6 Obsolete Social Media Tactics You’re Wasting Your Time On

Social Media is a great way to get in front of people in your local area. The ability to reach thousands of people interested in you and your service is a vital resource for real estate agents, and is why more an more agents are becoming active on social media.

The opportunity is there to generate a consistent flow of leads and listings from social media. However the medium is constantly evolving and strategies that worked yesterday might no longer work today.

The biggest complaint I hear from people about social media is the amount of time that it can take up.

So I have put together some great tips from an article by Neil Patel highlighting some obsolete social media tactics that you are wasting your time on.

If you aren’t getting leads and sales from your social media efforts, chances are you are using one (or more) of these obsolete strategies.

6 Obsolete Social Media Tactics The You’re Wasting Your time On

1: Posting whenever you’re free

Posting daily or whenever you have time isn’t ideal. Why? Because your followers may not be online when you are posting.

That means no one is going to see the content you are promoting.

Simply Measured has some free tools that show you when you should be posting. It will analyse your user base and tell you the days and times the most optimal for engagement.

Here is an example report for Instagram:

Once you figure out the ideal days and times you should be posting, sign up for Buffer (free), and start scheduling your posts.

2: Posting only text updates

With Facebook’s new algorithm posts with just text in them are receiving much less views than posts with images included.

Take an extra 10 seconds to snap a quick photo or video with your phone and include that with a caption. You can still use the same words that you were going to use in your plain text post, but now more people are going to read them!

The same goes for any other social network, picture catch people attention and will draw them to your post over other plain text status updates.

3: Trying to game your follower count

You may be able to go out and buy 1000 fans to your Facebook page for a couple of dollars online.

The big numbers may look cool but it doesn’t take much for an average person to see that those fans are all from third world countries.

They aren’t going to engage with your content, and they are only going to hurt your reputation if people start seeing a bunch of spammy likes on your page.

Also, social sites are getting smart at analysing how many of your followers are actually engaging. And if the ratio is poor, your content won’t spread much, which will cause you to get less traffic compared to having a smaller fan base that actually engages.

So, instead of trying to game the system, start looking at your competitors. See what types of content they are posting that causes engagement. Test posting similar types of posts. And avoid posting content that doesn’t get likes, comments, or shares.

4: Being self-promotional

I started participating on social sites because I wanted to grow my brand, traffic, and sales. I didn’t really care about anything else, and people saw it.

But once I started engaging on other people’s content, answering questions, and just helping people out, I quickly noticed that I started to build a loyal following.

If you are providing informative, funny and useful posts on social media people will be happy to engage with you and share your content. Which will allow you to stay top of mind when they need a real estate agent in the future.

Make sure you help people out, answer their questions, and share content from others within your industry. You don’t have to promote competitors, but you should be promoting news and content sites.

5: Linking directly to someone’s site

If you find an interesting news article or piece of content that you think your audience will benefit from you should share it with your audience, right?

But when you share someone else’s link, you are driving traffic to their site and generating no traffic in return. That kind of blows.

What if I told you that every time you promote someone else’s site, you can actually drive more traffic back to your site?

There is a cool social tool called Sniply, which puts a promotional box on any site you share.

When you drive traffic to others, there is a chance that some of those visitors will come back to your site.

7: Adding too many social sharing buttons to your site

If you want people to share articles on your site, what do you do? Add social sharing buttons to your site, right?

Instead of having social sharing buttons to every single social network out there, try just having 3 or 4 networks for your reader to share content to.

Pick the sites that resonate most with your readers. Chances are it is going to be Facebook, Twitter, and one other social site.