So, Instagram is huge – we already know that. With over 1 BILLION active users, and has a user engagement 4 times higher than Facebook’s, this is a social network that shouldn’t be ignored by real estate agents.

Tons of top producing agents are using Instagram to boost their organic lead generation, reputation management, and even attract actual transactions.

And with the current pandemic, the power of Instagram marketing has only increased.

For this article, we have meticulously studied hundreds of top producing agents in the US and Canada, including our very own AgentFire clients, in order to come up with 20 simple but effective Instagram marketing strategies, you can implement right now.

And if that wasn’t enough, most of these strategies won’t even take you 5 minutes to implement.

Understanding the power of Instagram

Instagram, has an exceptionally high engagement rate and a very wide audience range, which makes it ripe for a myriad of marketing strategies. The data below should give you an idea of just how big Instagram is.

According to research data by Oberlo:

•  Instagram’s engagement is 4 times higher than Facebook’s
•  Instagram has over 1 billion active users.
•  Young adults make up 71% of the user base.
•  Users spend an average of 53 minutes per day on the platform.
•  83% of users say they discovered a new product or service on the platform.
•  Half of the users follow at least one business.

The data tells a fairly compelling story. You simply can’t afford to neglect Instagram when such a highly engaged audience is within your reach. In the next section, I will discuss some of the ways you can use the platform to market your services in the most efficient manner.

Think about the people you follow on your personal Instagram account. Even if you’ve never met or engaged with them directly, you feel as if you know them because you’ve gotten a peak into their life. When it comes time to look for a real estate agents, you’ll come to mind.

Who is Your Audience in Instagram?

Ultimately, whoever you are selling your services to is your audience. Afterall, the National Association of Realtors found that over 50% of real estate agents use social media to generate leads.

These are the people that you should be posting for:

1. Past clients
2. Current clients
3. Potential clients
4. Local business owners
5. Local community influencers
6. Local residents

Instagram Marketing for Real Estate: 20 Simple Ways to Use Instagram Like a Top Producing Agent

Optimize Your Profile

1. Switch To A Business Profile

The first thing you should do with your Instagram account is to switch to a business profile. It’s extremely easy and won’t even take more than 30 seconds – here’s a short guide on how to do it.

A business profile will give you access to insights about your audience and to the actual advertising suite, Facebook Ads Manager. Once you make the switch, other users will see a ‘title’ underneath your name. Plus, if you want to use paid advertising, you will need an Instagram business account.

2. Have A Well-Written Bio

Having a well-written bio is important for 2 distinct reasons: first, it looks way more professional. 

Second, most users want critical information about you right away to make the decision of whether or not to engage. Having a gap-toothed bio will cost you potential clients.

Keep it clean and simple, and easy to read. Make sure you include:

• Your Full name
• The location of where you practice real estate
• The name of your real estate team (if you belong to one)
• Your brokerage’s name
• Awards and accolades – If there are any well-known awards or stats that set you apart from other agents, let your audience know. There are loads of real estate agents online, so anything that makes you memorable can give you an edge up.
• A link to directly to your website or “link in bio” that connects to your other social accounts and website – This creates a circular journey from your social media to your website and back. For example, is you’ve mentioned a listing in a recent Instagram post, you can encourage viewers to visit the link in your bio to learn more about the listing in more detail. If you’ve shared about an event or open house, for example, your susience should be able to use your bio link to learn more.
• A professional profile picture – Ensure your photo is a bright and clear with no messy design or small text. Profile photos are small and only bold details can be seen from afar, keep that in mind when taking your photo.
• Brand hashtag – You should have a hashtag that is unique to your brand or brokerage that you can include in captions and connect your Instagram feed.

The link on Josh Altman’s bio actually takes you to a YouTube video of his ‘Top 10 Properties of the Week’ series. So if you have a content strategy going on you might want to include it in your bio.

3. Clarify Your Personal Brand

Consider how you will visually distance yourself from other real estate agents on the app. What could you show that would make you stand out, yet still appear authentic? It can be as simple as wearing different colours, using a unique headline, stepping up the quality of your photography and videography, etc.

Speak with your AgentFire designers when you’re ready to revamp your real estate brand. Our designers and real estate marketing experts that know exactly which visual cues to use in order to garner the rigth attention and reinforce your real estate brand.

4. Have Action Buttons

Instagram allows business profiles to have action buttons, which allows users to interact with your business. Having these in place removes even more friction for prospects to get in touch with you or even set an appointment – it all happens within the app.

To add an action button, simply go to your profile and select Edit Profile, then under Public Business Information select Contact Options.

By filling in this information, the action buttons for Email, Call, or Message – if you use all three, they will be consolidated into a Contact button.

There are a couple of more advanced action buttons that are integrated with other apps such as for booking appointments and reserving tickets – but we found that most agents did just fine with the basics. 

Here’s what it looks like on coach Dan Wood’s profile:

5. Choose an Attractive, but Honest Instagram Username

Your username is what people see and search for when they look at your instagram account, when selecting an Instagram name there are a few things you should take into account to make the most out of each character:

• Use the limited space to fit in your name, and don’t worry about cramming in your Brokerage name. Instagram is best for building a personal brand, plus if you decide to change brokerages, you may confuse your followers.
• Integrate easy-to-spell real estate words to make it easier for users to remember your account and to find.
• Location, age, and title are other factors that may change in the future. Be aware that if you use these terms in your username, you may have to change then down the line, making it challenging for your regular followers to find your account. However, it can be smart to add these details to your username if your natural name is common or already used.
• Stay away form Instagram suggestions that propose usernames with unrelated number or symbols in them. These usernames can come across as sloppy and un professional.
• The best usernames are timeless, tell your audience what type of content they can expect, and require no future changes.

6. Set Clear Goals for Your Instagram Real Estate Marketing Plan

Clarifying your goals and staying true to them thoroughout your efforts on Instagram will encure that you get the highest ROI and the best possible results for your business consistently. Here are some benchmarks you may want to focus on with your instagram real estate marketing strategy.

• Generating quality leads
• Showcasing various property types
• Building a community around your real estate business
• Growing your professional reputation and brand
• Establishing influence and authority in your hyperlocal community
• Repurpose content and linking to blog posts and other social media platforms
• Communicating regularly with clients and industry giants

Highlight Your Current Properties

7. Display Your Listings On Your Feed

The most basic Instagram marketing real estate strategy that you could implement is to turn your feed into a sort of ‘listings magazine’ by featuring your current properties.

You’re allowed up to 10 photos per post – perfect for showing off a property’s highlight features. There are a couple of filters you might want to mess around with, but it’s always good practice to keep photos as authentic as possible.

Chad Carrol’s Instagram is an immaculate collage of luxury properties with an occasional classy portrait. That’s how a top agent leverages social media.

8. Highlight Your Listings with Instagram Stories and Highlights

An Instagram Story is a feature where you can highlight a photo or 15-second video for 24 hours – after that, the ‘story’ gets archived (make sure that feature is turned on!). You can have multiple stories in a day. Think of it as a visual counterpart to Twitter and Facebook’s off-the-cuff status updates.

An Instagram Highlight is a collection of up to 100 current or archived Instagram Stories of your choice.

This is the Instagram account of celebrated industry leader Joyce Rey – and with over $4.5 BILLION in sales – her strategy is worth learning from. Each property has its own highlight, which opens to a slideshow of high-quality photos taken around the home via Instagram Story archives. 

Now here’s the best part – when you view her highlights, you get a swipe up CTA. If you swipe up the ‘See More’ button below, it takes you to that property’s page on her website, all without having to leave the app!

Not only is she able to broadcast her properties to her sphere, but she has essentially built a simple funnel to guide the prospect’s journey to buying.

Stories are a great option when you want to share content, but it’s not quite impressive enough to reserve a spot on your instagram feed. Additionally, stories allow for more opportuniteis for enaggement such as polls, lives, and Q&As.

9. Use Videos To Enhance Your Posts 

According to HubSpot, social media posts that have video attract 48% more views.

Regular Instagram video posts have a limit of 60 seconds. But Instagram recently released IGTV – a feature for longer-form content and which has a limit of up to 60 minutes. IGTV videos can also be easily shared to other platforms that support longer videos such as Youtube or chopped up to create a series of videos on TikTok.

As we always say, there’s a wide spectrum of production quality you can shoot for, but work with what you have.

Here are some ideas:

• Upload a trailer of an upcoming virtual open house with regular Instagram Video
• Film a property tour with IGTV
• Take a short video of yourself giving a market update – just a simple clip recorded with your phone can be enough.
• Talk about Covid-19 safety guidelines you’re implementing into your property tours
• Answer buyer’s questions
• Answer seller’s questions

We have an example from another top agent, Mark Salerno, giving a minute-and-a-half tour of a property – with a couple of drone shots thrown in the mix (but that’s optional if you don’t have a drone). 

10. Host And Promote Virtual Open Houses

When the pandemic first hit, we scrambled together to get all the information we could on the strategies that we could share with our readers.

One of the most prominent strategies that we found to be used by the best agents and teams were virtual open houses. We wrote The Complete Guide to Virtual Open Houses so that our readers learn about alternatives to live showings and open houses.

In the article, we boiled the process down into three key steps: Choose Your Format, Prepare, Promote. The good news is, this is perfectly applicable to Instagram:

Choose your format – Hold your virtual open house live or pre-recorded! Instagram Live is a great option if you want to answer queries in real-time or bounce back and forth between rooms on demand. 

Pre-recorded is better for those who don’t yet feel too confident in front of the camera, want to focus on production quality or worry about connection issues.

Prepare –  Make sure you’ve memorized your scripts and made sure all your equipment is working – and for those going live, monitor that internet connection!

Promote – Promotion is really where Instagram marketing for real estate shines. If you consider the features we already discussed – Instagram Stories, Highlights, IGTV, etc. – you can get very creative. 

Here are some ideas:

• Use Instagram Stories to broadcast a video of you teasing your upcoming open house, some high-quality photos of the property, graphic text with details of the event (you can use Canva for that)
• Compile all those posts into an Instagram Highlight on your profile
• Post a tour trailer on your feed using Instagram videos or IGTV
• Post high-quality photos on your feed (you can have up to 10 images in a single post)

Here’s an awesome example from luxury agent Scott McIntosh, where he posts a replay of a live virtual open house. You’ll also see on his Instagram feed that he posted a video trailer of that same open house a few days earlier.

11. Tag People And Businesses

Just like Facebook, you can tag people and businesses in your posts. Tag your brokerage, your sphere, and third-party vendors like developers who might want to share the post.

This helps keep you front-of-mind in your sphere of influence. And you never know if any of them is in need of your services. 

12. Add The Location Of The Properties To Your Posts 

Instagram’s Location Tagging is similar to Facebook’s Check-in. You can either use your phone’s GPS or find the location using a search.

There are some benefits to doing this – the most important being that Instagram is still a search engine, and you can get more eyeballs to your listings for anyone searching locally.

For example, if someone searches ‘house for sale’ + [location], your listings should appear in the search results.

The location you chose will appear near the top of your post.

Promote your real estate business

13. Provide value to your followers 

Turn your data into visuals and share it with your followers. Now more than EVER, we need to be the knowledgeable guides for our clients and our communities.

There are loads of useful information you can turn into visuals – MLS data, unemployment rates, news on government stimulation, inventory updates, etc.

Tip: use Canva for an easy way to design visual posts. 

As Tom Ferry always says, “Become the Knowledge Broker in your market.” Here’s a beautiful example from top agent Banna Fakhoury:

14. Share Inspirational Content

Inspirational content is not only shareable content, but it’s also just a really nice thing to do for the community right now. 

Ryan Serhant is basically both your realtor and your life coach, so he’s got some great inspirational content that hits right at the heart of this pandemic. Ready, Set, Go!

15. Share Client Testimonials

We already know how important client testimonials are – in fact, if you’re a regular reader here at the Spark, you already know that we are in a ‘review economy’ and today’s prospects come with expectations. 

There are several ways to share client testimonials with your Instagram audience. Here are some of the options that you should explore:

• Reach out to one of your clients and ask if they can make a short video that you can share in your feed.
• Share written testimonials in your Instagram stories.
• Attach testimonials to posts that showcase your latest deals.

Here’s a simple but effective example by top producer Abel Gilbert:

16. Showcase Your Success

Showcasing your success might sound like the absolute last thing you want to do right now, where many have had to file for unemployment.

But here’s another way to look at it: By showcasing your success, you are showing the community that it is 100% possible to conduct a transaction today, all in compliance with Covid-19 safety guidelines.

You are showing them that the market is moving – it’s not the end of the world. 

Here’s a great post by Loida Velasquez, though I would add some text to the post that describes how they got it done. 

17. Focus On What Makes Your Properties – Or Even Your Neighborhood – Unique. 

Here’s a fun way to spice up your feed. Aside from promoting your listings, why not promote your neighborhood?

Instagram helps you tell a visual story – what’s your city’s story? The inside scoop? What’s something only a hyperlocal expert would know?

This example by Leonard Steinberg is an homage to the history of Park Row.

18. Share Other Users’ Content

Another activity you can add to your feed is sharing other users’ content. Think of it as curating information from reputable sources for the sake of your users. 

For example, Keeping Current Matters has its own Instagram account and they regularly upload valuable posts that you can share to keep your community informed.

19. Partner With Influencers

There might be a local influencer you could build a relationship with – whether that’s someone well known in the community, or a fellow real estate knowledge broker. Today’s more successful projects come from works of collaboration – it’s no different with real estate and real estate marketing.

We know this is cheating since Ryan’s basically an influencer himself, but hands down to him and Joe for bringing in YouTube legend Casey Neistat!

Launch Instagram Ads

With an instagram business account, you have the option of using paid instagram ads. Use Meta’s targeting tools to specify who and where you’d like to target your ads to. For example, if your real estate niche is seasonal cottages by the lake, you may target people living in surrounding cityies within home-buying age.

Consider which type of post would work best in a paid instagram ad. You’ll want to include a link to your website or consultation page, and give viewers and clear and quick idea of who you are and what you do. Meta allows advertisers to be as specific about their chosen audience as behaviour, interests, and demographics.

20. Use Instagram’s Insights Tool

If you already switched to a business profile, you’ll get access to Instagram’s Insights tool, which lets you view age, gender, and location data on your choice of posts, stories, or promotions. 

To access this feature, simply go to your profile and click the menu icon on the top right. The Insights tool will be second on the list.

21. Highlight Property Features With Carousel Ads

The carousel ad is one of the most powerful tools on Instagram. More importantly, it is the perfect ad format for real estate.

A Carousel ad displays a catalog-like row of images that users can swipe through, promoting an interactive slideshow of your best photos for the listing. Here’s what it looks like on Facebook, which uses the same ads manager as Instagram:

22. Launch Sponsored Ads

A sponsored ad is basically any organic post that you decide to pay to promote – you don’t have to come up with any new creative, retype the text or reupload photos.

The post is boosted as is, and you get to keep all the existing engagement! This is a great shot of promotion juice for posts that are already doing moderately well.

23. Go Hyperlocal With Targeted Ads

Another great feature of the Instagram platform is its advanced targeting. When creating an ad, you are presented with a wide range of targeting options that pertain to location and specific demographic sets. This will allow you to build a custom audience that is more likely to engage with your services.

Targeting by location is especially important for real estate agents. It is worth noting that Instagram location targeting is extremely accurate and laser-focused since it employs both zip code and radius targeting.

The demographic should also be taken into consideration when you are creating a targeted ad. 

For example, luxury apartments should only be advertised to high net worth individuals whereas affordable rentals are generally geared towards young adults and lower-income families. The various targeting options that the platform puts at your disposal will enable you to narrow the audience down to a very specific group with a click of a button.

24. Follow the Right Instagram Accounts

Instagram isn’t exactly a new social media platform. There are already agents in the real estate industry who are racking up the followers and engagement to generate real hot leads. Following real estate professionals who inspire you, will give you Instagram content ideas that you can re-style and remake to fit your own style. If you pay close attention, you can also grab pointers for your Instagram real estate marketing plan such as frequency or posting, types of posts, levels of engagement and more. Not sure which social media trends you should jump on? Take a cue from your favourite real estate agents online.

25. Take Advantage of Audio Trends

Find trending audio by clicking on the arrow in the bottom left corner of reels. Using trending audio will push your content to the top of Explore pages with similar content. Don’t be afraid to use the same audio on more than one video. It’s possible that only one of the videos you make with that audio will go viral.

26. Make Posting Easy with Memes

Think a certain meme is smart and relevant to your field and audience? Try creating your own version with something specific to you as a real estate agent. There are loads of memes floating around the internet that you can replicate and repost quickly and easily. Take a look at 100 of the best real estate memes out there!

27. Use Canva to Whip Up Graphics for Your Instagram Post

Few graphic design apps provide as much free, valuable graphics tools for real estate agents to use as Canva. Within this app, agents can choose from colorful, professional templates to create scroll-stopping social media posts, mailers, brochures, presentations and more on the go.

28. Make the most out of Instagram Reels

Reels are one of the most used and useful types of content on Instagram today. You can use calls to action, links to your websites, invitations and more through reels. There are loads of fun ways to use instagram reels to bring your real estate business to the forefront of the explore page. Your reel videos should generate likes and shares, be short and engaging and take advantage of audio to raise the chances of it getting on the Reels Explore Page. Use your Instagram in-app analytics to see what Reels work best with your audience.

For example, some Reel ideas include:

• Highlight your real estate niche: focus on a specific type fo clients, neighborhood, or property type that you specialize in.
• The property buying process: show viewers that buying house is a big step that doesn’t have to be overly complex. Chat about common concerns and issues that clients face on both sides of the deal. For example, how long does it take to close the deal?
• Showcase before and often after renovations: show the potential of the property before and after renovations.
• Home tours: Make your home tours quick, yet informative and engaging. Add in-app tools such as text overlays, sound effects, animation, memes and more.
• Your opinion of current real estate news: real estate clients are eager to learn more about real estate from a professional standpoint. Share your opinions about current real estate news and your best suggestions for clients.
• A day in the life – Give your Instagram followers a glimpse into your personal life and interests outside of real estate. Add a human touch to your brand by showing a peek beyond your picture-perfect facade. If you only post about real estate, your followers will start to lose their sense of who you are as a person. Do you love cooking special meals for your family? Attending local jazz shows? Let your audience in on the fun. Extra points if it helps them learn more about your hyperlocal area.
• Answer client Qs: record yourself answering the question and put the dm on the screen, if possible.
• Share positive client reviews: screenshot client reviews and testimonials and then break down your experience with them in more detail for your followers.

29. Focus on Increasing Engagement

Ask yourself what meaningful engagement looks like to you. After all, you are a real estate business, not a content creation business, so you shouldn’t expect to have the same goals and metrics. Are post shares more valuable to you than likes? Are link clicks more valuable that detailed questions in the comments? Clarify which metrics mean most to you and use analytics to track the performance of your instagram marketing.

Consider how the nature of your post can inspire or deter engagement. For example, you can use a carousel post with 4 images of staged homes and ask your audience to comment on which they like most. This will give you direct insight into what interior design trends your audience will be attracted to when house-searching and give you the opportunity to promote the staging company fo your choice.

On the other hand, a simple photo of a current listing with specs is not any more engaging that it would be on MLS and is unlikely to naturally garner a ton of interaction.

30. Amp up Real Estate Instagram Posts with Hooks

Think about what your followers see when they first stumble upon your Instagram page. Do the first few posts tell your audience what you and your business are about? Not only should your account tell users what you have to offer, but they need to quickly catch your audience’s attention and keep it there for long enough to get your message across.

For example, Instead of “5 ways to update your home” try ” We transformed this home to sell in 5 days”.

Consider putting the positive end result in the hook, using creative wording, identifying a common problem, or emphasizing urgency to step up the power of your hook.

31. Never Forget a Powerful Call to Action

Each of your posts and actions on Instagram have the power to create real deals and clients in your real estate business. A call to action is the tool that makes this translation from viewership to action possible.

Clarify your goal, in other words the action you want viewers to take. For example, you may want to schedule more consultations. In this case, try a line such as “Want to learn more? Click the link to schedule your consultation now.”

If you’d like to get more attendees for your upcoming open house, you could add a sentence such as “Want to see your dream house in person? Schedule your open house visit.”

32. Schedule Your Instagram Posts in Advance

The key to simplifying your social media strategy and achieving success on Instagram is to prepare your posts in advance. If you are a realtor posting taking care of your own professional social media marketing, you may not have much time to spend posting daily and all of the editing and writing that comes with it.

Using a schedule laid out in excel or a social media planning tool such as Hootsuite, will make it easy to track and compare the performance of your posts and make alterations accordingly. Plus you’ll gain insight into the best times, occasions, and topics to post.

33. Use the power of Visuals

Help people visualize what is is like to work with you by filming b-roll of all of your daily tasks and successes. B-roll are bits of film that are used to introduce video content and set the mood, so to speak. Film yourself doing everything that summarizes your day from signing contracts, driving around the city, stopping by the office, and picking up a quick snack.

Ask yourself which types of Instagram content click with your audience?

Your real estate instagram strategy should revolve around the habits and desires of your target audience above all else. While you may have an idea of what you want to communicate to them, how well you deliver on what they want, will determine your success on instagram.

34. Keep Your Instagram Feed Aesthetically Pleasing

The first step to getting noticed is having people stop mid-scroll to pause on your photo. The second step is when they click over to your account, and the third step is when they like your photo feed enough to follow you.

What Not to Do on Instagram

Paying for Followers and Likes

The issue with paying for followers is that the companies who pair you with them typically sell fake or bot accounts. These account will inflate your following count but damage your credibility.

Paid followers don’t translate to authentic engagement or real real estate leads leads. Additionally, Instagram work furiously to remove these accounts which could affect your overall follower count. 

Sharing Only Promotional Content

Your followers are swarmed with ads every time they open their phone on almost every app. They don’t need more from you. In fact, most users actively search for accounts that offer value to their lives, not promotional content. 

Sticking to a Personal Profile

When you have a private profile, people have to request to follow you before they can see the posts on your account. Most of your clients will be strangers before you start working with them. A private account is just an unnecessary barrier to growth and possible leads. 

Keep your account public and professional in order to get the most new eyes on your content as possible.

The Bottom Line

It should be clear by now that marketing your services on Instagram is a no brainer. Keep in mind that the techniques outlined above are only a fraction of what you can do. The large user base of the platform coupled with its advanced visual features makes the marketing possibilities virtually endless.  

If you want to stay up to date on all of our free and valuable content, subscribe to our newsletter. We publish valuable articles and guides such as this one regularly. That way you can constantly improve your marketing skills, and become a more effective real estate marketer.

And if you want to dominate your hyperlocal real estate market, check out AgentFire’s AgentFire Sites, #1 rated for several years in a row.