The Ultimate Social Media Cheat Sheet

Sharing useful content on your social networks, also known as inbound marketing, is, as I have previously written, an effective way for real estate agents to promote their businesses and generate leads. But not all social media posts are created equal. The content you share and the way you share it makes a world of difference.

At CityBlast, my colleagues and I have created over 1.5 million social media posts for real estate agents. When you do something over 1.5 million times, you tend to get pretty good at it. This experience has taught us that all successful social media posts share a common structure. By including these five basic elements in your posts, you can ensure that your social media posts are generating leads:

1) Share New and Useful Links

Inbound marketers are curators, offering value to their networks by finding and highlighting the best content on the Internet. At CityBlast, our social media experts read thousands of articles every day in order to identify the items that our Realtor® clients haven't read yet. We do this because real estate agents who share new information stand out and offer the most value to their social networks. As TopRank Online Marketing's Lee Odden explains, the point of content marketing is to "be the best answer." Sharing new content achieves that goal and helps you ensure that your posts are prominently featured in Facebook's newsfeed.

2) Always Use Visuals

On social media, a picture is definitely worth a thousand words. Every post we create at CityBlast includes an image. Because humans process visuals more quickly than text and images take up more screen space in Facebook's newsfeed, images make your posts stand out. Indeed, research shows that photo posts generate 53% more likes and 104% more engagement on Facebook. If you're writing a post, always include a picture and, if you're sharing a link, make sure a preview picture is visible.