Is LinkedIn Good for Realtors?

According to some, LinkedIn was and is considered the next big thing.

Can it get as big as Facebook and other popular social networks?

When you hear those predictions, you might wonder whether it is also good for realtors.

At least from the standpoint of growth and its focus on business connections, it might be true.

LinkedIn is a social media network where your chances of generating high-quality real estate leads are pretty high.

Considering that your traffic to sales cost is about the same as on Facebook, with sometimes conversion rates of 40% with InMail Ads, LinkedIn is definitely good for realtors in terms of lead generation.

This article will analyze the platform deeply and discuss its importance, essential statistics, the benefits for realtors, and tips to use it efficiently as a realtor.

What Is LinkedIn?

In one phrase, LinkedIn is basically Facebook for professionals and another social network.

In contrast to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and all the other networks, its focus is on helping people make business connections.

But, of course, you can also do the standard things you might be used to doing on Facebook, such as sharing, liking content, and messaging other users.

When checking a profile, you will soon realize the rather professional structure of the network.

Here, your profile is instead a resume, where you can present your work experience, accomplishments, referrals, and recommendations.

Another professional feature is a career board, where you can search and apply for jobs.

The page you land on when you click on “Home” is similar to Facebook’s news feed.

There, you will find posts published by other LinkedIn users, and you can also post your own posts.

Again, similar to Facebook, you can decide who can see your posts (only your connections or just everyone (the public)).

When you click “My Network,” your existing network of connections is displayed.

Here, you can look for other users to join your network and check if you have existing invitations from other users.

If you click on “Jobs,” you will get to an extensive career site, where you can search for and apply for jobs and/or research companies you might be interested in.

Here, you can also get notified when there are new job offerings.

“Messaging” is again similar to Facebook messenger, where you can chat with people in your network.

Using LinkedIn Premium, you can also send messages to people outside your network. This is called “InMail.”

You can find your profile by clicking on “Me.”

And then, you can add your resume with your career history, including your accomplishments, work experience, education, current location, and more.

It should be as shiny as a resume you would send over to the human resources department of a company.

Why? You can assume and expect that professional connections and potential recruiters are visiting your profile.

21 Interesting Statistics about LinkedIn to Make Better Marketing Decisions

There are 675 million LinkedIn users and 310 million active users.

Almost 25% of the total users come from the U.S. alone. That’s 167 million users (source).
LinkedIn users are 57% male and 43% female (source).
Regarding countries, after the US (167 million), India has 64 million, China 49 million, Brazil 41 million, and Great Britain 28 million LinkedIn users (source).

87 million Millennials use LinkedIn, of which 11 million are in higher positions (decision-making).
There are 90 million senior-level influencers and 63 million decision-maker users.
Concerning content marketing, LinkedIn is the number one channel for B2B marketers (source).

If you post professional content, you will get 15x more impressions than job postings (check out my article on real estate content marketing strategies here).
57% of the time, content is consumed on mobile, and how-to & list posts perform best.
50% of all social traffic to B2B websites and blogs comes from LinkedIn.

Content is shared weekly by only 3 million LinkedIn users.
The best-performing article titles have 40 to 49 characters (source).
LinkedIn is part of the digital marketing mix of B2B marketers in 92% of the cases. 97% use it for their content marketing (source), and 79% consider it an effective lead generation method (source).

It is better to upload videos separately on LinkedIn because articles without videos perform better (source).
B2B leads come in 80% of the cases from LinkedIn compared to only 13% from Twitter and 7% from Facebook (source).
LinkedIn is used by 41% of millionaires (source).

There are over 30 million companies on LinkedIn with 20 million open job listings (source).
Users publish 2 million posts, articles, and videos daily on LinkedIn (source).
Using a professional headshot in your profile, will get 14 times more views (source).

To my surprise, LinkedIn Message Ads got a 40% conversion rate (source).
There are 80 million active users for LinkedIn SlideShare (source).

5 Benefits of Using LinkedIn as a Realtor

Now we know some important and surprising statistics about LinkedIn.

Let’s also review the 5 benefits of using LinkedIn as a realtor, then think about strategies and conclude if LinkedIn is good for realtors.

Basically, all of the below benefits have at their core one goal, namely to generate leads. Some are softer and more indirect ways to generate them, and others are more direct.

But see for yourself.

1) You can learn about your industry and build credibility

There are several groups on LinkedIn dedicated to real estate agents, where you can learn about the industry, connect with colleagues and find potential partners and/or co-brokerage opportunities.

Here is one of them that you can visit.

Besides groups, you can find, for example, industry information about median salaries, top companies, and the most attended universities.

Then, you can also do research about the largest U.S. real estate markets and find specific real estate agents.

When you take advantage of your LinkedIn profile and polish it as well as possible, you will have an additional tool to build trust and credibility.

Since you have almost all the space to describe yourself, you can fill in all the critical information about yourself and/or your real estate business.

Another element that shouldn’t be ignored in this context is the ability to post helpful content on your LinkedIn “wall.”

It is something you can include in your overall content marketing strategy and helps you present yourself as an expert.

When it comes to converting traffic into leads, in general, creating trust and credibility has a significant influence on it.

Another element that can increase your credibility is receiving endorsements and recommendations.

This is a unique feature of LinkedIn that you won’t find on Facebook.

After a successful deal, you could ask clients and partners to give you a LinkedIn recommendation or endorsement.

But this is not limited to only the people you closed deals with.

You can potentially receive endorsements and recommendations from anyone who is in your network.

2) Finding Partners and Joint-Ventures

Networking with others is generally important, but more so in real estate and especially when it comes to the luxury real estate niche, as I mentioned already in this article.

And LinkedIn can help you to partner up with other professionals from your industry that could provide you with leads.

It could be lawyers, financial planners, tax service providers, lenders, relocation providers, and any other business interested in creating a win-win situation.

3) Taking Advantage of LinkedIn Groups

LinkedIn Groups are similar to Facebook Groups.

These are communities created by individual users about a certain topic or industry niche.

As already shortly mentioned above, there are several real estate groups a realtor could join.

You can ask for advice, counseling, and ideas and post helpful content that you already have created or syndicated there.

Just look out for overly spammy groups that are just a constant advertising channel and don’t provide many helpful networking opportunities or help in general.

4) You Can Use It to Promote Your Content

As mentioned in the first benefit, in creating credibility, you can also use your LinkedIn Page as a content distribution channel.

Ideally, you already have a content plan as part of your real estate content marketing strategy.

In this article, you can learn how to create suitable real estate content you can then distribute on specific channels, such as LinkedIn, to promote your content.

So, your content, which can include listings, blog posts, videos, curated articles, and market trends, can be posted as your updates.

5) Directly Advertising on LinkedIn

Up to now, the benefits presented were more or less indirect ways by which you could generate leads.

Indirect also means that it is more difficult to measure in terms of performance.

But LinkedIn also has direct methods if you choose to use their advertising platform.

The platform is suitable for you, provided you have goals such as…

Increasing brand awareness
Engagement
Website visits

Lead generation
Video views
Job applicants

Website conversions.

These are the types of advertising you can run on LinkedIn:

Sponsored Content

Text Ads
Sponsored InMail (the LinkedIn Messenger)
Video Ads

On average, the cost per click on LinkedIn is $5.26. (source)

Sponsored content is a post you can promote (similar to Facebook’s post boost) from your LinkedIn feed.

This is also the type of ad with the highest cost per click, which can range between $2 and $5. (source)

Then, there are text ads, which can usually be found on the right side of the LinkedIn feed, similar to how Facebook Ads were in the year 2010.

Another standard placement of these ads is below the section “People You May Know.”

The ad types that can appear most spammy are the Sponsored InMail ads.

On the one hand, it’s riskier to appear spammy when using them.

But on the other hand, you also have a good chance of getting the best conversion rate compared to all the different LinkedIn Ad types, namely up to 40%, as already mentioned above.

Speaking of conversion rates, the average is 6.1% for U.S. users. (source)

The last ad type is video ads, which help you to promote your videos to your target audience.

10 Tips to Use LinkedIn Efficiently as a Realtor

From all the above, I can derive 10 tips on how you can use LinkedIn efficiently as a realtor:

1) Use it when your primary market and target audience is in the U.S. and if you also want to target high-net-worth individuals.

2) Post professional and good quality content regularly, ideally how-to & list posts, and don’t make the title longer than 49 characters

3) Use a good headshot profile picture to get 14 times more profile views.

4) Make sure the content from your website or blog is mobile-friendly since more than half of the content is consumed on mobile.

5) When using the LinkedIn Advertising Platform, focus on Message Ads because of the potential higher conversion rate (40%) they can give you.

6) Take advantage of your LinkedIn Company page, where you want to add every detail about your business.

You can also add a well-designed banner image for your page header.

7) Another page that can be beneficial is a showcase page, where you can provide more information about your real estate business.

A showcase page resembles a landing page and the company page of the real estate website. You can promote content, offers, and more on the showcase page.

8) To find local community members or users, you should also create or join LinkedIn groups related to real estate.

9) To find background information on your current leads and to identify new potential clients, you want to use the advanced search.

10) Finally, to know if you are using LinkedIn efficiently, you need to also check your LinkedIn analytics.

So, Is LinkedIn Good for Realtors?

When asking whether LinkedIn is good for realtors, the actual question is whether it is good for the real estate business in terms of generating new leads or new business.

So, we should compare it to the metrics of other marketing channels.

One good metric is the cost per sale (traffic to sales conversion rate), which we can calculate based on actual data and some estimation.

Focusing on LinkedIn InMail ads converting traffic at the highest rate of 40% compared to all the other ad types of LinkedIn, we can calculate the cost per customer acquisition.

For that, we can assume a lead-to-sales conversion rate of 10% (that I’ve already used in past articles, such as this one).

But let’s be a bit more pessimistic and assume a 20% traffic-to-lead conversion rate.

Applying the 10% lead-to-sales conversion rate, we would have a traffic-to-sales conversion rate of 2%, meaning we would need 50 clicks to generate on sale (1 divided by 2%).

We know that the average cost per click on LinkedIn is $5.26.

This means that to generate one sale or paying customer (CPA), the cost would be $263 (50 clicks x $5.26).

Let’s compare this to Google Ads and Facebook Ads.

The Facebook Ads traffic to lead conversion rate in real estate is 10.68%, and the CPC is $1.81.

Applying the 10% lead to sales conversion rate, we get a 1.068% traffic to sales conversion rate, which means that for one sale, we would need roughly 94 clicks.

This, in turn, would mean a cost per sale of $169.50 (94 clicks x $1.81).

What about Google Ads?

The Google Ads traffic to lead conversion rate in real estate is 2.47%, and the average CPC is $2.37.

Applying the 10% lead to sales conversion rate, we have a 0.247% traffic to sales conversion rate, which means that for one sale, we would need roughly 404 clicks.

This, in turn, would mean a cost per sale of $957 (404 clicks x $2.37).

Platform	Cost per Sale
LinkedIn Ads	$263
Facebook Ads	$169.50
Google Ads	$957

At first glance, it looks like Facebook Ads is the winner, and Google Ads is the loser.

But before you jump to premature conclusions, consider that I used an estimated lead-to-sales conversion rate of 10% throughout all the platforms.

This number depends highly on your sales and follow-up skills and also on the quality of leads.

And there have been reports that the leads you generate from Facebook are not always the best ones, so this 10% could be much lower (maybe around 5%).

In turn, this number could be even higher than 10% on LinkedIn because you will likely get better quality leads with higher net worth.

This could be similar to Google Ads, where it depends on the keywords and, thus, the search intent you are exploiting with your search campaign.

So, all in all, after this analysis and estimation, I tend to conclude that LinkedIn is good for realtors in generating leads or new business.

This article has been reviewed by our editorial team. It has been approved for publication in accordance with our editorial policy.