From Followers to Guidelines – Property Industry Eye – TNT

I speak to agents every day, and one of the things that always comes up is social media. Almost all agents are on in and plenty have built really strong followings on Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok.

I’ve seen agents with posts that rack up millions of likes, reels that look like they’ve been professionally produced, and accounts that have more followers than some local newspapers. But when I ask the obvious next question, how much business has actually come from those followers, the answer is often, “Not as much as I’d like.”

And I get it. It’s really easy to get caught up in the numbers. Followers, views, likes, they feel like progress. They show people are paying attention. But here’s the truth: likes don’t pay the bills. An online following is only as valuable as the number of people you can move from simply engaging with you online to actually becoming part of your database,  and eventually, a client.

Here’s a quick test I often suggest. Add up your social media following across all your platforms. Now look at the size of your CRM. As a rule of thumb, your database should be at least twenty per cent of your follower count. If it’s not there yet, that’s not a failure on your part, it’s just showing you the size of the opportunity you’re sitting on.

What I’ve noticed is that the agents who do this well always start by asking: why would someone follow me in the first place? And the answer usually isn’t just property posts. Sellers don’t hit the follow button just to see another three-bed semi pop up in their feed. They follow because they see you as someone who knows the local market, someone who can give them useful insights, someone they’d turn to when it’s time to move. That’s the sort of content that gets remembered.

But even when you’ve nailed your content, there’s another step. You’ve got to make it clear what happens next in the process. Too many profiles are full of good posts but no direction. If you don’t tell people what to do, they’ll just keep scrolling. This is where things like lead magnets make all the difference. A free local market guide, a “what’s my home worth” tool, a simple checklist for getting sale-ready, it really doesn’t need to be complicated. It just needs to give people a reason to share their details with you so they move from being a follower to being in your CRM, where you can actually build a relationship offline.

When I look at agents who are winning instructions off the back of their social media, it’s rarely the ones with the biggest followings. More often than not, it’s the ones who’ve thought carefully about this process. They know how to turn attention into conversations, conversations into valuations, and valuations into instructions. That’s where the real return comes from.

And here’s the encouraging part, once you’ve set this up properly, your following becomes so much more than just a vanity metric. It’s not about being the most popular online. It’s about having a steady flow of homeowners who already know who you are, already trust you, and are now ready to pick up the phone when you call. That’s when social media stops being just a marketing exercise, and starts becoming a real driver of your businesses growth.