How to Combine Real Estate Blogs & Social Media to Attract Clients

You can combine your real estate blog and social media to create a housing market information and news service, geared toward local home buyers and sellers.

Many real estate agents and brokers use real estate blogging and social media to communicate with their target audiences. But this is often done in a haphazard sort of way, as if the two channels are completely independent or disconnected from one another.

Today, I’ll explain how you can combine real estate blogging with social media to grow your online presence, increase website traffic, and generate more leads from potential clients.

Are you ready to become the leading authority on your local real estate scene?

Great! Here’s how to do it…

Integrating Your Real Estate Blog and Social Media

Let me start by introducing the core concept at work here. After that, I’ll walk you through the different steps to help you put this strategy into place.

The goal here is to align your real estate blogging and social media efforts under one common purpose: providing local market news and updates on a regular basis.

You can accomplish this by publishing insightful market reports onto your real estate blog, and then promote them to a broader audience through social media.

Let’s assume I’m a real estate agent in South Detroit (with a nod to Steve Perry). On my blog, I’ve just published a detailed update on the South Detroit housing market with all of the latest data.

This insightful report helps local home buyers connect the dots to understand what’s happening in the local real estate scene. It also contains a fact-based outlook and forecast extending into the next year, with insight from third-party analysts, economists, etc.

Eventually, my blog post will generate traffic and visibility organically, through search engines, social media sharing, and referrals from other websites.

But I don’t have to sit around and wait for those organic results. I can use social media to promote my latest real estate report and entice people to click over to the blog. For example, I might post the following messages on social media:

“You won’t believe how much the South Detroit housing market has changed over the past couple of years. But you need to know if you’re planning to enter the market soon. Check out the infographic below, and then read the full report on our website.”

Notice how there’s a consistent messaging strategy between the real estate blog and social media accounts. It’s all part of the same content strategy, as opposed to being separate elements.

Benefits of This Content Strategy

If you apply this strategy consistently over time, you’ll give local home buyers and sellers a good reason to follow your social media profile. But there are some other big benefits as well. So let’s zoom out and look at the bigger picture.

1. Growing your social media following

Publishing useful insights about your local real estate market is one of the best ways to build a social media following. You’re giving people information that can help them accomplish important goals, like buying or selling a home. You’re also giving them a good reason to follow your account, even after they’ve completed their sale or purchase.

2. Making your real estate website more useful

This strategy involves publishing insightful reports onto your real estate blog and promoting them on social media. Along the way, you’ll be creating a much more useful real estate website. In fact, you could turn your website into “the place to go” for local housing information, using social media to put it on people’s radar.

3. Growing your website traffic and rankings

Search engines reward websites with content that truly helps people. Google says their ranking algorithm is “designed to present helpful, reliable information that’s primarily created to benefit people, not to gain search engine rankings.” Over time, this kind of people-first publishing strategy can increase your website traffic and visibility, bringing you more clients.

4. Increasing opportunities for lead generation

Aligning your real estate blog and social media strategy also gives people more ways to reach you. They can reply or comment through social media to inquire about your post. And if they click through to read the real estate blog post on your website, they can contact you there as well. Publish new material on a weekly basis, and you’ll eventually start generating leads.

Step-by-Step Instructions

Note: This real estate blogging and social media strategy requires a good deal of writing. (It’s a content-based strategy, after all.) So you will either need to write the material for yourself, or have someone else do it for you.

• If you don’t have the time or resources to write high-quality real estate content and local market reports on a regular basis, this strategy probably isn’t for you.
• On the other hand, if you’re up for the challenge, this strategy could eventually surpass all of your other real estate marketing efforts combined. I’ve seen it happen.

Here are the steps you’ll need to take, in order to get the best results:

1. Write a great real estate market report.

The first step is to create your real estate market report. This is the centerpiece of your blogging and social media strategy, where you provide the most value to your followers.

Home buyers and sellers frequently research their local real estate markets. But it can be hard to find reliable and insightful information on this subject. So that’s where you come in. You can insert yourself into this information “void” to grow your social media presence over time.

If you provide regular housing market updates through your real estate blog and social media accounts, you’re creating a valuable information service for local buyers and sellers. You’re also giving people a strong incentive for following you.

I’ve been writing real estate market reports for more than 15 years, and I analyze the results for every piece that I publish. Here are some lessons learned along the way:

• Accurate: Make sure all data included within your real estate blog and social media posts are accurate and come from reliable sources. Double-check your statistics.
• Consistent: When it comes to developing a news-focused real estate blogging and social media strategy, consistency is key. Develop a schedule for your market reports—weekly, at least—and stick to it going forward. Tell people when they can expect new reports or updates.
• Local: Provide insights specific to the local market you’re covering. As you know, real estate conditions can vary significantly from one city to the next. So tailor your real estate blog and social media content to the specific needs of your target audience.
• Useful: Go beyond the surface-level data. Provide in-depth analysis and insights into what the data means for local home buyers or sellers. Explain how it affects them directly.

2. Create three or four social media posts for each report.

Each week, when you create a new report (blog post) for your local audience, you’ll want to promote it through your social media accounts. One of the best ways to do this is by creating a handful of social media posts and sharing them throughout the week.

Pro tip: Generative AI programs like ChatGPT and Bard can help with this process. You can copy and paste your latest article into one of these programs and have them generate a series of social media posts to promote it.

Here’s an AI prompt I’ve used in the past, with good results:

“Create 5 to 10 social media posts relating to the following article. Each post should be 3 to 5 sentences in length. Include some teaser-style social media posts, to encourage people to click over and read the full report.”

You can use the AI-generated posts as-is or (better yet) modify them to suit your needs.

3. Respond promptly and professionally when someone comments.

When people comment or reply to your social media posts, respond in a professional manner. Remember, it’s not just some Internet stranger. It could be a potential client. When you respond, encourage the person to follow your account for future updates (or subscribe to your email newsletter if applicable).

Think of it this way: Every interaction you have on social media is an opportunity to grow your real estate business. Granted, they won’t all turn into clients. But even if only 5% of the people you communicate with become future clients, it more than justifies the effort.

4. Use analytics to see which topics generate the biggest response.

As you begin publishing content to your real estate blog and social media, make sure you have an analytics program installed on your website. You can use your analytics to see how many people are visiting your blog, where they are coming from, and other useful insights.

Additionally, all of the major social media companies offer analytics and insights to their users. These tools can help you determine which posts are generating the most engagement in the form of likes, follows, comments and shares.

The point here is to gather information that you can use to tailor your real estate blogging and social media content strategy going forward. Which brings us to step #5…

5. Adjust your content strategy as needed based on step #4 above.

So, you’ve got some analytics installed on your website, and you’re monitoring your social media insights and engagement. What do you do with all of these insights?

You use them to adjust and improve your publishing strategy going forward.

Over time, you’ll learn which of your real estate blog reports and social media posts are bringing the most interaction from your local audience. You’ll discover what interests them the most. Through their interactions, people are telling you what content they like and want to see more of.

You can use this knowledge when choosing topics for future reports. Give people what they want, and they’ll respond by giving you their time and attention.

6. Consider bringing an email newsletter into the mix.

A social media following allows you to communicate with people over time, delivering useful content and informative reports. This in turn can help you attract new clients to sustain and grow your real estate business.

An email newsletter can give you another way to communicate with subscribers over time. And it offers some advantages over social media. When you distribute an email newsletter, you have the subscriber’s undivided attention. Your message will appear in their inbox without any competing “noise” or messaging.

Of course, you don’t have to bring an email newsletter into the mix. Your real estate blogging and social media strategy, when combined, might deliver the kind of marketing and lead generation results you are seeking. Just know that a newsletter could help you take the strategy to the next level.

Whatever you do, just be sure to keep everything consistent in terms of branding and naming. Create a publication that delivers useful real estate market news for your local area, and give people multiple ways to follow it.

Here’s an example of how you could position it:

“True to its name, Phoenix Housing Weekly delivers weekly updates and insights on the Phoenix metro area real estate market. You can follow us on social media or subscribe to the official newsletter to receive weekly reports. Either way, you’ll stay up to speed on local market trends!”

So there you have it: a newsy strategy for combining your real estate blog, social media profile, and possibly an email newsletter. By aligning these channels under one “umbrella,” you have an opportunity to create something truly valuable—for you and your readers alike.