Social media for realtors: why months of posting have not brought you a client

Social media for realtors: why months of posting have not brought you a client

Sunday night, couch, phone tilted away from whoever is sitting next to you, and you are scrolling your own profile instead of anybody else's. More than forty posts since spring: listing photos, two just solds, a market chart, and a reel you recorded six times and still do not like your face in. You open your messages to see what all of it produced, and the only new one is from a stranger offering to edit your next video for free.

Posting was never the whole job.

This month's closings are the wrong scorecard

The agents I coach who give up on social media usually give up early, and for the same reason. They posted every day for a few weeks, nobody called, and they looked at the month and saw zero closings from it.

That is a fair way to grade a paid lead. A paid lead shows up today and feels like business today. Social media runs the other direction. Somebody watches you for months before they reach out, and when they finally do, they talk to you like they have known you for years. The agents I coach who stick with it and track where their business comes from see the same pattern: social leads take months to turn into a closing, not weeks.

So when somebody tells me they are forty posts in and nothing has happened, my answer is the one I give on almost every call about it. Don't look for the results right now. For the first hundred days, the only grade is whether you posted and talked to somebody today. Views, followers and closings can wait, and a week with no messages means nothing if you were never grading it on messages.

A burst is not a strategy

The pattern I see most is not an agent who never posts. It is an agent who posts like a heart monitor: five posts and a video in a good week, then a messy closing and a full weekend, then three weeks of nothing, then a guilty comeback burst.

Posting that depends on your mood means your feed depends on your business, because your mood does. The people in your database do not know you had a slow month. They see somebody who shows up, and then somebody who is gone, and every comeback has to rebuild what the gap spent.

The fix I use is a hundred posts in a hundred days. It is a common challenge and I did not invent it, but I have not found a better one. You are going to learn more about yourself and what you will actually do on repeat: home tours for some agents, comedy for others, local content about the town you sell in for a lot of them.

Small and imperfect both count. A photo from a showing with two sentences about what the buyer noticed is a post, and so is one question about your town. Three or four posts in a brutal week is a good week. What I will not take is the disappearance that lasts three weeks.

Polish is how you avoid posting

Some agents are not in the burst pattern at all, because they are stuck one step earlier. The idea for the video is good, but the lighting needs fixing, a teleprompter app eats an afternoon, there are four takes, and two weeks later the idea is still on the phone.

I use a guitar example with clients. If all I have to do is pick it up, then noodling for thirty minutes is better than not having touched it. If I spin my wheels on how to make those thirty minutes as optimal as possible, I have a larger chance of doing nothing, because I overoptimized it. A post is the guitar, and picking it up is the whole job.

Every agent I have watched get real business from social media built the habit first and did the analysis later. So set one rule: you do not open your analytics until day one hundred. On that day you sit down for an hour, look at which posts got comments and messages from real people, and do more of those. Until then the only question is whether it went up.

I do not take my own advice on this

I run a YouTube channel for agents, and I coach habit first and analysis later on almost every call where content comes up. This fall I went 32 days without publishing a new video on it.

When the next one went up, I was reading the impressions and the click rate before it had been live long enough to tell me anything. I said out loud to the person who edits my videos that I do not understand YouTube, and that any attempt to understand YouTube only frustrates me. That is the agent in this post. A gap, a comeback, and analysis on day one of something that needs a hundred days before the analysis means anything.

What it cost me is what it costs you. Every gap resets the clock I keep telling clients to trust, and I was the one who stopped it. I just have to keep cranking, and look at the numbers when there are enough of them to read.

A like is not a conversation

Business comes from conversations, and a like is not one. Look at your last ten posts. If most of them would make sense on a billboard, they are doing a different job than you think. Listings, just solds and market charts are advertising, and people scroll past an ad from somebody they know the same way they scroll past one from a stranger.

My theory, from coaching a lot of agents who do this well, is that the content that meets strangers is local content and entertaining house tours. The informational posts everybody makes mostly reach people who already know you. I do not discourage anybody from making them, but call it what it is. It is a touch to your database, not a way to meet new people.

Boosting a post buys reach, not conversations. Let's not lump paying for Facebook ads in with prospecting; that is just giving out your credit card info.

So finish the conversation yourself. When somebody from your database comments, reply, then send them a direct message about them and not about real estate. After every post, spend ten minutes commenting on posts from people you actually know. This is a people business. We need to find a way to talk to people, and social media is one more way to do it.

Social media is not everybody's lever

Some agents should not be using social media as their main way to find business, and I tell them so. One of the most useful things I can say to an agent who dreads every post is that social media does not come naturally to them. That is not a bad thing; it is knowing yourself.

The story is that whoever grinds hardest wins. That works for maybe the first year, and then you recognize that you do not like getting business the way you have been getting it. A method you resent does not survive a busy spring, no matter how well you set it up.

I also have clients for whom content is the foundation of the whole business, so this is not an argument against posting. It is an argument for a test. If you are paying an editor or a video company, you need two answers before you spend another month: how will you know it is working, and by when do you need to know it is working before you cut the cord?

If social media is not your lever, nothing here is wasted. Keep the ten minutes of replies, let your profile be the place people check you out after they meet you, and put the rest of the time into the ways you already like meeting people. Being seen and finding business are two different jobs, and only one of them has to happen online.