In the mortgage and real estate industries, you need trust to turn attention into growth. Visibility alone isn’t enough.
Building a magnetic brand on social media isn’t only about posting consistently, it’s about posting with authenticity, having a strategy, and posting content that is relevant to your audience and your niche. Many mortgage and real estate industry brands are posting, but few of them are building trust in a way that can scale.
With all the content flooding social media, building trust takes more than just visibility, you need credibility and connection. Leveraging proven methods to build that credibility and connection, like social proof, team visibility, and story-telling will broaden engagement and accelerate your growth.
In this article, I will cover deeper strategies for companies that already have a solid social media presence and are ready to scale trust-building and turn their visibility into growth and broader influence.
Three Next-Level Social Media Strategies for Building Trust
Trust isn’t given, it’s earned. The following three strategies will help you take your social media presence to the next level to build trust with your audiences on any of the primary platforms you use.
1) Client Testimonials & Success Stories: Leveraging testimonials and client success stories is called sharing “social proof” that you are a solid, reputable company. People don’t like taking risks, especially when it comes to a high stakes purchase that requires careful consideration. Social proof reduces that perceived risk because it validates your claims of greatness. Plus, it triggers an emotional connection, especially if you see parallels between your story and theirs. And finally, there’s the “bandwagon” effect that occurs when people see that social proof, meaning they want to jump on and have a similar experience.
To overcome any risk of privacy violations with this strategy, here are several steps you can take:
Keep the story general: Describe the situation in a way that does not reveal identities. Be sure to explain any challenges and strategy that led to success to give the story all necessary context.
Focus on the results: What people really want to know are the results others have achieved by partnering with you. It’s not necessary to name the client, but it is helpful if you can get the permission.
Ask for permission to share a quote, testimonial, or story: It is good to mix in permission-based shares to give you overall credibility, especially since not all clients will agree to this due to privacy concerns.
Use charts, graphs, or other visuals where appropriate: You can blur names and locations where necessary, while still getting the same message across.
2) Personal Branding for Team Members and Leaders: People like engaging with other people, not an impersonal, cold corporate entity. That’s why there is typically much lower engagement with company posts than personal posts. Teams that engage personally on social media platforms accomplish many things:
a. Building emotional connections.
b. Market differentiation: The competition cannot replicate an individual – you are uniquely you.
c. Increased credibility: Sharing your own stories builds credibility and trust with your audience.
d. Better recruiting and retention outcomes: Lenders, and vendors, want to have success in recruiting great people and then retaining them. When your people engage on social media, your audiences get to know who you are, your culture, and your mission.
e. Amplifying their overall company and personal reach: Team members with strong personal brands can do a lot to extend overall visibility and influence.
One consideration as team members engage on social media is ensuring the company brand doesn’t somehow get diluted. Here are a few pointers to help avoid this dilution:
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- Aligning personal content with company values by sharing content that reinforces the company mission.
- Highlight team wins and collaborative efforts that tie to the broader corporate effort.
- Use branded templates and hashtags to maintain consistency while still using your personal voice.
- Share company content with your added value.
3) Data-Driven Optimization & Social Listening: Reviewing data dashboards frequently provided by both the social platforms and post distribution tools, you can refine your message and drive better performance over time. These tools enable you to identify top-performing content so you can produce more content that is similar, track impressions, spot trends, and monitor conversions.
Here’s what you should be watching in your social media content metrics to inform future content and strategies:
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- Engagement rate, which includes likes, comments, shares and saves relative to the reach
- Reach and impressions: Reach is how many people saw your content, and impressions are how many times people saw it.
- Click-through rate: This metric tells you how compelling your content is.
- Follower growth: This metric is declining in importance because the algorithms lean towards serving up content that users are interested in. Focus more energy on engagement instead.
- Video views and watch time: If your average watch time is only a few seconds on a video that is 30 seconds or more, you failed to hook them. For shorter videos up to one minute, you want viewers to watch at least 50% of the video.
- Conversions, if applicable: This includes downloads, sign-ups or inquiries related to a post or campaign.
If you want to put these strategies into action, I will walk you through a 5-step roadmap in my next article “Your Social Trust-Building Roadmap: 5 Steps to Activate Your Brand Online.”