Top Social Media Marketing Tools for Real Estate
Real estate agents, apartment locators, and marketing teams need the right tools to attract new clients and build a stronger online presence that expands their outreach. These days, a solid marketing strategy incorporates the best social media tools, but sorting through and choosing the most effective options can be a challenge. Thus, below we review various social media tools to better understand their strengths and limitations. Our assessment takes into consideration the cost as well as the pros and cons of each one.
Related to Social Media Tools for Real Estate: How Much Can You Make as an Apartment Locator?
Social Media Ads
Facebook Business Suite App (Facebook & Instagram Ads)
The Business Suite App serves as a one-stop shop for managing your Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger accounts. From the Facebook Business Suite you can view notifications, create stories and ads, and schedule when your content will go live. In addition, you can review the analytics to see how your posts are doing, including the number of reactions, comments, and shares. It also allows you to manage your calendar and schedule appointments. Additionally, Facebook Business Suite App gives you the ability to manage your sales and inventory information, but only if you also use Facebook’s Commerce Manager and add some third-party tools.
- Cost per Month: Free
- Pros: It’s easy to post and respond without having to open multiple applications or tabs.
- Cons: It contains an excessive number of features, many of which will prove unnecessary for most users.
- Best for: People who run multiple social media accounts and would like to manage them all from one location.
TikTok Business Suite
TikTok for business is a platform where a real estate agent can create a business profile with photos and videos in order to attract TikTok users and engage with them online. Many professionals get confused and think that TikTok is only meant for entertainment purposes and will only attract a younger demographic of people under 25. However, older users also like TikTok for educational purposes, which gives agents the opportunity to introduce their expertise to a large audience. Many businesses on TikTok will partner with known influencers in order to stand out. According to the Influencer Marketing Hub, TikTok users spend over $110 million each month.
- Cost per Month: Free (unless you decide to pay influencers to support your brand)
- Pros: You can access a large audience.
- Cons: A younger demographic group makes up the majority of its users.
- Best for: People who want to expand their outreach in a cost-effective way, especially businesses with a younger clientele.
Creating Social Media Content
Canva
Canva is a graphic design tool that contains many templates for creating visuals quickly. They offer tools for designing Facebook ads, presentations, business cards, and other social media projects for Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter. These designs can either be created on a computer or an app made for use on a mobile device. The drag and drop feature allows for a faster learning curve and the final Canva design can be created within minutes while still maintaining a polished look. There are over a million photos and 25,000 templates along with 5GB of storage as part of the free version.
- Cost per Month: Free, or $12.99 for a team of 1-5 people, if you want more features
- Pros: You get lots of templates, photos, and videos to choose from for free. It’s easy to use.
- Cons: You can’t make a customized logo. The interface is harder to view on smaller screens.
- Best for: People who don’t have time to learn a complicated graphic design program and want to post as soon as possible.
Splice App
The Splice app is a mobile video editor that can take your existing photos and videos and turn them into a compelling mini-movie with special effects. Easier to use than TikTok’s in-app editor, your final videos can achieve that movie quality look, with music, smoother transitions, and subtitles that make the experience more interactive for the viewer. One main advantage of the Splice app is the ability to share the video instantly on your social media accounts. Some of the available features include slow motion, speeding up, cropping, or adding musical effects.
- Cost per Month: Free
- Pros: They provide lots of options for music, transitions, and filters to enhance your videos.
- Cons: They don’t provide any templates. You provide the footage.
- Best for: People who want to enhance their videos for posting on social media.
TikSave App
The TikSave app gives you the ability to save and organize your TikTok videos in order to locate them at a later time. This app also makes it easier to find your preferred videos by creating folders that make your future searches less time consuming. It gives you the ability to review a video’s analytical engagement by displaying the number of comments, shares, and likes it receives. You can also use it to schedule and share posts within the optimal time frame for posting on additional social media platforms.
- Cost per Month: Free 3-day trial, then $4.99 per month, or $29.99 per year
- Pros: It allows users to save TikTok videos without a watermark.
- Cons: It has a very short free trial, and users run into technical difficulties sometimes.
- Best for: People who want to save their TikTok videos without watermarks.
TrendTok
TrendTok is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) app that allows users to see various trends occurring with TikTok videos for various sounds and songs. The app organizes data into three main sections: people, places, and categories, such as genres or industries. Each section displays information about how certain trends are going up or down throughout the world. The data features a simple visual format of green and red arrows on an easy-to-understand color coded world map. This app helps influencers who want to stay ahead of trends in order to grow their social media presence.
- Cost per Month: Free to download, but $2.99/ month or $19.99/year to use
- Pros: Users can see how sounds and songs are trending around the world.
- Cons: It measures only sound and song trends.
- Best for: Influencers who want to stay ahead of the trends.
Posting & Queueing Up Social Media
Buffer
Buffer helps you manage and respond to various social media accounts in one location. Instead of visiting each platform individually, Buffer allows you to manage many social media platforms, such as LinkedIn, Shopify, TikTok, and your Google Business Profile, in addition to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. The version you choose will determine how many accounts you can manage and the extent of the analytical, scheduling, and reporting capabilities you can access. Most people start with the free version to get a feel for how it works. Some of the paid versions will also allow for 14-day trials if you need additional bandwidth, depending on the size of your business.
- Cost per Month: $0-$10, depending on the tier you choose, or $100 per month for marketing agencies
- Pros: It’s easy to use, and they have good customer support.
- Cons: The free version has very limited capabilities.
- Best for: Busy professionals who want the ease of managing their profiles in one place.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite, another social media management software, enables you to efficiently manage your social media accounts, including Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest. With over 16 million users, according to techjury, they are also the best known company for social media management and app integration. In addition to managing posts, they provide an analytical component that gives you insights into the effectiveness of your social media posts. They create training and certification opportunities in order to expand your social media knowledge and offer their services in 6 languages. Lastly, the app will refresh itself every 15 minutes to stay up-to-date with the latest information.
- Cost per Month: Anywhere from free to over $249, depending on your plan
- Pros: They offer easy scheduling for instant or delayed posts and 150+ integrated apps.
- Cons: It’s expensive, and some users report glitches with the scheduler.
- Best for: People who want one place to manage an extensive array of social media platforms.
After you master your chosen social media tools for real estate, learn some other ways to market yourself as an Apartment Locator and expand your digital savviness with additional real estate tech tools.
Get Hands-on Social Media Training at AptAmigo
If you like the idea of working with a marketing team who knows how to deploy the top social media tools for real estate, consider joining AptAmigo. Our agents receive hands-on training and continued support from an expert marketing team when building their social media presence. If you’re interested in learning more about the opportunities at AptAmigo, visit our job board for more information and get ready to become a social media expert.
AptAmigo is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and does not discriminate based on race, religious creed, color, national origin, ancestry, genetic information, physical or mental disability, medical condition, marital status, gender, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law, in connection with any aspect of employment at AptAmigo.
Jennifer Schmidt is a freelance writer in Vancouver, Washington, who specializes in real estate topics.
