We have been briefed to deliver social media training and a group-wide playbook across 300 estate agency branches.
We have been awarded a strategic social media brief with LSL Property Services plc, one of the largest providers of estate agency franchises in the UK.
LSL owns several household estate agency brands, including YourMove and Reeds Rains. It has asked us to deliver a social media training and strategy programme across its 300 branches, and to build a group-wide playbook so that best practice is actually written down rather than living in the heads of the four or five people in the network who happen to be good at it.
The problem with 300 branches
Estate agency is an unusually local business attached to a national brand, and social media sits right on that seam. Head office can produce all the beautiful assets it likes, but the person who wins the instruction is usually the branch manager who has built a following in their own town.
The numbers back that up. Recent research found that 67% of buyers are more likely to trust an agent that is active on social media, and 60% admit they have been persuaded to buy a property after seeing it on a social network. That is a lot of pipeline sitting in the hands of individual branches.
The challenge, of course, is consistency. Getting one branch posting well is straightforward. Getting 300 of them doing it, to the same standard, without head office having to police every post, is a different job entirely. That is what this programme is designed to fix.
What the programme covers
The focus is on helping each branch use social media marketing to build its reputation locally, and to attract and convert landlords and sellers rather than simply collecting likes.
Chris Norton and Will Ockenden are delivering the training themselves, covering an overview of the current social media picture followed by platform deep dives on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, X and TikTok. Alongside that we are writing the bespoke playbook, tailored to the group’s own brand guidelines and audiences, covering how to build an engaged local community and what good actually looks like.
We have also built in work to avoid learning fade, which is the thing that quietly kills most training programmes. Everyone is enthusiastic in week one. The test is whether anything has changed in month six.
What the client said
Emma Tildesley, Your Move and Reeds Rains Brand Marketing Manager, said:
“Social media has never been more important in the domestic property market, with both vendors and buyers increasingly basing their decision making on what they have seen online, whether that’s which estate agent to list with, right through to which property to view or buy. However, maintaining best practice across 300 branches can be a challenge, and that’s exactly what this project is going to address, helping keep the Group at the forefront of the market.”
Will Ockenden, director at Prohibition, added:
“This is exactly the type of training brief we love to work on; large scale, and with the potential to drive meaningful behaviour change and tangible business results. It’s also great to see an organisation the size of LSL taking learning and development so seriously. Our focus will not only be on instilling best practice across the network, but ensuring we avoid learning fade and the lessons stick.”
It is a good example of the sort of work our property and construction team takes on, where the brief is less about coverage and more about changing how a large organisation behaves. If you have a network, a franchise or a branch estate with the same problem, we would be glad to talk it through.
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