It’s nearly impossible to build a modern marketing strategy without at least considering social media. Now the main online activity for most demographics, platforms like Facebook and Instagram are a perfect opportunity to reach and engage your audience of prospective homebuyers. Of course, home builder social media does not lead to guaranteed success. Get your strategy or execution wrong, and you risk shouting into the noise of thousands of companies across industries doing the same. Instead, you need to be strategic in promoting your business and engaging prospective and current homebuyers.
That’s why we’ve built this guide. Keep reading to get a solid foundation of what you need to know about home builder social media, along with some tangible information on how to get started in building your own presence and growing your business.
Why Home Builder Social Media Matters
Let’s start with a simple truth: social media for builders matters because it’s where your audience spends their time. In fact, studies show that 90% of millennials (now representing the biggest generational share of home buyers) are active on social media, 79% check their favorite platforms multiple times a day, and 63% have increased their social media usage over the past year.
But the need for social media goes deeper than just reaching your audience where they are. Research consistently shows that consumers use social media to interact with the brands that matter to them, looking particularly for content that seems authentic and honest before making purchasing decisions.
Finally, social media is increasingly moving toward visual content like photos and videos. For home builders looking to show off current or future properties, it’s a perfect outlet to maximize the exposure of anything from blueprints to virtual walk-throughs and more.
Organic vs. Paid Social Media for Home Builders
Before digging into the nuances of home builder social media, it’s important to make one clear distinction: ad vs. organic, or unpaid, efforts.
- Organic social media is a long-term strategy. It includes creating and optimizing your business accounts, posting content, and gaining followers for your page who can see and engage with that content over time.
- Social media ads are short-term efforts to build awareness for your business. For example, you can create home builder ads on Facebook that appear on the platform’s newsfeed—but are targeted toward users based on their demographics, even if they’ve never heard about your business.
Long-term, organic social media is a more sustainable and successful strategy, so our guide will focus primarily on that part of the tactic. But that doesn’t mean social media ads can’t be effective for short-term exposure. This guide on social media advertising is a great place to start digging deeper into the concept.
6 Steps to Home Builder Social Media Marketing
Make no mistake: whether we’re talking about social media marketing for new home builders or experienced businesses, the key to success is strategy. These six steps can help you be successful in building a digital presence specifically designed to engage and convert prospective homebuyers.
1. Define Your Goals
As with any marketing or business strategy, any effective execution has to begin with defining exactly what you want to get out of your social media efforts. Chances are you won’t convince someone who’s never heard of your business before to buy a new home; instead, social media goals for home builders tend to revolve around other topics:
- Building awareness of your home-building business
- Generating traffic to and leads from your website
- Generating engagement among prospective homebuyers
The key, though, is making sure that these goals are as exact as possible. Follow the SMART Goal template, setting goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. In other words, a social media goal of “generate more website traffic” is too general; instead, consider making it a SMART goal with phrasing like “increasing web traffic by 5% per month from relevant audiences.”
2. Analyze Your Audience
With your goals set, it’s time to define exactly what you mean by a relevant audience. Sure, you want to attract prospective homebuyers. But what do you know about them?
Start with the demographics. The more you can define the age, education level, location, and other tangible variables about your audience, the better. From there, go into the intangibles, like interests, online behaviors, and more.
In other words, you need to build an audience profile for your social media efforts that’s as comprehensive as possible. That way, you can focus on the channels, content types, and engagement opportunities most relevant to that specific audience.
3. Choose Your Channels
Your audience analysis should make this next step simple. It’s all about making sure that you don’t stretch your social media efforts too thin, trying to be everything for all people. Instead, it’s about focusing on the channels most relevant to your audience.
For example, prospective homebuyers likely won’t be on LinkedIn. However, using Instagram for home builders makes sense when you try to serve a largely millennial audience.
Start by informing yourself about the various differences between the channels, and how different audiences interact with them. Then, choose between one and three channels that most align with your audience. If you’re new to social media, start with a single channel to establish a consistent presence there before moving too far ahead.
4. Create a Content Calendar
Social media, for home builders or otherwise, can never be a one-time effort. Most estimates place the time from establishing your presence to seeing tangible results at around six months. Although the exact time may vary, long-term success is only possible with a steady stream of content.
That content stream, in turn, requires careful consideration of both your audience preferences and the type of media most successful on your chosen channels. The more you can plan ahead in the form of a content calendar, the more organized you can become and the easier keeping that consistency will become.
It might seem counterintuitive for a marketing channel, but social media is most successful when you don’t overpromote your own business. Instead, focus on sharing interesting content your audience will want to share with their peers. As mentioned above, visual content tends to be a winner.
Looking for inspiration? Keep scrolling for some potential home builder social media posts you can easily implement.
5. Build an Engagement Plan
Posting is only half the equation on social media. The other half: engaging with your audience to encourage interactions and respond to questions. That can come in multiple forms:
- Posting content specifically to drive engagement, like asking your audience questions about their home or home search.
- Actively responding to comments, including negative comments as long as they’re constructive and not spam.
- Responding to direct messages and mentions of your business, using social media as a customer service channel.
- Responding to reviews on networks like Facebook, showing your willingness and ability to build relationships with your customers.
Especially as your presence grows, this effort can take on an increasingly prohibitive amount of time. That’s why building an engagement plan makes sense: define specific times of day devoted to engaging with your audience, and create a FAQ section so you can answer consistently commonly asked questions among prospective homebuyers.
6. Evaluate and Improve
Finally, keep a close eye on your social media presence as it grows over time. That means not just tracking your follower growth, but also how your individual posts perform. Over time, you might be able to detect trends among your posts, like certain content consistency leading to more clicks or comments than others.
All social media platforms have built-in analytics that allow you to track metrics like reach, impressions, likes, comments, and more. By keeping a close eye on your core metrics, and aligning them with your goals where possible, you can keep improving your social media presence to become more successful over time.
5 Social Media Post Ideas for Home Builders
All of the above steps are largely strategic. So, before we finish out this guide, let’s get tactical. While there are near-infinite types of posts you can publish, consider these options as an inspiration to get you started in building your content calendar:
- Share inside looks at new or future properties coming to market. You can also get more creative, like a timelapse of one of your properties being built.
- Share the stories of home buyers who have been on the building journey with you, showcasing the types of input and experiences they’ve had throughout the process.
- Create a series of posts that outline common tips for home buyers looking to purchase a new property, positioning yourself as a trusted expert.
- Introduce your team, humanizing the people behind the business that prospective homebuyers may end up working with.
- Show your appreciation for any partners with whom you work on building new homes. This can even lead to content collaboration with partners who also have an active presence.
Of course, these are just some of the countless types of posts you can publish. Visuals like virtual tours always work well, and so does sharing simple company news or updates. Use your content calendar to keep your posts varied enough to remain interesting to anyone following your social media presence.
In the end, social media for home builders is relatively straightforward. It does, however, require strategy, creativity, and at least some patience. The steps and tips in this guide can help you get there, building a social media presence your audience is sure to love. And once you get there, you can integrate your social media efforts into your larger digital and marketing strategy for long-term sustainable success.
