The Complete Guide To LinkedIn Real Estate Marketing
LinkedIn’s focus on people’s professional lives means that real estate agents need to approach it differently from other social networks.
LinkedIn is less focused on straight-up real estate sales (although you’ll definitely get these).
Instead, it’s more about helping brokers and agents to:
🤝 Expand their network
🤝 Increase brand awareness
🤝 Connect and share knowledge with other local and international brokers
🤝 Develop as a professional
LinkedIn is primarily used to access professional resources and a wide variety of connections across industries.
This article explains how you can use LinkedIn to:
✔️ Generate leads
✔️ Manage your professional image
✔️ Expand your business
Why Should You Use LinkedIn for Real Estate Lead Generation?
Using LinkedIn marketing for your brokerage will…
Convert More Real Estate Leads
LinkedIn has the highest lead generation conversion rate of all social media platforms.
Traffic from LinkedIn has a 2.74% visitor to lead generation ratio for both B2B and B2c audiences. This is much higher than Facebook (0.77%) or Twitter (0.69%).
Reach Your Target Audience
Less than a third of Americans use LinkedIn, but those that do are tend to be ideal real estate clients:
- More than 75% are aged 30+
- Just under 50% earn over $75,000 per year
- Around 50% are college graduates
- 90% are household decision-makers
Network With Other Real Estate Agents
Broadening your sphere of influence is critical if you want to gain more referrals. LinkedIn is the ideal place to do this. Nurturing professional relationships is one of its key purposes.
LinkedIn also allows you to join real estate groups. A LinkedIn group is an effective way to share knowledge and get more connections organically.
Meet Your Future Team
One of the most critical factors for a successful brokerage is finding good real estate agents. An excellent real estate agent is rarely out of work, so you need to play the long game—meet them via networking, get to know them and then give them a reason to come and work for you.
There are around 1 million U.S. real estate agents on LinkedIn. This means it is an excellent place to network with the industry’s best people.
You can also use its jobs section to post vacancies. According to Small Business Trends, people recruited via LinkedIn are 40% less likely to leave within the first six months.
Face Less Competition
People post more targeted business-related content on LinkedIn than the social clutter which dominates other platforms.
This means your content will compete with fewer similar posts than on other social media sites.
Boost Your Rankings
Having a business profile on LinkedIn and linking to your company website can boost your Google rankings because the platform is a trusted site.
Differentiate Your Brokerage
Real Estate is a crowded market. The question you need to be able to answer is why potential clients would choose you over thousands of competitors. Your LinkedIn profile is a great place to list your experience and specialisms.
How A Real Estate Agent Uses LinkedIn For Marketing
Now you know why you should use LinkedIn, let’s look at how to generate those real estate leads.
To begin with, you need to set up two types of profile on Linkedin. One for you and one for your real estate business.
Optimize Your Personal Profile
Having a good personal profile will give you an excellent foundation for success on LinkedIn. Make sure you have the basics right:
- Make sure your summary and work history are up to date
- Use a recent, professional head-and-shoulders profile picture
- Use a background image that indicates the area of real estate you specialize in
Write a Compelling Headline
Your headline is one of the most critical parts of your profile. You need to tell people why they would want to work with you in just 100 characters.
There are a few ways to approach this. Let’s look at some examples:
In the example below, Alexander Gudim explains what he does and where he does it. This helps potential clients understand if he is the right real estate agent for them.
Mike Karisny takes a different approach. He focuses on the fact that he has won awards. He uses his headline to sell himself and his expertise. He also indicates that he is a spiritual person and values his team.
Headlines help your LinkedIn page rank on Google search results. You can rank higher by including popular keywords in your headline. Keywords are words or phrases about popular ideas, topics, and explanations commonly looked up online.
This article has a great guide on how to use LinkedIn keywords effectively.
Expand Your Network
Referrals are one of the best ways to get real estate leads. They are a vital source of sales for new brokerages trying to find business in a crowded market.
Your LinkedIn network can be a source of referrals. If you are connected with people on the platform, you will be able to see all of their connections. Those people are known as second connections to you.
You can see next to the person’s name that they are a second connection in the picture below. Beneath that it shows the first connection that you know them through.
You could approach this first connection and ask to introduce you to the person. Or, you could simply send the second connection an invite. The former approach is more likely to be successful, as it shows that person has your trust.
One mistake many real estate agents make is that they don’t connect with everyone they know in real life. This means that they miss out on a huge network of seconds.
Make sure you add as many people you know and try to connect with everyone you engage with on LinkedIn.
Ask For Referrals and Recommendations
LinkedIn is great for finding other real estate professionals and connecting with potential clients.
It provides a unique function that allows you to ask for recommendations from your connections. This is invaluable for real estate agents.
To do this, visit your profile and scroll down past your experience, education and skills to where it says “recommendations”.
You can ask former clients and colleagues to write a testimonial about you here. One good tactic for increasing the number of positive reviews you get is to write them for other people, encouraging them to reciprocate.
Join LinkedIn Groups
LinkedIn groups allow people with shared interests to network, discuss their chosen topic and stay up-to-date with any changes.
There are thousands of groups dedicated to different parts of the real estate industry.
By contributing to groups, you’ll build brand awareness and authority. You’ll also be able to interact with thousands of people who have an interest in your services.
Groups are run by admins and you will need to request permission from them to join their group. Once you do, here are some good practice tips for groups:
- Join ones where your target clients are active
- Try to join groups that are as local to you as possible
- Don’t push sales. Be helpful and answer peoples’ questions
- Generate discussion and get involved with other peoples’
- Engage with the group regularly. Aim to post or respond to something once per day
- If you see someone looking for services you offer, then send them a private message explaining how you can help. This way, it won’t look like you’re being too pushy on the main group
For example, imagine if your brokerage specializes in mid-market properties in California. You may wish to join the California Real Estate Group.
It has nearly 15,000 members and covers all aspects of real estate.
Or, if you specialize in something more specific, like commercial real estate in Los Angeles, you may be better off joining a group like Los Angeles Commercial Real Estate.
This only has 1,766 members. However, they fit your market and location perfectly and so are a more valuable audience.
Create a Public Business Profile
Once your personal LinkedIn profile is optimized, you need to create a profile for your brokerage.
This guide is a helpful starting point.
Like your personal page, make sure that your business looks professional by using high-quality images for your profile and banner pictures.
There are also a few other things you can do:
Tell Your Brokerage’s Story In The “About” Section
The first thing people will read on your brokerage’s page is the “about section”.
Provide all the information that people need to decide if you are the right brokerage for them.
- Where you are based or operate
- What types of property you specialize in
- What services you offer
- Your certifications
- Contact information, including your website, address, email and phone number.
Use Your Banner to Sell Your Expertise
The banner on your brokerage’s LinkedIn page is a great way to highlight your brokerage’s strengths.
Real Estate One has chosen to focus on being named one of the top places to work in Michigan. This will attract great agents on LinkedIn and shows clients that they are a caring company.
Here are some other ways to improve your marketing using your banner:
- Include a call-to-action
- Highlight the number of years you have been in business
- Tell people how many sales you make per year
- Explain what makes you different to other brokerages
Start Creating Valuable Content
LinkedIn’s focus on people’s professions means users generally prefer curated business-related content. Pictures of puppies and kittens are much less effective on LinkedIn than on Facebook!
We’ve compiled a list of content ideas to kickstart your LinkedIn real estate journey.
There are four main ways to post content on LinkedIn. They are:
- Feed posts: these can be 700 characters long on your company’s feed or 1,300 characters on a personal feed. Posts are flexible and can include pictures, slideshows, videos and more.
- Articles: can be up to around 17,000 words long. However, the ideal length is about 600 words. Use this when you want to cover topics that are too detailed for a post.
- Events: this is where you post information about your upcoming events. The events are hosted externally.
- Documents: you can host longer documents like an explanation of real estate regulations for your state. It can also be helpful for posting PDFs, like property brochures.
Here are some examples of the kind of content that will help you generate leads on LinkedIn:
Share Skills and Milestones
You can create feed posts that share the skills that make your real estate agents stand out.
This can include:
🔍 Being great at finding properties with unique features
🔍 Staying within the client’s budget
🔍 Excellent ability to close deals quickly
For example, this post highlights an area of expertise that Marcus & Millichap’s Senior VicePresident has in the hospitality industry.
You can also share important milestones for the brokerage. For example:
🏆 Number of successful sales
🏆 Employee growth
🏆 Number of years in the industry
Showcasing your employees’ skills can help you gain authority and trust with potential clients because they will see that your brokerage is good at what it does.
Below is an excellent example from Surterre Properties.
Share Industry News
LinkedIn is a great place to show clients and other real estate agents that you are on the pulse of latest industry trends. Use it to keep people up to date on topics like:
🗞️ New government policies that impact real estate
🗞️ The latest mortgage deals
🗞️ Changes in the average house price
Here’s a good example from Advent Properties. This post is effective because it gives their view on a challenge facing their target customer.It also compels readers to engage further by linking to a blog post that provides answers to the problem.
You can also share interesting real estate content that you’ve found online that may be relevant to your audience.
For example, this brokerage uses LinkedIn to share interesting blog posts about various topics in the real estate industry, like sustainable development.
This keeps followers interested in your content and motivates them to engage by sharing or liking relevant articles.
Guides and Helpful Content
Because LinkedIn is used more for professional purposes, it is a great place to post guides and other helpful content. People will be more likely to look at this kind of content than on sites like Facebook or TikTok. That’s because people are in a “get things done” mindset on LinkedIn.
Most people only buy or sell a property a handful of times in their lifetime. This means that they will be unfamiliar with the process. Providing a guide on LinkedIn will be helpful for these people and a great way to generate leads.
Below is an excellent example from Coldwell Banker. They have created an app that allows people to compare factors like property prices and general quality of life in different cities in America.
This allows them to either check what impact a move to a new city or state will have or help them find their ideal location.
Publicize Your Events
Use your brokerage’s account to share news about upcoming events like open houses or educational seminars.
Here’s a good example from Finfellas. They are holding a webinar on how people can get finance to invest in property.
This is useful content for people looking to buy an investment property. It’s also great for generating leads because:
- They capture contact details from the attendees and can target them with marketing campaigns
- It allows them to meet attendees digitally and build a closer relationship with them
- They can show off their expertise
- They can include calls-to-action throughout the webinar, and use it to drive qualified leads
Here is a great guide to setting up and getting the best out of events on LinkedIn.
Highlight Employee Performance
Similar to sharing skills, highlighting employee performance shows off your brokerage’s successes and that you appreciate the work of your staff.
It also improves your employees’ morale, which makes them more productive and more likely to stay with you. This helps retain valuable experienced people.
These posts can be as simple as telling your clients about the person and what area they specialize in.
Other things you could highlight include:
👏 Closing their first deal
👏 Making the most sales in a month
👏 Receiving excellent customer feedback
Here’s a good example from Maryann Dingam’s feed.
Expand Your Brokerage’s Reach With LinkedIn Today
Joining LinkedIn can be the first step in generating real estate leads and finding new clients for your brokerage.
But hundreds of connections, referrals, and leads won’t appear overnight. You need to engage with people, create high-quality content and grow your network consistently.
By following the tips and ideas in this article, you can make the most out of your LinkedIn real estate profile.
