There are many real estate agents on social media, such as Ryan Serhant, Josh Altman, and Barbara Corcoran, who are widely known and command a large social media following. However, there are many more agents whose names you may not know but who are quietly crushing it on Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and other social media platforms. These agents haven’t reinvented the wheel. Rather, they’ve diligently and consistently posted real estate content for social media that has been proven to work—they’ve just done it better than most.

Nothing about what these lesser-known but nonetheless successful agents do to promote their businesses is beyond the reach of a typical real estate agent. They all started out small and built their businesses and social media followings one step at a time, relying on the experience of others and the lessons they learned along the way to growth. There are, however, three key things they do that so many other agents don’t:

• Pay attention to new developments and trends.
• Remain committed to consistently posting to their accounts.
• Invest time, money, and technology into making their social media accounts more profitable.

If you want to know what real estate agents should be posting to social media or are looking for inspiring examples of real estate social media marketing that attracts followers and creates engagement, then you’ve come to the right place. In what follows, you’ll find profiles of three winning real estate agents who’ve appeared as guests on our Stay Paid podcast along with descriptions of their social media content strategies and related marketing tips for Realtors^®.

Shannon Gillette

Location! Location! Location!

• Founder and Realtor^®, Gillette Group, Tempe, Arizona
• 62K YouTube subscribers
• Key real estate social media strategy: posting high-quality videos to YouTube

YouTube real estate video idea #1

Among the classic real estate topics for social media are new listings and just-sold properties—they’re a staple in every agent’s repertoire. While this is all well and good, most agents focus primarily on images and videos featuring the property. This may seem like the most logical thing to do, but neither distinguishes you from your competition or stops people scrolling past your posts.

Shannon Gillette takes a different approach. Her hook isn’t the property—it’s the location. Referring to her strategy as “lifestyle first” videos, Shannon capitalizes on her belief that people first buy a lifestyle and location and then they buy a house.

Representative of this strategy, her video titles are variations of “What It’s Like to Live in [XYZ],” “Moving to [XYZ],” and “Living In [XYZ].” The opening frames include images of the geography, town, and community with a voiceover describing the lifestyle, amenities, and attractions that make it a desirable location. Only then does she introduce the property.

Shannon has called this real estate social media strategy a “complete game changer” for her business, saying, “You’ll see our listing videos are getting 5, 10, 15,000 views!”

YouTube real estate video idea #2

Shannon’s second social media marketing strategy for real estate is her “next step” series of videos. Every few months, she invests the time to write scripts to explain every aspect of the homebuying and selling processes. She then rents a recording studio, complete with a teleprompter and professional videographers and editors, to batch film her videos.

These videos have made a notable impact on the time she has been able to save repeatedly answering the same questions. She no longer needs to step away from dinner with her family to take a call from a client who wants to know what closing costs are or how to ask for needed repairs. More importantly, her clients have a better experience because they feel more informed.

They’ve also given her audience a way to know, like, and trust her. Shannon’s had clients ask her to sell their homes based only on what they’ve seen of her on YouTube. In fact, she recently had a seller call to schedule a photo and video shoot without her providing a listing presentation or having seen the house.

Among the wide variety of real estate social media ideas, it’s hard to match the power of high-quality video. Shannon’s “lifestyle first” and “next step” videos have made YouTube her #1 lead source.

To hear more about how Shannon is using video to grow her real estate business, listen to her interview on Stay Paid: “5 Life-Balancing, Business-Growing Strategies for Real Estate Agents.”

Will Penney

Facebook groups that work like a CRM

• Founder, President, and Realtor^®, Penney Group at eXp Realty, Stow and Akron, Ohio
• 1,025 private Facebook group members
• Key real estate social media strategy: forming a private Facebook group

Will Penney didn’t always understand the value of keeping in touch with past clients.

He became an agent in 1988 when he was 19, but it wasn’t until he attended an event in 1994 featuring real estate business coach Joe Stumpf that he learned he could grow a business almost entirely through referrals. The key was to stay in consistent contact with past clients.

Today, in addition to making calls and sending his personally branded magazine, Will invites his clients to join his private Facebook group where he regularly posts educational and entertaining content and interacts with his members. As he commented in his Stay Paid interview, “90% of humans are on Facebook,” which makes it a perfect place to connect with an audience. In fact, his “Penney Group eXp Friends & Family” Facebook group functions for him much like a CRM works for other agents.

Dubbing it “an overall fun group with zero negativity,” Will and his team routinely post information about neighborhood activities, things to do, favorite restaurants, fun trivia, quizzes and questions, home-related topics like design and DIY hacks, and giveaways. They also use it to recommend contractors and other service providers his clients often need, but it’s a sales-free zone—he does not use it to promote his business.

His group has been so successful in providing him and his team with referred leads that he turned the idea into a business called Social Orchard. Through it, he provides real estate agents with content their audiences will enjoy and teaches them how to use Facebook groups to nurture meaningful relationships with their members.

Hear more about Will’s Facebook group and his advice for how real estate agents can build referral businesses by listening to his Stay Paid interview: “How to Beat the Big Agencies in Real Estate without Spending Millions.”

Katelyn Rhoades

Get into character

• Owner and creator of @socialmarketingqueen on IG and enfluence Marketing Studio
• 140K Instagram followers
• Key real estate social media strategy: edutainment

Katelyn Rhoades spent 10 years as a real estate agent before becoming a full-time social media marketing specialist and business owner. Her company, enfluence Marketing Studio, is a successful social media agency specializing in real estate marketing, targeted lead generation, and email campaigns.

On Instagram and elsewhere, audiences are exposed to a tremendous amount of content, which makes capturing and keeping someone’s attention the primary challenge for anyone posting to social media. For this reason, Katelyn and her team advise their clients to adopt a character while helping them to produce “edutainment,” or content that both educates and entertains. In her own Reels, Katelyn exaggerates aspects of her personality to become more flamboyant, more “out there,” in ways that entertain and appeal to her target audience.

During her Stay Paid interview, Katelyn also offers several tips that help agents turn their followers into leads. One of the most significant is to include a call to action—omitting one is the most frequent mistake she sees. If you want to monetize your social media effort, then you must tell your viewers what you want them to do once they’ve viewed your Reels. It could be to click your bio, send you a message, leave a comment, or something else. Whatever action it is you want your viewers to take, make it clear.

Another useful tip is to use location tags. People often search for agents and information using local search terms and hashtags (for example, #OrlandoREALTOR or #OrlandoRealEstate). Instagram indexes keywords and hashtags, so if you’re using them in your posts, your profile should appear in the results when people perform a search. If you click “Insights” at the bottom left of your posts, you’ll see which hashtags people are using to find your posts.

A third tip Katelyn emphasizes is to remember that social media is intended to be social. Interact with your audience by sending them personal, direct messages (DMs, for short). When you interact with your audience, you demonstrate that you appreciate their involvement with your posts—and people love to be recognized! Acknowledging someone with a DM is one of the most effective things you can do to encourage them to know, like, and trust you.

If you want more advice on how to succeed on Instagram from someone who is doing it well, including how to balance authenticity and professionalism, define and stick to a target audience, and which agents to follow for examples of edutainment, you can listen to Katelyn’s interview on Stay Paid: “Reel Advice for Leads and Growth From IG Pro Katelyn Rhoades.”

Need help with your social media?

When starting out, using social media for real estate can seem overwhelming—there are a lot of moving parts and no shortage of advice about how to do it best. But even the top real estate agents on social media began with one post, one Reel, or one video. They key is to simply start.

We help our clients take their first steps with Branded Posts—personally branded, prewritten posts you can use on all your social media platforms.

Our clients have access to a library of pre-written real estate content, branded to them, and ready to share across all social media platforms.

It’s just one of the four tools that make up our Digital Marketing Platform. With Branded Posts, you can select content from our perfectly balanced library of educational and entertaining posts. Use our Facebook and Instagram schedulers to plan out as many as you wish weeks in advance (a set-it-and-forget-it solution that will save you time). Click here to take advantage of our exclusive discount offer for ReminderMedia blog readers.