Social media is often pushed as a perfect way to connect with potential clients. This couldn’t be more true in the world of real estate. In the recent Secrets of Top Selling Agents webinar, “The Modern Real Estate Professional’s Guide to Success,” Marki Lemons-Ryhal shared her tips, tools and best practices to help your business boom with social media.

Previously, we examined Lemons-Ryhal’s tips and strategies for finding inspiration for content, creating a social media schedule and setting goals for your pages. This time, we’re going to review her top social media tools to make your social posts look consistent and professional.

Finding the Right Photos
Lemons-Ryhal mentions that there has been an issue recently with agents using copyrighted images. She says that it’s important to remember that all images on the MLS are copyrighted, so you’re not able to use them freely. You may even not be able to use pictures that were taken by hired photographers in the way you hoped. Because of this, agents are being sued by both Getty Images and photographers. Lemons-Ryhal says the way to avoid this issue is to use royalty-free photo sites.

Two royalty-free photo websites Lemons-Ryhal recommends are Pexels and Pixabay. The great thing about these sites is that you’re able to download the images and use them freely on any platform. When searching for photos to use, Lemons-Ryhal tells viewers to stop searching by the term “real estate photos”; it will return very limited search results. Instead, she recommends using the term “architecture,” as it renders over 10,000 photos to choose from. To narrow down the results to your specific location, Lemons-Ryhal says to search for the city where you live and “architecture.” The goal is to find something that will resonate with your intended buyers and sellers.

Customizing Your Photos
Once you find your perfect picture, you can customize it to fit your branding. Lemons-Ryhal recommends color-matching to find the exact palette in the picture, so you can keep any overlays consistent. The best tool to use for this is Canva Color Palette. After you’ve found the exact colors, Lemons-Ryhal suggests making it even more personal by adding one of your own headshot photos as an overlay to a free photo you’ve downloaded.

First, you’ll need to remove the background from your headshot. To do so, Lemons-Ryhal recommends a site called Remove Image Background. Once you have all of your pieces, you can use the Canva app to layer your photo and text on top of your free image, and use it on your social profiles. As Lemons-Ryhal says, “There’s no reason to look generic.”

Capitalizing on Audio
Lemons-Ryhal says that capturing the best audio is the most important part of recording. This is because you can use your audio recordings across multiple platforms. She says that she uses aTube.me to turn videos from mp4 files to mp3, and then posts the mp3 files in multiple locations.

Another way Lemons-Ryhal suggests using audio files is to record a long video once each week, and then use Sound Up Now to repurpose them. From each long video, she says to pick a few sections that have your best content. You can turn the long video into a podcast and publish it to iTunes so it will be posted across multiple audio platforms. Then, through Sound Up Now, you can use the short audio files that you created to make clips for Alexa Flash Briefing (which is a quick overview of trending topics and news), embedding on webpages or for audiogram. Lemons-Ryhal says one agent even uses clips during open houses. After converting the clips into Alexa Flash Briefing, he places Alexa devices in each room so visitors can play clips about the room or ask for more information. (To learn more about Alexa Flash Briefing, Lemons-Ryhal recommends watching this YouTube tutorial by Chelsea Peitz.)

More Tool Suggestions
Headliner.app gives you the ability to take short audio clips and turn them into videos. Select the photo you want paired with the audio, and Headliner will automatically create an animation to match the sound.

Otter.ai will transcribe any audio clips that you upload. This tool is very practical if you want to post a podcast as a blog post. You can also use the text in emails, social media, etc.

In order to connect with clients online, Lemons-Ryhal says you need to “be as many places as humanly possible.” Repurpose.io allows you to do just this. It’s an automation platform that will publish your content in multiple places without you having to spend the time doing so. Using this tool, you can upload Facebook Live videos to YouTube, automatically transcribe your video or audio posts, create vertical or square audiograms, and more.

To learn more of Lemons-Ryhal’s tips or to watch the recording of her webinar, join the Secrets of Top Selling Agents Facebook Group here. For more free real estate education, including best practices, visit the Secrets of Top Selling Agents website.

Joe Sesso is an author and national speaker for Homes.com. For more information, please visit marketing.homes.com.