Trying to keep up with your social media accounts can be a little bit overwhelming, especially when you’re not sure what to post every day.

Here are some quick tips that you can utilize to enhance your social media strategy right now.

Post local content

There’s a lot more going on in your neighbourhood and city than you might think. In many industries you have to think locally.

Fortunately there are tons of sources of good local content. Local news websites are a good place to start to find out what’s going on.

Another excellent place to get ideas is Reddit. There’s a subreddit for pretty much every city out there so visit www.reddit.com/r/yourcityname and you’ll probably find lots of inspiration.

One place you might not have thought of checking, especially with today’s focus on the internet is local museums. Talk to the curators there because they can probably tell you all sorts of interesting facts about the area.

Posting about local events, charities, festivals and fun facts about your area will give you a large amount of excellent content. It will also help establish yourself in the community and show you care about your neighbourhood.

Use beautiful images

In most cases you want to include big beautiful images in your social media posts. The only exception to this is on Twitter where images are used less often since the focus is on the short 140 character tweets.

Big, bold images help you stand in your followers’ newsfeeds and grabs attention. Post with images also get much more engagement than posts without.

Even if you don’t have image editing skills there are lots of excellent apps out there that you can use to enhance photos or add text.

Using images is especially important in the real estate industry and without big beautiful photos on your listings for example no one will want to visit your homes in person.

Which brings us to our next tip.

Don’t post advertisements to your social media pages!

It can be very tempting to use social media as another advertising channel and post every new ad or promotion but this is a huge mistake.

No one wants to be sold to on social media and this is the fastest way to get people to unfollow you.

People will follow you on social media because you offer something of value to them. If you only care about yourself and treat social media as just another advertising channel you’re wasting your time.

This doesn’t completely mean that you can’t post listings to your social media pages but you have to do it strategically.

Lots of people will say to follow an 80/20 rule with 80% of your content being valuable to your followers and 20% being sales related.

I would say at most post 20% sales related content but ideally even less than that, 10% even.

Curate valuable information

Not everything you post on your social media pages has to be your own unique content. You can feel completely free to share other people’s videos, blog posts and images.

Subscribe to blogs or YouTube channels based on topics related to your industry and other things your audience would find valuable.

Then as you see new articles and videos post them to your social media pages. If you follow enough sites you’ll definitely never run out of content.

Make sure you’ve set up proper business pages

One mistake people and companies still make today is posting everything to their own personal social media accounts.

You absolutely need to create business pages and accounts and post all your content here.

There’s a huge difference on Facebook for example between user accounts and business pages. User accounts are limited to a certain number of friends and business accounts have an unlimited amount of people who can follow you.

Business accounts also give you options to run advertisements and promote your content to reach more people.

Ask questions

Another thing you can do is ask questions to your followers and this can be directly related to your business. If you were a realtor for example you could ask questions like “What do you find most frustrating about buying a home?”

Or you can simply ask them questions like “What plans do you have for the weekend?”

Questions are a fantastic way to engage with your audience.

Thank your clients

One more small thing that makes a big difference is to thank your clients.

Many salespeople will send out birthday cards to their clients but why not also wish them a happy birthday on social media too?

Thank your clients for their business and tag them in your posts. This is an absolutely fantastic way to engage with your followers and show them that you care.

The biggest idea you need to take away from this post is that it’s about your followers, not about you. Put them first and you’ll definitely have much more success with social media.