Social Media Best Practices: Century 21 Sweyer and Associates
Let’s start out with a little bit of information about Century 21 Sweyer and Associates. Century 21 Sweyer is Southeastern North Carolina’s local real estate company with eight offices located in Wilmington, NC, Jacksonville, Hampstead, Morehead City, New Bern, Downtown Wilmington, Carolina Beach and Holden Beach. Century 21 has been Serving valued customers since the 1980s with local expertise. We are the #1 Century 21 in the Carolinas in closed sales and #11 in the United States based on units sold.
Century 21 Sweyer and Associates does attempt to be active on most main forms of social media from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Many of our posts will feed onto all platforms.
The platform we plan to continue to grow is Century 21 Sweyer’s Instagram account. The account currently has 1,376 followers and our reach is continually growing. Instagram is a photo and video sharing app. The ideal length of characters for Instagram captions are between 138–150 characters. The ideal number of hashtags for Instagram captions can be anywhere between 5–10 hashtags per post.
We do want to continue to post within that Instagram caption character amount. We want people to remain engaged and not get too bored and swipe through our posts. We ALWAYS want to utilize our hashtags. Being a real estate Instagram account gives us a lot of niche hashtags to take advantage of. Every post MUST include the hashtag #Century21Sweyer. We try to include at least three hashtags in the less than 100,000 followers and three above that number.
Below you will find some hashtags we like to include:
· #NCRealEstate
· #RealEstate
· #FeaturedListing
· #NCForSale
· Please use the following hashtags whenever you are posting about a specific area: #WilmingtonForSale, OakIslandForSale, #JacksonvilleForSale, #NewBernForSale, #MoreheadCityForSale, #HoldenBeachForSale, #HampteadForSale, #CarolinaBeachForSale
Consistency is key when following social media best practices. One of the things that remains consistent for our social media are particular posts in general. We want to make sure that we are posting at least once a day. The way we do that is by posting a featured listing from one of our eight offices at 11:30 am. We want to make sure that our photos on Instagram are of high quality. We want to avoid posting blurry or low-resolution photos. These posts tend to have slightly longer captions, as we are posting facts about houses for sale. We also want to make sure to always include a bitly link to our website where the house is posted. Make sure to always customize the bitly link so people know what they are clicking on.
We also want to continue to stay within the Century 21 color scheme. This color scheme includes gold, black, grey and white. You will see our feed stray a little bit when we post about our Real Estate school, Coastal Real Estate. The colors for Coastal Real Estate are a red and blue. All of these colors can be seen in the graphic below.
There are a few more things that we would like to do better when using Instagram. It is becoming clearer and clearer that Instagram is no longer just for publishing pictures. In order to be successful on Instagram, we need to make sure that we fully optimize and utilize all their features. Something we have done in the past, but are not as consistent with are Instagram stories. To be more specific, we would like to continue to drive up engagement by using things such as polls and questions. This would create an engaging and fun experience for our followers besides just liking and commenting on posts.
We would also like to use more of the video formats that Instagram provides. Reels have proven to be extremely popular on Instagram and have been proven to reach even wider audiences than prior Instagram posts. By partaking in this new trend, we could get even engagement on our page and help more people find homes.
