Introduce Yourself

Once every season, real estate agents should plan to publish an introduction post — a post that introduces yourself to new followers and refamiliarizes you to existing followers.

This post should…

• Welcome new followers and thank existing followers
• Work in a condensed version of your unique value proposition
• Share a bit about who you are outside of real estate
• Give followers a sense of your personality

Quizzes and Knowledge-Testing

Posts that invite interaction from your followers are a great way to boost engagement — tapping, commenting, liking, sharing — especially when business is slow. 

Quizzes and tests are perfect for driving engagement. They’re easy to execute and you’ll be surprised at just how many followers will participate.

The simplest and most effective way to share a quiz on Instagram? Use Instagram Stories.Stories offers an interactive quiz sticker that lets users post a question with two response options. All followers have to do is tap their desired answer to see whether it was correct or incorrect.

This is a super easy way to drive engagement. You can use the sticker in multiple Stories to ask several questions in a row. You can share weekly quizzes on different real estate topics. You can share the results in your Stories later, and invite followers to send you Instagram direct messages with follow-up questions.

Ask Me Anything

In addition to the quiz feature, Instagram Stories has another sticker option that makes for an awesome and effective way to interact with your followers: the questions sticker.

This sticker is like the quiz feature in that it lets you write a custom question. The difference is that the questions sticker provides a text box for followers to type a response, rather than two predetermined answers to choose from.

Use this sticker to encourage your followers to ask you questions. When a follower enters a question in the text box, you can see what they wrote and share it (anonymously) in your Stories, along with your response.

Here are some examples of questions you could ask:

• Ask me anything
• Sellers: what do you want to know?
• Buyers: what do you want to know?
• It’s Mortgage Monday! Ask me anything
• It’s First-Time Buyer Friday! What do you want to know?
• Another interest rate hike. What are your questions?

This or That

One more great Instagram Story sticker to take advantage of in your real estate social media posts: the poll feature.

Like the quiz and question stickers, the poll lets you ask your followers a question but it gives them four possible responses to select from — and none of them are right or wrong. 

Use this sticker to poll your followers on their likes and dislikes. You could share photos of four interior design trends and ask them to pick their favourite. Or poll them about their current thoughts and feelings about the real estate market. 

There are no shortage of real estate-related topics you could poll your followers about, ranging from fun (“What’s your favourite front door colour?”) to financial (“Are you feeling the effects of higher interest rates?”).

Trends

You may not have exciting real estate listings to share with your followers, but there is so much real estate content you can turn into engaging real estate social media posts.

Like trends. Trends in interior design, building style, paint colours, landscaping, holiday decor and so on.

You can turn trends into multi-slide Instagram Stories (and even ask your followers to choose their likes and dislikes using the poll sticker we just mentioned), Instagram Reels or multi-photo Instagram grid posts.

You could even create real estate blog content about a specific trend and then share that to social media, driving traffic to your real estate website. 

How-Tos

Helpful, instructional-type content on real estate-related topics make for great year-round real estate social media posts.

You could create how-tos about…

• Making a room feel bigger
• Size guides for area rugs
• Top staging hacks
• Hanging art the right way
• Concealing a TV
• Easiest houseplants to care for

The possibilities are endless.

To make how-to content that really stands out, experiment with turning them into videos. Instagram Reels or TikTok are the perfect format to bring these ideas to life.

Giveaway 

When you really want to boost results during the slow season, a giveaway is a guaranteed engaging real estate social media post.

The key to using a giveaway post to boost engagement and grow your audience comes down to a few different factors: a compelling prize, the entry requirements and exposure

The prize has to be something that people want. Purchase a prize yourself (you can likely claim it as a business expense) or partner with a local business (you get something to give and they get exposure). 

The entry requirements need to be engagement-based. Ask your followers to like, comment and tag a friend (as many as they want!) in order to participate.

The giveaway needs enough time and exposure to maximize attention and entries. Keep it open for at least five days. Promote it several times during that period. And ask others to share it, too — sharing it to their Instagram Stories could even be a contest entry requirement.