Social media marketing means publishing content on social media platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook, in order to increase your visibility and credibility, and therefore generate leads.

Social media marketing is important because most Australians – and therefore most of your clients and referral partners – use social media. To succeed with marketing, you need to hang out where your clients and referrers hang out – and that includes LinkedIn and other social media platforms. On any given day, a significant number of people who could send you business would be active on social media, so it’s important to market to them.

You should use the social media platforms that your clients are using. For most property and finance professionals, that will be LinkedIn and Facebook.

As often as possible, because the more content you publish, the more times you’ll get in front of clients and referrers. Posting once per week is the bare minimum; three times per week is good; daily is the gold standard.

You should write about topics that your clients consider interesting and that give you the chance to position yourself as an expert. So instead of writing social media content that basically says “Look at me, I’m the best, buy my stuff”, you should think about publishing industry news and providing general advice. The more interesting and relevant your content marketing is, the more clients who will consume it, and the more effective your marketing will be.

To create engaging social media content, think of things from your clients’ perspective. That means doing two things. First, write about topics they consider interesting and relevant – such as industry news and helpful tips. Second, present that information in a clear, easy-to-read way – by using simple language and getting to the point.

Do two things to succeed with social media hashtags. First, make sure your hashtags are directly relevant to your posts – so if you write a post about the home loans market, #homeloans would be relevant but #funfacts would not. Second, choose hashtags that readers are actually searching for – so #homeloans would be good but #mortgageserviceability would not.

The only way to build and engage an audience on social media is to put in consistent effort over the long-term. First, you need to publish content on a regular basis – at least twice per week. Second, you need to respond to all the comments that people leave on your posts. Third, you need to like and comment on other people’s posts. If you do those three things, you’ll position yourself as an industry expert and build lots of virtual relationships. But this won’t happen overnight; it will only happen after an extended period of time.

The best practices for creating a social media content calendar involve doing three things. First, get clear on your target audience. Second, make a list of topics your target audience consider interesting and that give you the chance to position yourself as an expert. Third, pick specific dates to cover those topics. So a Brisbane-based asset finance broker might decide to target Queensland small business owners, and to publish news about the economy on Mondays, general advice about asset finance on Wednesdays and news about the small business sector on Fridays.

The way to target specific demographics and audiences is to write content specifically for them. So if you’re a Perth buyer’s agent and your clients are Perth home buyers, all your content should be about the Perth property market and Perth economy. You should reinforce that focus by using relevant hashtags, such as #perth, #perthproperty and #perthrealestate.