s the most crucial LinkedIn metric to watch so you can connect with your audience.
Post Performance: LinkedIn Analytics breaks down the success of each post into several categories, so you don’t have to look all over the place. Pay attention to your post reach and the percent engagement; even if your post reaches thousands of people, it won’t mean much if they don’t interact with it at all. If you want to go a bit deeper, look at your overall engagement rate for all the posts on your page over time. This metric will help explain if the engagement on a specific post was due to the timing or the content.
Final Thoughts
You can also measure one metric across all your pages: reach. Reach tells you how many people saw your post, and it is available across all your channels. If you are aiming to increase your visibility, watch your reach carefully and make tweaks to find out how you can appear in front of a wider audience.
To make a real impact on social media, focus on quality over quantity. Quality posts will engage the viewer and potentially convert them into a customer, whereas simply posting a lot may annoy followers. Each network has its own analytic platform where you can view the most popular post. Understanding what posts customers like is important as you can then replicate this post-type.
Learn to pay attention to a few key metrics on each platform so you can keep track of your audience’s interest in your work. When you begin to garner a highly-engaged group of followers from your local community, you’re probably on the right track.