Social Media for Loan Officers: Tips to Succeed

You’ve likely heard of the importance of social media for loan officers and wondered if it’s really a necessary marketing tactic for your business.

In this highly digital world, using social media is a must for most every business, including for mortgage lenders. Whether your organization has a social media presence or not, there’s still room for you to build your own social media presence as a loan officer.

Why Is Social Media for Loan Officers Important?

There are two main reasons to use social media as a loan officer.

The first is that it shows borrower leads that you’re an active loan officer if they find you through a social media channel.

The second is that it shows search engines that you’re active, and can, when done correctly, give your search engine result page ranking a boost. This means it might be easier for new leads to find you if they run generic searches during their home financing process like “loan officer in Raleigh.”

Meet Customers Where They Are

Something important to keep in mind when you’re thinking of either getting started with social media or branching out to a new network is to do the research to determine which platforms your target audience uses.

For example, if you’re trying to let leads know you know the best way to finance a jumbo loan, you may conclude your target audience is at least over 40. Putting that messaging on Facebook would serve you better than trying to get those individuals to move to a platform they might not use regularly like Instagram, which skews toward a younger demographic.

Types of Content to Share

The types of content you want to share and the cadence at which you share them all comes down to what you think you can reasonably handle.

Here are just a handful of the types of content you can share on social media:

• Sharing content with or without comments
• Plain text messages that act as status updates or call-to-action
• Photos from events
• Blog posts you’ve written
• Videos you’ve filmed that answer questions about the mortgage process

For Newbies: Try posting content at the lower end of the effort spectrum twice per week. Once you’re comfortable sharing content from other sources and adding your own commentary, you can move onto content requiring more effort.

For Intermediates/Advanced: Try your hand at blogging or video while maintaining your lower effort content schedule. For example, continue to share industry content twice per week and aim to publish a video or blog post once every month.

How to Pull It Off

Social media for loan officers is only as complicated as you make it. That’s why we’ll reiterate to take on what you can reasonably manage.

Two things we can recommend to help you be successful with your efforts are 1) use a social media scheduling tool, and 2) to set goals for yourself.

Scheduling Tools: Buffer and Hootsuite are two popular free scheduling tools. If you have your content ready to go a few days in advance, you can set up content for all your social accounts on your scheduling tool.

Set Goals: If you want to succeed at social media, you need to hold yourself accountable. Set specific goals (ex. I’ll share 2 articles per week and post 1 video every 2 weeks) and track your progress against them.

Final Thoughts

When you’re creating social media content, you want to make sure most of your content is about your borrowers (current and potential). Like your value prop, your posts should focus on answering questions for borrowers, solving their problems, and how you can help them.

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