Real Estate Marketing Tips for Pinterest
The real estate industry relies on visual appeal for a good first impression. Both images and good staging heavily impact the audience attracted to buy or rent properties. The dream of having a beautiful home is a common one; your job is to lead buyers and sellers to find inspiration in your brand.
Pinterest — the social sharing site made up of virtual bulletin boards — is the perfect visual marketing tool for real estate professionals. We’ll show you how to build a brand that’s so aesthetically pleasing, customers will want to spend hours browsing on your page. Here are our real estate marketing tips for Pinterest.
Step 1: Identify your niche within the real estate market.
How do you identify yourself as a realtor? Do you specialize in suburban properties with sprawling backyards, modern rentals in big-city high rises, or vacation timeshares on the beach? Identifying your niche will help you to figure out what kind of visuals you’ll be creating and putting together.
You want your images to have a common style and tone to them. For example, if you specialize in winter ski homes, you’ll want to focus on images of warm fireplaces, snowy mountains, forest trails, and hot chocolate. You want your images to have a common style and tone to them, so you can paint an appropriate emotion in the viewer.
Step 2: Search relevant content and follow accounts to generate your dashboard.
Once you’ve registered and set up your profile + company bio, search for a few terms that are relevant to your business. You could search “luxury apartments”, “real estate trends”, “modern kitchens”, and pretty much anything else you could think of.
Pinterest will generate a search of “pins”– pieces of content represented by a photo, a caption, and a link– relating to your search terms. From the same search, you can also find other pinners and other pinner’s pin boards: a collection of pins grouped by a common theme.
When you find a pin you like, pin it to your board relevant to your search, i.e. pinning a modern kitchen pin to your board “Kitchen Inspiration”. When you find a board or an account that inspires you or matches your style, follow it. Every time you perform these actions, Pinterest will use the information to create a unique feed for your homepage dashboard, your main source for new pins.
Step 3: Create pin boards for buyers.
Pin boards for buyers are going to spark the dream they may not know they have. You know what the clients in your niche are looking for, whether it’s the beautiful kitchen, the best view, or the perfect neighborhood. So create a board for inspiration in each of these areas.
Say you’re selling apartments in Brooklyn. Create a board of the beautiful brownstones that line the streets and call it “Brooklyn: Neighborhood Feel”. Create a board of the best dining in the area, and call it “Brooklyn: Food + Drink”. Finally, create a board of stylish interiors (kitchens, living rooms, bedrooms) and call it “Brooklyn: Interiors”.
Along with this, you’ll want to have a board for how-to’s, tips, and need-to-knows when buying a new home. It will serve as a wealth of information for new buyers.
Step 4: Create boards for sellers and new homeowners.
If you also represent sellers, you’ll want to create boards that serve as resources for them during the selling process. Think of it as a board full of DIY hacks, money-saving tips, and tons of how-to’s when it comes to selling a home.
Team Ruby Henderson, a real estate team in Raleigh, NC got it right with their Sell Your Home board. They have a plethora of fantastic articles and infographics on paint color choices, staging a home like a pro, and a cleaning checklist. They go above and beyond what you’d expect from a realtor.
You should also put together a board for homeowners (that may have recently bought from you!) full of similar content but with a heavier focus on DIY and decorating tips. This reflects both your personal style and your eye for trend, and will attract many new pinners (and potential future clients) to your profile.
Step 5: Link your board to your website and other social profiles.
What good is all of this branding if you don’t get the word out? Linking your Pinterest to your website is essential. There are a few ways to do this, but a simple effective way is to instal a plugin to show some of your recent pins in a feed on your website.
Here’s a handy HubSpot article on how to set up a plugin. This way, whenever a potential new client comes to your website, they’ll get some value add before even going to your Pinterest profile.
Also, make sure to add a link to your Pinterest on Twitter, Facebook, and any other social profiles you may have.
Creating a visual brand is important; it helps viewers see your style, tact, and knowledge. A study reported by HubSpot showed that pins on Pinterest have a high virality potential: over 80% of pins are re-pins compared to twitter where only 1.4% of tweets are retweeted. This increases the probability that a pin from one of your boards will be shared over your contributions on other social media sites.
Looking for more real estate marketing tips? Check out our blog 4 Real Estate Marketing Tips for Beginners.