10 Ways Real Estate Agents Can Get More Followers on Instagram
It’s the leading question for anyone using Instagram to market their business:
How do I get more followers?
It’s not about vanity. The more followers you have, the bigger pool you have to generate leads from.
Except for buying followers (not recommended), there is no magic solution for ratcheting up your follower count.
There is, however, a set of tactics that, when used together, can help you steadily add followers to your real estate Instagram account.
In this post, we’re diving into those tactics. Here are 10 ways real estate agents can get more followers on Instagram.
Solidify Your Aesthetic
Instagram is a visual social media platform. When someone arrives at your profile for the first time, they aren’t reading your captions — they’re scanning your feed.
That first impression matters. How your feed looks is what will hook them.
Your real estate Instagram feed doesn’t need to have a Wes Anderson-level aesthetic, but it should have a recognizable visual identity that conveys your real estate branding.
To create a cohesive look that will entice visitors, you should be:
- Using a consistent colour palette, fonts and image style
- Planning your posts so there’s some sort of pattern and rhythm to how they look in your feed (e.g, spacing out photos of homes, avoiding back-to-back text-heavy images)
Create Highlights
If you haven’t yet organized your past Instagram Stories into Instagram Highlights, it’s time.
Instagram Highlights are a way to strategically introduce visitors and new followers to the kind of content they can expect from your account, and to curate your strongest Story content into a readily accessible resource.
Tips for creating real estate Instagram Highlights:
- Have areas of focus. Think of Highlights like folders. They should be organized by topic. Possible Highlights for realtors include seller tips, buyer tips, home hacks, and listings.
- Be choosy. Not every Instagram Story is worthy of eternal life in a Highlight. Select only the best content.
- Use a strong cover image. Each Highlight should have an enticing cover image. You can create branded photos for consistency or choose a photo that best represents the topic.
As Instagram said in its announcement of Highlights, they “let your business hold on to its favorite moments from Instagram Stories and share them in ways with your customers that help your business express itself. Stories Highlights is a new part of your profile where you can express more about your business through the stories you’ve shared.”
Learn From Your Previous Content
Insights can tell you a lot about what kind of content is most likely to help you grow your following.
Using Instagram’s own insights — or, if you’re using one for your business, analytics from a management tool such as Later or Sprout Social — take a look at how your content is performing.
Analyze both high- and low-performing content to see if you can identify patterns. Use your findings to adapt your content strategy. Experiment with producing more of the type of content that seems to do best and less of the rest.
Create Highly Shareable Content
Instagram users sharing your content with their followers is a big win.
It introduces your content and profile to a whole new audience, one you wouldn’t have had access to otherwise.
Getting more shares requires creating more shareable content.
The easiest shareable content to create: memes. If you haven’t already, make sure your Instagram content strategy includes regularly scheduled memes. Here are 30 of the best real estate memes to get you started.
Reels give content creators, marketers and yes, real estate agents, an opportunity to communicate useful, eye-opening or funny content in a way that’s engaging, shareable and keeps viewers’ attention.
Create More Reels
Another type of content you should be creating more of: Instagram Reels.
Instagram has gone all in on the TikTok-like format; the algorithm loves Reels and users who create popular Reels are rewarded with exposure.
If you’re not making regular real estate Instagram Reels, it’s time to start. The format may seem intimidating, but Reels can be pretty simple to create. And no, you don’t have to appear in them if you don’t want to.
Here’s what you need to know about real estate Instagram Reels and how to make them a part of your strategy.
Partner With Other Accounts on a Giveaway
If you use Instagram regularly, you’re probably very familiar with how Instagram giveaways are run.
Much of the time, several accounts team up to offer a multi-prize giveaway. They don’t do this solely to make the giveaway more enticing; they do it to multiply the number of entrants.
An Instagram giveaway always requires an entrant to follow the account running the contest. If the contest is being jointly run, the entrant has to follow all the accounts. That adds up to way more exposure and new followers for those profiles.
That’s how real estate agents should be running Instagram giveaways.
A few times every year, consider partnering up with two to three local businesses on an Instagram contest. The rules of entry should require following each account, liking the post, tagging other users in the comments and, for an extra entry, sharing the giveaway post to Stories.
Curate Aspirational Content
Fortunately for real estate agents, photos of stunning homes — perfectly designed interiors, gorgeous backyards, incredible vistas — are amongst the most popular content on Instagram.
Agents should tap into that by making sure such aspirational images have a place in their feeds. These kinds of photos should have a small but regular spot in your content calendar.
Step 1: Scour Instagram, Pinterest and/or sites like Dwell and Architectural Digest to source images (be sure to credit the source in your caption).
Step 2: Write an engaging caption (e.g., ask your followers to comment with their thoughts, or to vote between two images).
Step 3: Use the right hashtags. Pay attention to the hashtags that other accounts are using when they share architecture and design content, then use this real estate hashtag advice to pick yours.
Engage With Your Competitors’ Followers
Don’t be confused — you should absolutely be engaging with your own followers, and regularly.
But going a step further and engaging with your competition’s audience is a stealthy strategy for attracting new, qualified followers.
How do you do this? With a bit of reconnaissance and legwork.
Check out the users engaging with your competitors’ content. Then check out their profiles to get a sense of who they are and where they live.
If it seems like they’re local (and like they’re not a close familial relation of your competitor), follow them and engage with their content.
A word of warning: only use this strategy with public accounts that are actively in use. Requesting to follow a private account or leaving comments on old content won’t play well.
Cross-Promote Your Instagram Content
Cross-promoting means using one platform to promote another.
In the context of social media, that means publishing the same or similar content on several platforms or promoting content published on one platform on another.
Real estate agents should be doing both to get more followers on Instagram.
For example, adapt a listing-of-the-week Instagram post for your real estate newsletter and push your subscribers to your Instagram profile for the full look. Or publish a tips-for-sellers on TikTok and tell your followers to follow you on Instagram for more tips.
Stay Consistent
Growing your following doesn’t happen overnight. Results take time and consistency.
Stay the course! Show up on Instagram regularly. Have a strategy in place. Make use of the tips on this page. Analyze your results and tweak as necessary.
