Wouldn’t it be nice if you could wave a magic wand and have your social media marketing done for you? You can! Well, kind of. Realtors just need to invest in real estate social media automation to make it happen.
Granted, you have to do a tiny bit of work, but we can help. In this blog, we’ll cover the benefits of social media automation for real estate agents. We’ll also explore the seven best tools to help you automate your social media marketing.
Let’s face it: social media management can be a time-suck. That’s where real estate social media automation comes in.
Here are the top reasons why social media automation is great for real estate.
Save time creating posts and responding to messages or comments
Let’s start with the most obvious benefit. When you’re a busy realtor, every minute counts. By automating your social media, you can free up precious hours to focus on what you do best.
Improve your strategy with better data collection
Do you know which platforms drive the most business for you? Which post types does your audience like best? Do you get more engagement on Sunday mornings or Wednesday afternoons?
If you’re not using an automation tool that helps you gather analytics, you can still find the answers to these questions. The process is just a lot more tedious.
When you automate the manual parts of social media marketing, you can gather data and improve your strategy faster.
Increase engagement and brand awareness
Wouldn’t it be great if you could respond to DMs from prospective clients without even having to check your phone? What if you could post about a hot new listing while running an open house?
Automation tools allow you to have a consistent and professional online presence without constantly being glued to your phone or computer.
So go ahead, set up those auto-replies and scheduled posts, and take a well-deserved break. Your followers (and your sanity) will thank you.
Staying on top of your real estate game means saving time and effort where possible, so you can reallocate your focus on other critical matters. To do so, you need automated social media marketing for real estate.
You’re running your own business, so you need all the tips and tricks small businesses use to thrive. And, of course, tools to help you succeed. Here are 7 of the top social media tools for real estate agents.
1. Hootsuite
Sure, we’re a little biased, but if you want to automate your social media, we really believe the best thing you can do is get Hootsuite.
Here are just a few ways Hootsuite can help you with social media automation.
Create and schedule content
Hootsuite’s Publisher tool can take a lot of work off your shoulders. You can pre-schedule posts to go live when your audience is most likely to engage and can bulk schedule up to 350 posts at a time.
The publishing tool uses AI learning to suggest relevant hashtags and the Best Time to Publish for your unique audience.
Want to save time while repurposing content? You can edit a single post to work on multiple social media accounts and platforms. This allows you to rinse and repeat your content without looking spammy.
And if you’re done with writing social media captions, OwlyWriter AI is your new best friend.
It writes captions for any platform, generates great real estate post ideas, and can even help you re-work your best content. Plus, it’s incredibly easy to use.
Just insert a prompt, choose your voice, and hit Generate.
Analyze your results
We can safely assume all realtors (yourself included) don’t love spending time and effort pulling data from each of your social platforms to analyze.
Hootsuite Analytics pulls your social data, analyzes it, and presents you with custom reports. It’s top-tier data automation.
You can use these custom, automated reports to guide your social media strategy. See what’s working for you and what’s just a waste of your time with the click of a button.
Psst: Check out our full list of general Social Media Marketing tools, too.
Auto-respond to DMs
Hootsuite Inbox allows you to manage all conversations on your various social pages, allowing you to spot trends and improve response times without switching between apps.
Hootsuite Inbox makes it easy to create automated message responses to commonly asked questions. Plus, if you’re part of a larger team or brokerage, you can even assign incoming messages to different departments.
Improve your social listening
Want to use social listening to improve your strategy? We’ve got great news — every Hootsuite plan includes everything you need to get started with social listening.
Use Listening Basics to discover trending hashtags, brands and events anywhere in the world, or dive deeper for personalized insights on your brand.
You can track what people are saying about you, your top competitors, your products — up to two keywords tracking anything at all over the last 7 days.
Plus, you can use Quick Search to analyze things like:
- Results. Ready to get into specifics? The results tab will show you a selection of popular posts related to your search terms — you can filter by sentiment, channel, and more.
- Key metrics. Are more people talking about you this week? What’s the vibe of their social media posts? Hootsuite Listening doesn’t just track what people are saying — it uses enhanced sentiment analysis to tell you how they really feel.
- Top themes. How are people talking about you? What are the most popular positive and negative posts about? Which other conversations are you showing up in?
Watch social media expert Trish Riswick explain how to get started with Hootsuite’s social listening in the video below:
Create and analyze paid campaigns
If you’re advertising on social (and you really should be), you need a dashboard showing all your results in one place.
Hootsuite Social Advertising can present your paid and organic advertising results in one place from all of your social channels. You’ll be able to plan and publish ads directly from your dashboard. You can also automatically pull all your analytical insights into one place.
2. Airtable Automation
Do you love Airtable? Us, too. Its capabilities are off the charts, so no shade if it’s your favorite social media calendar.
But guess what? You can absolutely combine it with your favorite social media tool (Hootsuite) for more automation capabilities.
With Airtable Automations, you can schedule content through Hootsuite to be posted directly from your Airtable base. You can also use the tool to schedule messages to send as soon as specified conditions are met.
Source: Airtable for Hootsuite
3. Facebook Business Suite and Creator Studio
Automatic Facebook posts for realtors can be a big time-saver. While you can schedule and edit content for your Facebook Page (and for Instagram posts and Stories, too) within Facebook Business Suite, it does have some limitations.
The tool’s editing capabilities are pretty basic, but the scheduling software works for lower-volume accounts.
4. Peech
Peech can help you to automate your video editing. This tool is especially helpful for realtors doing walk-through videos — adding a watermark or talking head segment is super easy.
Peech can also automatically transcribe and repurpose your video content so you can use it in other areas of your marketing, like blogs or for social captions.
For larger real estate businesses that create content with their teams, you can automate title cards for your team members, giving your videos a polished look.
Source: Peech
5. Grammarly
There’s nothing more embarrassing than finding a glaring typo in your caption after you post.
Use Grammarly to automate your spelling and grammar checks. The pro account can tell you whether or not your tone is right and if you’re misusing passive voice. Plus, it automates suggestions on how to shorten your writing, not repeat yourself, and generally write for an audience.
Grammarly can integrate into your existing software, like your email, Google Docs, and Hootsuite.
Source: Grammarly
6. Pictory
Successful realtors know it’s (almost) all about marketing. You need to be able to find new, quality prospects on social media to keep your sales funnel full. To do that, you have to create, post, and engage regularly.
Pictory helps you automate your branded video creations, taking the pressure off of producing video assets.
With Pictory, you can copy and paste your text into the tool, and AI will automatically generate a custom video for you. If you’re the kind of real estate agent who creates thought-leadership-style blogs, you can easily convert these into video assets. It’s also great for agents focused on building personal brand assets.
Plus, Pictory integrates with Hootsuite! You can easily schedule your videos for publication within your dashboard.
Source: Pictory
7. Coffee & Contracts
Coffee & Contracts is another brand offering real estate social media posts designed on Canva. This service is better than your average Canva-template-business due to its realtor-specific community and wide breadth of pre-created assets.
They offer a Facebook group, plenty of guides for new realtors, and pre-made monthly social media content calendars. Coffee & Contracts also provides a wide range of templated digital assets, like email marketing, blogs, and other printable materials.
Source: Coffee & Contracts
Just a note on limitations: Pre-made monthly content calendars can be a little tricky since you risk posting the same thing as your competitors or following a strategy that isn’t tailored to your goals and audience. Custom posts and strategies will always be your best bet.
But, for an easy-to-customize pre-made post template, Coffee & Contracts can offer automated content creation to busy realtors.
Real estate automation DOs and DONTs
As with any tool, there are dos and don’ts when using automation for real estate. Here are some best practices to keep in mind as you automate your social media.
Do maintain authenticity
Automating your social media can be a big help. But your followers will notice if you let the robots take over your account.
Maintain a personal, authentic tone in your social media posts. Avoid sounding robotic or spamming followers with excessive content.
Don’t rely entirely on automation
Automation should complement, not replace, your personal touch on social media. Take the time to engage with others, respond to comments and questions, and add a human vibe to your online presence.
Source: Shauna Gold on Instagram
Do invest time in planning
Take the time to plan out your posts ahead of time, using metrics to guide your decision-making.
This can help ensure you post content that resonates with your audience and achieves your desired engagement.
You can use AI tools to help you plan, but don’t let them do the entire planning themselves. They’re smart, but you still know your audience and business better.
Don’t use bots
While some companies may offer “bot” services that automate likes and comments, these can damage your reputation and risk being flagged as spam. We’ve tried to buy followers before (several times, in fact), and the experiments always flop.
Stick to legitimate automation tools that don’t violate the social networks’ terms of services.
Do schedule posts
Pre-scheduling your social media calendar makes for stress-free publishing. We love Hootsuite for this, for obvious reasons.
Maybe you already use a third-party app like Airtable to organize your calendar. No problem! Hootsuite can integrate with it so you can publish your posts directly from your Airtable calendar.
Don’t ignore the numbers
Posting on a regular schedule is great, but if you want to take your social media marketing to the next level, you need to understand the impact of your posts.
Don’t just post content blindly. Use SMART goals and social media metrics to guide your content strategy and review your results regularly.
Do keep tabs on your competitors (and the industry)
You don’t want to copy your competitors, but you do want to keep an eye on what they’re up to.
Stay on top of the conversation by automating your competitive research. Set up alerts for relevant news to see what’s good in the world of real estate social media.
You don’t want to miss out on trending news or the opportunity to weigh in on relevant issues.
Don’t trust automation software for critical business decisions
While automation software can be helpful in several aspects of your business, you shouldn’t rely on it to make important business decisions.
Automation has come a long way, but not quite far enough to replace a human’s strategic mind.
The data you get from automation software should be used as a reference point, but not as the only requirement for decision-making.
Do understand your target audience before automating communication
Your tool will only be as smart as the person using it (that’s you). An excellent automation tool caters to its user’s demands, but those demands should be backed by data and insights.
That means you need to start with an understanding of who your audience is on social media.
Understanding your target audience will help you customize your automations to improve relevancy and effectiveness.
Looking for an automated social media tool for real estate? Hootsuite has you covered with all the content scheduling, publishing, and analytics tools you need. Reach more people, attract high-value leads, and protect your brand from negative reviews — all in one place.
Get new clients and close more deals with Hootsuite, the #1 social media management tool for real estate agents.
