12/07/2024
Last year we started working with Alexander Swart Property Group on their social media presence.
By the end of 2023, their Instagram grew from 280 followers to just over 20 000 followers. TikTok grew from 0 to 16 000 followers. Facebook grew from 3 000 to 14 000. YouTube from 0 subscribers to over 1000. Most of this growth was organic.
What we learned out of this process?
Working with the right client is key.
By the ‘right client’ I mean a client that is aligned with your values and views on marketing. Straight out of the gate, Rowan Alexander's reason for going into social media was to create brand awareness. He saw the importance of having a presence where people are focusing their attention. He understood the long-tail on conversions from social media accounts and saw the value in investing in online marketing. He let us do our job. This is a big one. Rowan giving us the freedom to experiment, to play, and to figure out what works was a huge factor in the growth of their accounts.
Provide value to your audience
For more than half the year, we didn’t promote anything or create any sales posts. We primarily provided value to their audience. Through that approach, we could organically grow their accounts. The side effect of this approach was sales – it was not the goal. When sales is the primary goal, people see through that and you won’t get the kind of organic growth you might want or be able to build a large community. After the first half of the year, we did start including more promotional posts or talking about actual products, and the response was great. It has been incredibly satisfying to have Rowan call us to talk about how many people have contacted them about a house for sale or a development they are interested in.
Don’t be afraid of criticism.
A great example of this is a post we created mentioning the price of a certain house in a certain area. Comments blew up on how ridiculous the housing market is currently, how terrible the area is and how no-one would want to live there. On the flip side, the agent we posted the video for was flooded with calls from people interested in the property. All the negative comments on the post only created more engagement which ended up increasing its visibility. From there, more of the ‘right’ people saw it and took action on the CTA at the end of the video. Just because a post might be getting negative comments, doesn’t mean it’s not doing its job.
Keywords over Hashtags | Using keyword in titles and in captions.
Keywords give an audience an immediate synopsis of the video and act as SEO for the video. Including keywords in your caption, especially on Instagram, will send it to the right audience. Currently most of our Instagram content does not making use of hashtags at all. As with everything though, things on social media are constantly changing which leads me into the next point.
Tweak your strategy along the way.
When we started working with Alexander Swart at the start of 2023, we had a certain strategy in mind. After a month, we saw the strategy wasn’t really working, so we adjusted how we did things. Once we found what was working, we honed in on that. Social media is an ever-changing landscape and it’s important to be constantly adjusting as you go. What works today is not necessary what’s going to work tomorrow.
Reply to comments
Engage with your audience! Reply to comments as much as you can. Don't just leave them there. I would even got as far as to say that replying to comments is more important than creating new content. A great way to engage is to create video replies to questions from the comments and use them as a new post.
Just start.
Marketing on social media does not have one right way of being done. The trick is to simply start. Start creating something. If you have the drive to provide value to your audience as the main goal, your account will grow and as a side effect, sales will come too.
A big thank you to Rowan Alexander from ALEXANDER SWART PROPERTY GROUP for his trust in letting us at Haskin Studios run with this and for working together with us over the past year and a half.
Dylan
Writing credits :
Written by Dylan Haskin
Contributions from Tyla Storm Barker.
Edited by Sandi Brunel.
No AI tools involved.
