A crucial component of marketing yourself as a loan officer is social media. Social media has made it easier than ever for businesses to reach their target audience, with both its accessibility and the sheer number of internet users on social media. 

Social media has assisted businesses of all sizes in establishing customer connections for years. While it is a helpful tool in increasing traffic and lead generation, more than anything else, social media helps businesses gain more exposure. 

With all that said, it’s a lot easier to state the benefits of using social media than it is to start.

There’s also the issue of keeping up the momentum –knowing what to post, finding the right image, editing it, and writing a catchy headline…

It’s a lot of work, we know!

Read on to learn the steps that can make social media content less intimidating and assist you in creating a lead-generating strategy.

Have you checked out the newly expanded Social Media Marketing Program? Our awesome automated evergreen content now also comes with done-for-you branded content to share on your personal social channels plus the ability to create your own branded social content for partners to share. 

Learn more in this video.

How To Create A Mortgage Social Media Strategy

1. Define your Audience

If you’re a loan officer marketing your services to everyone you can, you’re wasting time, energy, and money. Let’s say, for example, you’re based in Texas. Instead of marketing to “everyone in Texas,” it may be helpful to narrow it down to “first-time homebuyers with poor credit looking to buy in Houston.” Being aware of and planning for your audience, in particular, can help you reach the right people with the right message and more successfully accomplish your marketing objectives.

So, to start, decide who your target market is. Broadly, you may say a homebuyer, but what does a homebuyer specifically look like?  You should base the specifics of who these people are on your market research and the audience information you already have.

Find your target audience by:

1. Gathering data. You must be aware of your target market’s characteristics to reach them. To effectively market to your audience, you should learn what a typical homebuyer’s age, location, and engagement trends are on various sites. Although gathering this data may seem difficult, a CRM makes this information easily accessible and simple to use.
2. Taking advantage of social media analytics. Many social media sites, including Facebook and Twitter, have built-in analytics that can provide you with information about your followers, such as when, where, and other interests they may have. Additionally, using these tools with business accounts is free.
3. Keeping up to date with the competition. You’ll gain insights into how to communicate with your audience by knowing what those around you are doing. To fill any gaps in your current strategy, you can look at where your rivals are lacking and improve upon that.

Once you’ve identified your target market, stay up to date on their needs and interests, and put a social listening strategy into practice.

2. Establish Clear Goals

Setting objectives that direct your work is crucial to succeeding at social media marketing. The SMART goal strategy provides a helpful framework for setting up fundamental goals and achieving your overall objectives.

• SMART is short for:
• Specific: It’s critical to be clear about the specific, smaller results you hope to achieve to meet your goals and measure your progress. By being specific, you can narrow in on what you and your team need to do to achieve your larger goal. For instance, you might want to increase your Instagram followers by 15% this quarter as a specific social media goal.
• Measurable: You have to have a way to quantify whether or not you have succeeded in achieving your goal. Having clear ways to measure your goals can do that– you can use metrics to gauge your development and adjust your goals as necessary. For instance, if you discover that likes and follows don’t result in increased website traffic, you can change the metric to one that will.
• Achievable: All of your objectives should be attainable for your company. Unrealistic goals can discourage workers and cause conflict in your business plan. Realistic goals can increase your productivity and keep your motivation up. Make sure to adjust your goals as you set them if it seems like you aren’t achieving them.
• Relevant: Ensure that your social media marketing objectives align with your overarching business goals. For instance, if increasing brand awareness is your goal, you might set a target of getting 25 social media followers to click through a post to a landing page that details your services.
• Timely: Your goals should have a clear and firm deadline to hold yourself accountable. Set a specific cadence to check in and ensure you’re staying on track rather than setting a goal for some vague time in the near future.

Using SMART goals gives you a place to start, as well as a way to check in on your progress and make adjustments as necessary. Even though social media marketing has many moving parts, these goals can help to keep you on track and not get disoriented.

3. Administer your resources wisely

Social media tasks are often mindlessly handled as an afterthought for loan officers. It may seem that you’re saving money and time by just handing social media to whoever has the free time, whether that be yourself or a colleague, but managing social media successfully calls for specific abilities such as:

• A strategic mind
• Organizing abilities
• Branding knowledge

Hiring a specialist to manage your social media can be beneficial if you have the funds. If you don’t have the funds to hire a social media manager, you can still spend money on social media advertisements, increasing reach and promoting brand awareness. 

4. Use each platform differently

You may want to post on as many platforms as you can be strong, but doing so could hurt your social media marketing plan. For instance, if your target audience is people over 40, you may want to focus less on TikTok. You will likely find that most of your audience is on Facebook or Twitter.

When you are creating your strategy, take into consideration:

• Where your competition posts
• Where your target audience is most likely to be
• Your metrics

Additionally, you should consider how to use each platform most effectively based on the purposes for which it was designed and the types of content that perform best there. For example, Facebook is good for quality live video streaming and interacting with followers one-on-one; Instagram and Tiktok rely more on visual content, like pictures, infographics, and short, entertaining videos.

Youtube is also for videos but is more oriented toward longer, informative videos. LinkedIn and Twitter are more written content-based, but Twitter is better for real-time conversations and quick news alerts, while LinkedIn is better for long-form written work, like articles and blogs. 

You might discover that the majority of your target demographic doesn’t tend to use fast-paced platforms like Instagram, so you’ll want to gear your focus more toward Facebook or LinkedIn. Maybe you want to be able to frequently give quick updates to your clientele, in which case Twitter may be helpful.

To get the most out of your marketing efforts, research the best strategy for each platform you use. While there are many ways to expand your small business, social media can be useful for attracting and keeping new clients.

Done-For-You Social Media for Loan Officers

5. Be consistent with your content.

Consistently posting compelling, engaging content is the key to success on social media. This will not only help to give you an appearance of trustworthiness, but it will also demonstrate that you care about engaging with your audience and that you have relevant information to share.

The principle of posting frequently is still valid despite changes in social media platforms’ algorithms over time. It increases the likelihood that your content will appear in newsfeeds. By concentrating on producing consistent, pertinent content, you can convince the algorithms that your posts deserve to appear in different newsfeeds, which will eventually draw users to your page.

6. Engage with your followers

Because social media users enjoy interacting with brands, you can gain advantages like:

• Increased brand awareness and a broader market reach
• Increased brand loyalty
• Seen as a local expert

According to Forbes, a staggering 83% of consumers place a high value on the customer experience, which makes the potential for a high return on investment (ROI) enormous. This includes interactions with brands on social media that help customers feel seen, heard, and understood. Using social media, you can keep an eye on conversations as they happen and quickly address any queries or concerns from your audience.

This can mean several things: it can include posing questions about your offerings, making Facebook groups, and employing the use of fun features like GIFs, emojis, and videos.

It can also be helpful to employ tools like Instagram Live to open up a dialogue with people looking to purchase or refinance a home. You can answer their questions and let your experience speak for itself as you engage with both prospective and current clients in real-time. 

Allow yourself at least an hour a day of constant social media activity to keep engagement high. 

With this hour, however, you should do your best to respond to any urgent concerns as quickly as possible throughout the day.  

7. Keep things professional

Remember that whenever you post something on social media, you are representing your company. Too frequently, posts can be misinterpreted, upsetting followers and causing conflict. Consider developing a social media policy to direct your staff members’ posts and interactions to avoid any unnecessary issues. 

A typical social media policy will include the following:

• Clear, non-confusing guidelines on what to post and how to react to unfavorable comments
• Platform regulations and guidelines
• The consideration of brands
• Security measures

Investing in a social media policy can ensure that your company is prepared for any situation. Remember that social media is fundamentally about putting your customer service philosophies into practice.

8. Hone in your brand identity

Your company’s brand identity makes customers relate to you and distinguishes you from the rest. Therefore, consistency should be maintained across all marketing channels, including print, digital, and social media.

For loan officers, maintaining brand consistency can be difficult, especially in the beginning. But it’s significant in all aspects of your company, and social media is no exception. As you post, be sure to maintain your brand voice (how you speak to customers), keep your posts consistent across each platform, and concentrate on your value proposition. 

A consistent brand identity can help increase loyalty and make it simpler to decide what to post.

9. Quality over quantity

Instead of randomly producing as many posts as you can per day on as many platforms as possible, you should concentrate on producing regular, high-quality posts. It’s actually very likely that posting too many low-quality items will penalize your account and flag you as spam.

It’s also difficult to keep up with a schedule that requires you to post several times a day. So ultimately, posting too often will end up hurting rather than helping your strategy.

Consider implementing a social media calendar to reduce these risks. You can use these calendars to organize your schedule and plan posts in advance. Marketers can keep track of the various moving parts of social media by categorizing posts into categories like when to post, post captions, post visuals, and which platforms to post on.

To keep your posts’ quality high, constantly ask yourself before posting something: Does this information benefit my readers? Is this something new, motivating, inspiring, or enjoyable? Does the text cite its sources?

You can use these to produce high-quality content that interests and draws readers.

10. Watch your outcomes

Social media marketing is influenced by various variables, so it’s crucial to evaluate and track progress. Analytics are helpful because they can improve campaigns, set new objectives, and identify tracking metrics.

Before you begin tracking, you should decide which metrics are most critical to your marketing objectives. 

The most typical metrics include:

• ReachsEngagementsImpressions
• Mentions
• Posting clicks
• Video views

Although social media marketing can seem intimidating, there is much to gain. When done properly, social media marketing can be a reliable, cost-effective solution to keeping your pipeline filled and your referral network active.

If you still need help with your social media presence (or would like a quickstart way to supplement your posts), consider adding our social media marketing to your website plan. Click below to learn more and schedule a conversation with an account executive.

See Our Newly Expanded Mortgage Social Media

Referrals are the lifeblood of any business, accounting for as much as 65% of new business. However, your former clientele isn’t the only source of referral –you also have realtors! The value of connecting with real estate agents is clear –you share the same consumers and complement each other’s services. 

However, while it’s an obvious avenue for mortgage referrals, few pros know how to get referrals from agents. Fewer still know how to keep a steady stream of qualified leads flowing. 

(Offering to buy them lunch or coffee won’t cut it)

In this article, we’re going to give you three actionable strategies to help you build a robust network of real estate professionals that will enthusiastically refer their homebuyers to you.

Let’s dive in.

How to get more qualified mortgage referrals From Real Estate Agents

Drop The Sales Pitch. Build Relationships.

Realtors are excellent salespeople, so they’ll appreciate a good pitch when they hear one. However, coming off too “sales-y” will have the opposite effect you’re hoping for. You might start to sound like competition, making the agent resistant to anything you might have to offer.

Let’s also remember that realtors are not your end consumers. They’re your colleagues and referral partners.

Here’s how to have a “building a relationship” approach that effortlessly encourages more agents to give you leads:

• Learn about the agent. Research the realtor to know more about their business style, clients they serve, and strengths. Even info about associations, hobbies, or other interests could come in handy when getting to know a potential referral partner. 
• Make the first conversations light. Don’t always talk business. Agents often get approached by loan officers looking to take them out to lunch and explore how they can “partner up.” Don’t be that basic mortgage pro. Instead, keep the first meeting friendly and personal. Congratulate them on a recent accomplishment or other noteworthy bits of news. 
• Share your value (but don’t brag). Casually sharing how many referrals you’re getting and how happy those clients are is a subtle way to hype yourself up without pushing it. It’s also a way of letting them know that you are open to receiving referrals and are successful at seeing it through to completion. 

Partner With Them In Social Media Marketing

Here’s what we know: Real Estate Agents are some of the most active professionals on social media. In fact, an estimated 90% of all 2 million licensed real estate agents use social media for marketing their services regularly.

This fact alone underscores their ability to be powerhouse networkers and your most lucrative ally for getting more qualified referrals. 

The key to getting “in” is not to pitch them, to echo the above point. Instead, you need to focus on creating a reciprocating relationship that genuinely adds as much value to their business as it would to yours. Here are some ideas to get started doing just that:

• Help cross-promote special events like live virtual open house events. 
• You can also offer to participate in the event via chat or live stream to answer questions from participants about home financing. 
• Create real estate-related centered content such as articles, infographics, or videos that you can co-brand with the agent. 
• Better still, have them publish the original content on their site and link back to your site for an additional SEO boost.
• Continuing the spirit of offering free valuable content, reach out to their email list. If you’re not already aware, email lists have one of the highest conversion rates. So if your agent has a list of a few hundred emails that they organically grew, it can prove to be a white-hot lead source. 
• Engage with the agent’s social media. Go beyond just liking every post and take the time to comment with additional insight or echo their sentiment. 

Leverage Your Digital Mortgage Tools and Co-Branding Opportunities

Historically, the real estate profession has been historically an in-person profession –at least when it comes to doing open houses and showing properties to potential buyers. So when the industry was suddenly thrown into virtual-only, it posed a significant challenge. 

Fortunately, it seems that both the industry and consumers have embraced a virtual way of home buying as a welcomed alternative to traditional in-person. And much like in the mortgage industry, technology in real estate is proving to be a significant boost to revenue potential.

As such, real estate agents look to partner with technologically savvy mortgage professionals. Products like our co-brandable mortgage mobile app Loanzify are a popular and valuable tool that agents can easily share with their clients. It’s free for the agent and consumer to use, and it’s packed with resources, information, and interactive tools that lead all users back to you. 

Loanzify POS is another tool you can use to win over more real estate referral partners. Keeping every interested party informed is hard, and miscommunication is a major cause of delayed funding and unhappy customers. With Loanzify POS, the agent can have secure access to the loan file with a pre-determined level of access.  They can also be assigned to specific loans.

From the agent’s admin view can see where the borrower is in their journey to approval and can even download the borrower’s preapproval letter to submit with their offers. 

Real estate agents are a powerful resource for finding quality leads, but only you make a conscious and strategic effort. Remember that when you approach it from building lasting relationships, you make it a win-win for everyone. Make it personal, overdeliver, be social and genuine, and leverage your mortgage technology every chance you get. 

Want to learn more about implementing mortgage tech to win over more referral partners? Click below to try it out for free and schedule a live demo with one of our helpful account executives.

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Social media has become a valuable resource for consumers to interact with the brands they love and discover new ones. New users across the globe are flocking to social media platforms in record numbers and adding their voices to your brand’s narrative.

With social media tools, brands can capture a wealth of measurable insights from the consumer data that social networks provide. And social media monitoring is the key to staying on top of changes in the volume and tone of these online discussions that impact your brand – and you can be sure that potential impact is significant! Let’s dig into some “must-have” capabilities, followed by the advanced, and finally – some tools to help you stay ahead of it all.

Social media monitoring must-haves

The way consumers engage and evaluate brands online is constantly evolving. For this reason, it’s critical for brands, institutions, and agencies to listen and understand consumers as they share their opinions on social media. These opinions are a valuable resource to protect your brand health, detect emerging trends, and keep a watchful eye on competitors’ performance with consumers. Social media monitoring is how you do it – but not all tools are created equal.

Therefore, when you’re outfitting your social media monitoring toolbox, there are several critical use cases that you want to have in your arsenal at the end of the day. Let’s look at a few.

Fig #1: Critical metrics measured and capabilities made possible with social media monitoring.

First and foremost, you need the capacity for robust brand health benchmarks. The ability to capture and measure posts, comments, potential impressions, and net sentiment are the bare minimum. Additionally, you need the ability to perform a precision-based social media audit on your brand to establish key metrics and understand your “normal.” Tracking these measurements over time shows how your brand performs online and is a critical element for early crisis detection.

Monitoring your marketing endeavors lets you track how your campaigns are playing out in real-time. This is vital for seeing what works and what doesn’t. Therefore, your social media monitoring should bolster your campaign strategy at the end of the day.

Likewise, your tools should leave you with a holistic outlook on your product innovation and launch. Shedding light on the consumer’s voice is critical to understanding their needs and wants, so you know which direction you need to go.

Your social media monitoring tools should be capable of casting a wide net on any topic allowing you to detect anomalies and emerging trends over time. Trend analytics is a critical component of social listening success and should inform your brand’s decision-making.

With the speed of social your social media monitoring tools should have a robust alert functionality to notify your team when your social media mentions or sentiment is going off the rails. Crisis management is a crucial aspect of social listening and something you never want to compromise on.

For the ultimate in competitive intelligence, your social media tools should have the capacity to perform the functions mentioned above on your competitors. This is particularly the case for brand health benchmarks – and even setting alerts. That way, you can compare the competition’s social media performance against your own. The goal is an accurate understanding of your share of voice within your market through competitor monitoring.

For example, tracking three competitors’ social media mentions in chunks of time gives you a window into share of voice. Monitoring these metrics over time lets you know if your brand is gaining ground.

Fig #2: Tracking competitors’ social media mentions, sentiment and passion intensity.

To round out our social media must-haves, your tools should have the ability to identify and track conversations surrounding influencers and key opinion leaders that are shaping the narrative in your market. After all, they shape consumer opinion, so staying in tune with their conversations leaves you with a head start on detecting emerging trends. Not only that, it allows you to perfect your influencer marketing strategy ahead of the competition.

While these use cases don’t cover the entirety of what modern social media monitoring tools are capable of, these are a few of the high-priority abilities you want from your toolbox. Let’s explore the advanced side of social media monitoring tools in a little more detail.

Advanced social media monitoring capabilities

To excel in today’s business world, your social media analytics must happen in real-time. Artificial intelligence (AI) with machine learning capabilities does the heavy lifting providing you with immediate access to measurable insights – which means quick decisions.

AI is a game-changer with social media monitoring, but not all AI is created equal. When choosing your social media tools, actionability is based on breadth and depth of insight. If your actions are based on half-baked AI, you have a problem.

Keeping that in mind, your social media monitoring tools should be capable of:

• Accurately analyzing billions of conversations across all social media platforms on any topic with the push of a button
• Recognizing patterns in human emotions, behaviors, and sentiment drivers
• Revealing trending conversations and issues through sentiment measurement and volume
• Analyzing demographic and psychographic data such as interests, habits, and opinions
• Predictive (what is likely to happen) and prescriptive insights (recommend or do it for me)

There’s no doubt about it; if you want to keep up in today’s market, brands are leaning on social media tools that give them a holistic outlook at a moment’s notice. AI is the way to go, and you want to test your social media tools to ensure you’re getting accurate results. Again, not all social media monitoring tools are created equal. The key is to get actionable intel within each sentence for emotions, behaviors, attributes, hashtags, people, and brands.

Fig #3: Using AI to parse text and imagery for emotions, behaviors, attributes, hashtags, people, and brands.

Top social media monitoring tools to consider

Staying on top of your social media monitoring is a continuous process with many tools vying for your attention. Here, we’ll briefly cover a few tools that will help you cover the lion’s share of social listening applications that your brand needs to attend to.

NetBase Quid

NetBase Quid is the leader in social media and consumer experience analytics, capable of delivering insights 5x faster than other solutions. NetBase Quid’s next-generation artificial intelligence uses best-in-class machine learning for intelligent processing and analysis of social media and any other consumer and market data at scale.

Fig #4: Snapshot of topic mentions, posts, net sentiment, engagements, impressions and more to inform next steps.

NetBase Quid offers two distinct ways to assess data for social media analytics and data visualization. Quid not only takes your competitive intelligence to the next level with patent, company, news and blog data, but it also incorporates your NetBase queries into Quid Social for advanced social media monitoring data visualizations. That way, you can see your topic’s conversation at a glance and dive into the themes that impact your brand, like the Olympics conversation below.

Fig #5: Olympics conversation, visualized with semantically related clusters.

Looking to complement a one-stop-shop such as NetBase Quid, let’s look at a few other social media monitoring tools to keep your eye on.

Feedly

Trend analytics and monitoring are the name of the game with social media monitoring, and Feedly allows you to make sure your social listening dynamic is staying the course. Leo is their “research assistant” that organizes social media sources around your topic, filters out the noise, and helps you share insights with your team. It’s a great add-on to double-check your primary social listening’s AI accuracy.

Fig #6: Feedly dashboard.

StoryHeap

Many brands are all in on “stories” on Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat – as well they should be. Stories give your brand another angle to social media and maximize impact. StoryHeap measures how your stories perform by following growth, open rate, completed views, and screenshots.

It’s a niche tool, but one that complements your marketing intel gleaned from your main social media monitoring tools, so you know the right direction to go.

Fig #7: Storyheap dashboard.

Sendible

When you’ve uncovered the data you need with your social media monitoring tools, Sendible helps you plan, post, and measure your content across a wide variety of platforms. When you’re putting your brand out there on social media, story is everything. Sendible allows you to take your social media insights, craft your marketing for direct hits and customize posts for each of your social media platforms – and track your progress.

Fig #8: Sendible dashboard.

Conclusion

Your consumers are talking about your brand and your competition on social media. Today’s top social media monitoring tools keep you apprised of relevant conversations, so you don’t miss a thing and can get ahead of narratives. Shaping the story is powerful, particularly when it so greatly impacts consumer perception. It’s essential to ensure your brand uses the latest world-class tools to stay a step of the competition – and keep pace with an increasingly demanding and fickle audience. Tomorrow’s opportunities are being shared online today!

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