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How to Connect to Investors through Instagram
For most of us in the real estate industry, Instagram is a brave new world that we’re completely unfamiliar with in a business context. Not many in the real estate development and investment marketplace are making a big impact on Instagram so far, but you can if you make the right moves.
Connecting with investors requires a nice mix of market research, content creation, and the appropriate brand voice for the platform. Here’s how you can start connecting with investors through your posts.
How to Use Different Instagram Post Types
There are a few different ways you can put content in front of your audience. Because of the algorithm on Instagram, your followers won’t always see everything you post. But, any of these post types can be boosted as a sponsored post to end up with more eyes on it.
These are the main post types on Instagram:
- Stories
This is the most popular type of content consumed on Instagram. It’s frictionless and easy to view, so whatever you’re posting in stories needs to fit into that bill. Videos are restricted to 10 seconds each, but you can post as many as you want to in a long string story. After 24 hours, story posts disappear, which means you shouldn’t put any information up here that you might want prospects to have access to over a longer period of time.
- Grid Posts
These are your basic content posts that appear on your feed and the feeds of people who follow you. They will stay on your profile forever, unless you go back and delete them. When you open someone’s profile (or a brand profile), these are the posts that appear all down the screen. You’ll want to make sure whatever you post on your grid is something that aligns strongly with your brand voice, shows off your goals, and speaks to your target audience.
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- IGTV
This is the most recent feature on Instagram. It’s meant to be a way to take on YouTube by allowing users to post long-form video content. Although it’s useful in some cases, it hasn’t caught on as much with users. Short-form story videos are still generally preferred. That being said, it might still be beneficial for you to post your long-form video content on IGTV, because it will sit on your profile and be viewable at any time. IGTV posts don’t disappear like story posts.
- Highlights
This is actually a sub-feature of the Stories option. When you post a story, you can save it to your highlights section within the 24 hours it’s posted. A highlighted post will stay on your profile for as long as you want it to, only disappearing when you eventually delete it. This works well if you want to keep highlights from ongoing projects visible for longer, or if you get a lot of engagement and views on a story post, so you decide to keep it around longer.
Each type of post is part of the overall mix. You need to find out what your target audience likes to consume and create a diverse content strategy that revolves around that. Remember to play around with both temporary and permanent post types and not to be afraid to try new things. You might get unexpected positive results!
Balancing Professionalism & Personalization
Most of the people you encounter on Instagram won’t be there to see super polished and professional content. There’s a time and place for that, but you want to show a few different sides to your business through Instagram. If you’re overly professional and rigid, you’re not going to attract a large audience on this particular platform.
People come to Instagram for personal connection with real humans. To be really successful here, you need to show a bit more of the personal side of the business as well. Give some peeks behind the scenes, tell personal stories that are relevant to the business, and show your company from a perspective that feels less polished and touched-up.
You don’t have to expose all of your flaws and throw ugly content out for the whole world to see. But you should consider making a habit of posting content that speaks to people on a personal level that’s easier to connect with. Professional content is great and still works perfectly in some contexts, but personal content has a unique way of working wonders through social media and particularly on Instagram.
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Instagram isn’t the same as email marketing, Facebook, your website, or any other online outreach platform. Understand the options you have on Instagram, the preferred content style, your unique investment value proposition, and how you can use them all to reach your prospects most effectively. It’s a bit of a balancing act at first, but one that you need to familiarize yourself with if you want to succeed with investors on Instagram.
If you have only just started in real estate development, have completed no deals, have no email list, but know you want the freedom and wealth being a real estate developer brings, then I suggest your first step is to start evaluating deals so you can recognize a good one when you see it.
Here’s where you should start. You’ll learn everything you need to know – the different types of real estate, different development strategies, how real estate cycles influence the market, and all about due diligence.
If you want to find deals and raise money for them so you can start your real estate development business, then learning how to conduct due diligence so you can pitch your deals better to investors is a great place to start.
If you’ve already purchased one or more real estate project and are seeing more opportunities than you can finance, then now is the time to start building your investor network so you can finance all your next deals quicker.
You’ve already got some momentum; now start finding and educating prospects about what you’re doing so you can build an email list of people to pitch to when you’re ready to raise money for your next deal.
This is what we build for private clients all the time – it’s called the Investor Acquisition System and you can access the entire program right here so you can find prospects, and convert them into being deep pocketed, repeat investors in your deals.
If you are a seasoned pro with multi-cycle experience, a substantial portfolio, a decent deal pipeline, and find yourself spending too much time raising equity capital because you’re still doing it in-person, then it’s time you put technology to work for you.
The wonderful thing about doing this is that you’re not going to be doing anything different than you’re already doing and, guess what, you’ll never have to sit through investor meetings again.
Sounds crazy I know, but I lay the whole thing out for you in this white board workshop where I personally show you exactly what it takes for you to transform your equity raising into a fully automated, capital raising machine so you can find new investors while increasing commitments from your existing network.
