Does Sharing Your Personal Opinions Help or Hurt Your Real Estate Business?

Disclosure: This post isn’t meant to open a can of worms. Its aim is to better understand how real estate agents use their social media accounts, specifically what type of content should be shared. If you feel you can comment without making a political statement, read on.

Over the course of the last several months we have increased our use of multiple social networks, and upped the number of accounts we follow to access current market information, and to learn more about our clients.

During that process one thing has jumped out; the proliferation of non-real estate content shared by agents, and a lot of it is personal political commentary. Which leads to a question:

In an ever more binary world, does sharing your personal opinion, especially political commentary, help or hurt your real estate business?

REALTOR Jenna Ryan received national notoriety, and a jail sentence, for her participation in the January 6th events at Capital Hill. Her comments included an ad for her real estate services.

Source: Curbed.com

“[She] livestreamed on Facebook: “We are going to <expletive> go in here,” she said at the top of the Capitol steps after breaching the line of police. “Life or death, it doesn’t matter. Here we go.” Then a quick advertisement: “Y’all know who to hire for your Realtor. Jenna Ryan for your Realtor!”

One has to wonder if that resulted in more or less business for Ryan? Did publicizing here political opinions alienate roughly 50% of the market? While we all have opinions, should we share them alongside professional, work related content?

To be clear, this isn’t a Republican or Democrat thing. Real estate agents with political opinions on both sides of the aisle share personal political commentary. As a result, the question isn’t about sharing content on a particular topic, it’s asking if agents should share personal commentary at all?

Before you answer consider the following tweets and bios, shared by REALTORS within the last few months. Is any of this something you would be ok sharing? Do sellers want to see their homes marketed alongside any of these comments?

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