At the end of 2020, Pinterest had 442 million active users. That’s more than 100 million more users than it had at the end of 2019. It’s one of the largest social media platforms globally and—due to its visual focus—one that has massive potential for people who work with visual products and services.
Few professionals rely on visuals in advertising as much as real estate professionals. Realtors, real estate investors, and other property flippers sell houses by emphasizing the beauty of the exterior details, interior features, and surrounding property.
Pinterest is the perfect social media platform for real estate. With just a little work, you can turn it into a powerful engine for selling properties. The following seven cumulative steps will help you do that.
- Start with your Long-term Goals
- Create a Branding Plan that Can Guide Your Content
- Understand that Your Primary Audience is Women
- Scout out Powerful Group Boards
- Create Boards Based on Topics that are Relevant to Your Target Audience
- Follow Successful Real Estate Professionals & Note their Style
- Create Geo-Targeted Pinterest Ads
Let’s look at each of them in more detail, starting with the importance of goals.
Start with Your Long-term Goals
If you’re using Pinterest for real estate marketing, you need to understand it isn’t a platform where you can quickly scrap a campaign and try something new.
On Pinterest, the whole history of your content is laid out very clearly. A post that’s a year old may still be visible and attracting engagement. If you start deleting it when it no longer suits you, it could mean losing the followers who have already responded to it.
You want to avoid losing followers because the number of followers you have is considered a mark of credibility to new followers (some of whom may be great leads).
That’s why it’s essential to think about your long-term goals before you do anything else. You need to figure out:
- Who your content will target
- What it is meant to accomplish (for example, direct leads or a broad base of followers)
- What details will set it apart from other page’s content
If you’re having trouble making these decisions now, don’t worry. The upcoming steps will give you a lot more clarity on why these decisions matter and what options exist. Next, let’s look at the role a branding guide can play in helping you set your content apart.
Create a Branding Plan to Guide Your Content Creation
A branding guide is a resource that you can reference to ensure that your content maintains a consistent look and character. This is important because you want your posts to be recognizable on sight. They should be recognizably yours even if other accounts steal them or try to copy them.
When you’re building content for a platform like Pinterest, your branding plan needs to cover the most important visual elements. Here are some of the important elements that should be laid out in your branding plan:
- The color palette that is used
- The borders that appear around the images
- The font that is used for text that appears in images
- The filter that is used over images
- The angles or perspectives that you prefer for photos
While visual elements are important, your branding plan should also include the voice and mood you take to create posts. You can focus on being humorous or try to intrigue people with posts that play up the glamour of the homes being featured.
You should understand when you’re choosing the direction you want to go with your branding plan. When you’re marketing on Pinterest, your audience is mostly going to be women.
Understand Your Audience
Before you can market effectively on any platform, you need to know who you’re targeting with your presence there. 71% of all Pinterest users are women, and in the US at least, Pinterest reaches 83% of all women between the ages of 25 and 54.
That makes it not just a great platform for reaching women but one of the best platforms out there. That should matter to you because more single women own homes than single men, and in couples, women tend to dominate the home-buying process.
Factor this into you the way you position your brand, the way you create content, and the way that you analyze how well your content has performed.
One of the best ways to reach everyone on Pinterest is to start by scouting the most powerful real estate boards.
Scout out Powerful Group Boards
Group boards are a special feature you’ll find on Pinterest. Group boards are owned by one person who has the power to add other people with authority to pin posts on the board. Some of the largest group boards have thousands of contributors and millions of followers.
When you’re just getting started on Pinterest, group boards are the best way to get your content in front of other people. Create enough content pieces—such as image guides, tips, and attractive photos of listings—that you can pass a review by any boards you ask to join.
Once you have joined a board, start building content (in your own style) that matches the type of content the board followers have come to expect. If you’re good at this, you’ll start attracting followers of your own.
That’s when it becomes necessary to start building your own boards.
Create Boards Based on Topics that are Relevant to Your Target Audience
Your home page on Pinterest isn’t just one big gallery. You can create navigable boards for multiple topics. When your followers visit them, they’ll see only the content that you created for that board.
Real estate investors and other professionals can benefit from this organization by building boards for all of the different topics that may interest their followers. Real estate professionals who use Pinterest have created boards around topics like:
- House flipping (photos of renovations in different stages)
- Beautiful homes (pictures of some of your best listings)
- Quaint/cozy/tiny homes (pictures of your smaller or more classic listings)
- Home Sales (Note-card style advice about how to sell homes or buy them)
You may start to notice that some of these boards are more effective at getting the kind of actions you’re looking for. You may notice that some boards help draw more people to your website, while others are more effective at drawing attention directly to your listings.
No matter what content you’re creating topics around, you want to follow some principles that will help you build powerful content. That’s a moving target on a young social media platform like Pinterest, so the best way to stay fresh is to follow the people doing it best.
Follow Successful Real Estate Professionals & Note their Style
Tips on how to help you build the best possible Pinterest content wouldn’t necessarily be helpful to you. Trends move fast on Pinterest. Followers reward the people who are most effective at keeping their looks fresh. That’s why you should make sure you’re following and taking notes from the most successful real estate professionals.
These high-performers aren’t very hard to find. They’re the people who naturally come up when you enter real estate-oriented keywords into the search bar. They show up at the top of results because of their popularity.
Pay close attention to how these powerful influencers are creating their content. Note the topics they prefer to write about, and how they choose to present them. You should also take note of how often they publish new content.
Some of the biggest real estate influencers are international (mostly because e-books, consulting, and training courses are their business instead of moving houses). The one way you want to deviate from that is by geo-targeting for one area.
Geo-Target Your Content and Ads
If you want to use your Pinterest account to move properties, you need to focus on your region from the beginning. Make sure that the content you develop includes written references to the area where the homes will be available.
When you’re ready to expand your marketing efforts to ads, you can also closely geo-target those by using the ad options. This will help to ensure that your content is reaching people who are positioned to be receptive leads.
Make Pinterest Work for You Today
Now you know how to make Pinterest a practical part of your real estate marketing efforts.
Ensure that you start by planning your long-term goals and creating a branding plan that can help guide them. Make the most of the fact that your primary audience is women, and reach out to everyone more effectively by joining group boards.
Let the best real estate professionals on Pinterest show you how it’s done, but remember that you need to focus on a particular region if you want to sell real estate.
