Free Social Media Calendar Template & Guide For Your Real Estate Business 2024

So, you’ve got all your social media accounts set up – but what should you post? You’ve probably found yourself at that stage where you realise you should be posting more, but you simply don’t know what and don’t have the time to spend hours thinking about what your next post should be. This is why social media calendars are an essential tool in any business – a central place where you can plan, schedule and create all your content. Once you’ve set up your social media calendar, you’ll have a clear overview of what should be going out on your channels and when.

To help you get started and provide you with plenty of inspiration, we’ve designed a free Social Media Calendar template for you to use, a user guide for the calendar along with the tips below.

Planned vs Ad Hoc Content

As part of this guide and calendar, we have included two sample months filled with ‘planned’ content specifically for real estate offices. Before we dive deeper into these examples, we’d like to highlight one thing: a social media calendar filled with planned content, does not mean you can never post spontaneous, ad hoc content anymore. Quite the opposite, actually!

As a real estate office, there is always something going on. These are often great things to share online:

- You’ve just listed an amazing new property for sale or rent

- One of your agents has just sold a property

- You have an OFI coming up

- It’s a team member’s birthday or anniversary

- There’s a social event happening in the office (team lunches, celebrations)

- You’ve just welcomed a new team member

If anything exciting is happening in the office, make sure to capture it and share it online! This is often the best content where you’ll get the most engagement.

Planned Content

The ad hoc content as mentioned above is great, but if you just rely on that for material, you’ll find that your social media accounts will dry up after a few weeks. You might have one exciting week filled with great content, followed by two weeks where virtually nothing is happening.

While Facebook and other social media channels’ algorithms can be extremely confusing, one thing is clear – consistency matters. To ensure you keep posting consistently, you need a plan for scheduled content.

The social media calendar we’ve created includes one month of planned content, specifically designed for real estate offices. Use this as a starting point to start planning your content.

You’ll see that there is a variety of content ideas and suggestions we have included in this calendar:

Weekend Wrap Up

The weekend is often where it’s all happening in real estate: let your followers know how the weekend activities went. How many OFI’s did you have? How many attendees were there? This is a great idea for a weekly post on Monday – you’ll keep it consistent, and you won’t have to think about what to post each Monday.

Weekly OFI Times & OFI Reminders

Example of an Open Home post for social media. Photo of a home with text over the image, including 'Open Home', the address and date. — *Example of an OFI post*

Have a regular post promoting your Open For Inspection times. This could be a post for each OFI, or you can combine all for the week in a single post – it’s up to you.

Team Member Profiles

Social media is a great way to introduce your team members to the local community. It’s always a good idea to share personal content on your socials and show the faces behind the organisation. When introducing a team member, provide interesting bits and facts such as hobbies, favourite places to visit, what they love about the local area, and why they joined the real estate industry.

You can create a monthly ‘Team Spotlight’ post where you introduce a member of the team. This will keep it consistent, and ensures you don’t run out of staff to post within the first few weeks. Did you know we also provide some free Canva templates to get you started with these posts?

Share Blog Post

Screenshot of a blog post shared on social media platform Facebook. — *Example of a blog post shared on social media*

Are you creating content for your blog? If you are, you should be sharing these posts on your social accounts (and if you aren’t, you definitely should – more about that later).

Blog posts are a win-win when it comes to social media: it’s a great way to drive traffic to your website, plus it provides a good source for content (especially when you have one of those weeks where there isn’t much exciting happening). Share a sentence or two about the topic in your post, provide a link to the actual blog post, and you’re done. Make sure to always test your link and image prior to posting – the Fac ebook Sharing Debugge r is an amazing tool for this.

If you don’t have a blog yet and would like to get started, these are some great topics to get you started:

- Top tips for preparing your house for sale

- How do I rent my home?

- Why should I use an agent to sell my home?

We’ll be sharing more later on why you should really have a blog on your website – make sure to subscribe to our email notifications for new tips and posts, so you don’t miss out on that one.

Suburb Profile

Another great topic for your blog and socials is a suburb profile. Choose one of the suburbs you service and create a profile of it. Add things that are valuable to know for people looking to move to the area, such as details about local schools, shopping and attractions. Did any famous people grow up there? Have there been any historical events?

Suburb profile content is also fantastic for your website’s SEO rankings!

Local Business Spotlight

Show your support for the community by spotlighting a local business. A lot of real estate agencies regularly use local businesses – if you have some that you love, shout them out.

Client Testimonial

Client testimonials are an amazing tool to build trust with your followers and potential clients. Share some of the great feedback you’ve received from clients in a nice social graphic, this way you’ll boost your page’s aesthetics while strengthening your brand.

Keep these to a limit of one or two a month – you don’t want to overdo it. If you’ve got long testimonials, only share a few key sentences in your graphic and link to the full post in the caption.

Community News

Is anything exciting or important happening in the local communities you service? Share it on your social media to show you are involved in the community. This gives your brand a more personal feeling and is an effective way to build trust.

Office Behind the Scenes

People love peeking behind the scenes and knowing what’s going on in other people’s lives – it’s why social media is as popular as it is. This is no different to workplaces and offices. Give people some insight into what’s happening in your office. This will again help give your brand a more personal feeling by showing the faces behind the business. This can be anything – a team lunch in the office, celebrations, or perhaps a shot of the cute office dog.

Getting Started

Hopefully this post has given you some inspiration for regular social media content on your profiles. Download our free social media calendar via the button below and start planning!

Some final tips and guidelines:

- If you post any ad hoc content that wasn’t planned, still update it in the calendar. This will help you keep an overview of what has been posted and whether you should change any future posts.

- Use the additional sheets to keep track of your actual posts. Include the subject, copy, image, link and anything else you need. You could potentially insert results in here as well to gain more insight as to which posts are performing well, and which ones aren’t.

- Once you’ve planned your content in the calendar, create the content and schedule it in your social media management tool! This could be in Facebook Business Manager, Hootsuite, or any other platform you may use.

- Think ahead. Try to get a few weeks of planned content in the calendar, so you won’t have to stress last minute. Ideally, you’ll set aside a time each week to plan, create and schedule your content. Aim to always be 2 weeks ahead.

- For more advanced users, it’s a good idea to include the specific channels (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter) in your calendar and plan content specifically for each of these. Not every post that goes on Instagram should go on LinkedIn, and likewise.

Lastly, you may have noticed that most of the above content ideas are focused on giving your brand a more personal touch. That’s right – it’s one of the main reasons why we are on social media and how to use it most effectively as a real estate agent. It’s not just about showing your listings (they’ll go to realestate.com and Domain for that), it’s about showing the faces behind the brand and building relationships. Keep this in mind when creating content.

Getting help

Feeling overwhelmed or simply don’t have the time to sort out your social media yourself? We can help. Book a free consultation today to find out about our fleet of Digital Marketing services, including Social Media Management. We’ve got options for everyone, no matter how small or big your real estate business is.