Navigating the Social Scene for Better Business By Joey Macari his month, Real Estate magazine spoke with Rocket Mortgage’s Bridget Hillyer, social campaign manager and content strategist, who discussed how real estate professionals can leverage social media to build their business. Joey Macari: Tell us how you got started with Rocket Mortgage, how it led to your current role, and what exactly your role is. Bridget Hillyer: I started at Rocket as a creative strat-egy intern in 2017, but quickly gravitated toward social content creation. At the time, Rocket Mortgage was re-ally starting to up its focus in the social space, but no one owned the strategy. I made that my focus, and now I lead the development of our brand social campaigns. A part of my job is reviewing commercial concepts and weighing in on how well I think they’ll fit online. Some ideas that work in a 30-second TV commercial Hillyer format don’t necessarily work on social, where you need to convey the selling point quickly. After a commercial is selected, I work with the campaign manager to de-cide what social content pieces we need, what platforms they will run on and how many ads we can support. I then work with our creative team, helping brainstorm and ultimately approve those concepts. JM: What trends do you see in social media strategy as it relates to the real estate industry? BH: Right now, TikTok is the leading platform for trend development and in-56 May 2022 RISMedia’s REAL ESTATE T novation. The demographics of the platform aren’t exclusively young as people think, so the home-buying audience is there even if it isn’t as large a group as other platforms. The benefit of TikTok is if you know how to use a trend properly, the al-gorithm can get you in front of a lot of people quickly. However, you re-ally have to understand those trends and be a regular user of the platform to do this right. If TikTok just isn’t for you, there are still learnings you can take away. TikTok has really shown there is a huge desire for bite-sized, snackable videos, and those videos can be popular across all platforms. Some-times a 20-second video explain-ing the pros and cons of waiving an inspection can be far more effective than spending three minutes getting your message across. JM: What type of content should real estate profession-als be sharing on social media? BH: First off, work to separate your personal and private lives on social. Have accounts to promote your busi-ness and private accounts if you want to share photos from your kid’s grad-uation or your weekend vacation. Not only does that give you the abil-
Real Estate Magazine May 2022: Page 56
