You Social Media Listening Strategy – Techniques and Tools

A good number of realtors pride themselves on their ability to listen and empathize with their clients wants and needs. That’s all good, but if you can’t even find your prospects or reach your inner circle of key clients, how will you hear their voice? Answer: social media media listening!

Perhaps I can help you connect with your inner circle of clients, and even forecast who will be a prospect better than we can forecast the real estate market?

Listening for Clues

Social Listening has to be the biggest trend in digital marketing right now, and that includes generating leads for real estate agents. It’s a technique that you can get the jump on your competitors and help you prospect better. Listening into conversations helps you find out what the trending topics are, monitor for activities and interests, and allow you to enter conversations with prospects. My role with you goes far beyond being an SEO specialist to helping you build your realtor image and unique value proposition to leverage high quality content and social media engagement. You will need to become proficient at social media listening.

What is Social Listening? A process predicting future clients and engaging current clients by monitoring words, comments, topics from a defined group of people and then engaging with them using relevant content, feedback and responses

I’m going to introduce you to social listening and some key software tools to help you with social listening for real estate. This way, you can develop your own prospect predictive intelligence tool to power up your ability to zero on the best prospects. Definitely an evolution in realtor prospecting technique.

Social Media Listening Questions

You might have a lot of questions on and what to use and how to use it: [bctt tweet=”How to Start a Social Listening Strategy #Realtors #SMB #SocialMedia” username=””]

whose comments and accounts do I monitor?
who is a social influencer in my target neighbourhoods?
what do people in my neighbourhoods chat about on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter
should I get involved in people’s broadcast emails where they send out material to all the people they know?
which words and topics should I be monitoring for?
what are the things these people do and are interested in?

Hopefully, we’ll have all of your questions answered by the end of this EPIC post!

A New Focus on Social Media

Why social media and social media listening? Social media allows everyone to let loose and express themselves. They tweet and instagram and snapchat their faces off. And were you were complaining? Well no more, because when they express themselves, you get cues as to whether they’re interested in moving, buying or selling. And that’s music to your ears! Whatever social channel they prefer, you can have a good listen, and then you’re able to respond and engage that person slowly.

Learn to love social media. There’s a reason people spend so much time on it so don’t judge and don’t turn your back to it. It’s very fortunate that right now, that you can collect all this chatter via various platforms using data feeds and look for clues to real estate prospect’s behavior and intentions.

The beauty of social media is that more info is available to about the individual, where they live, where they go during the day, and their conversations with others. In, fact you can stimulate some of that conversation yourself and purposefully get people talking about topics that lets them divulge their intentions. You could launch the conversations that leads to key insights. For instance, lets say you create an article about neighborhoods in your city, schools, restaurants, businesses, about types of homes, and you get your connections to respond to them. That’s a fantastic content strategy to get the information you need.

You can’t get this information from Google, because Google won’t let you have it and because they want to leverage it for themselves (and make politicians look like the villains. And you thought the Google guys were dummies:))

Turns out that social media hasn’t been oppressed as yet, so there’s time to utilize social engagement and posting for marketing. This data comes from normal internet connectivity and from involvement in social channels and from the cloud and Big data. Very technical sources of user information yet handy because over time users reveal quite a bit about themselves and their daily thoughts, values, activities and intentions.

Social Media Listening Tools

From Hootsuite to Talkwalker to SmartZip, there’s apps you can use and which you may have to experiment with to get the results you’re hoping for. Some have developed data filters and database processing algorithms that discover patterns of behaviour. A few companies such as SmartZip have programmers who comb through all that data and discover paths to purchase. So from early conversations, they can tell where that chatter is actually leading. Your chatter is directly related to your goals. You think they’re hidden and personal but they’re not.

Your chatter reveals what you value and where you’re headed. If you keep talking about Vancouver Canada, it doesn’t take a genius to know you’re going to move there. A realtor can pick up on that via social media listening and other sources and offer a way to make your dream a reality. Because realtors are just people who make dreams comes true.

You’re a realtor. Does Sotheby’s, Remax, Century21, ColdwellBanker, Homelife, Royal Lepage, Keller Williams and other brokerages give you this precog awareness of people’s desires and intentions? From what I hear, absolutely not. You have to take the initiative and get this done.

Fortunately, you have an ally in this quest (me). So let’s find out how you can use social media to listen for these cues that help you sniff out a seller like a hound dog. When Elvis said “you ain’t nothin but a hound dog“, well you know he meant now:)

Your Social Media Listening Strategy

A strategy is plan that uses tools and a systematic method to carry out tasks that will generate the insight and connections with prospective clients.

use tools to find prospects in your designated towns, zip codes, and neighbourhoods and start or seed your strategy with them first (start with your own client list)
discover or compile a list of words and topics that people commonly use such as neighborhood, broker name, mortgage, moving, commute, garage sale, landscaping, windows, renovation, roofing, school, and the questions that your prospects would be using if they were going to move to a neighborhood
audit your website content to compile a list of pages/videos etc that you use to generate conversations or take part in conversations
create a list of all the content you need to develop to be more informative, compelling and responsive
find a social media tool that will allow you to listen to people in a specific geographic region
discover those who are talking about you or praising you and compile their social accounts
compile a lost of local business owners, politicians, clubs, and other influential people’s social accounts to follow/listen
be active and tweet or message about people, events, places and topics – seed the conversation with interesting, fun comments

Social Media Listening Tools

Here’s a few of the best tools available to help do social media listening for real estate:

Talkwalker Real Estate Agent example, using app for Hootsuite

Yelps Strong Local Coverage Makes it a Worthy Component for social listening

Mention is yet another app you can use to begin listening on your accounts.

This social listening infographic talks about sentiment, share of voice, trust, responsiveness and more that you need to be more familiar with.

Real Estate from 2023 to 2024

There are so many new technology, technique, influencers, and trends impacting on the markets. To help you become more informed have a good look at some of the latest real estate market posts.