While tech continues to revolutionise the property industry and change the way people find their homes – now via social media – the industry also needs to follow social media trends to capitalise on the global shot in the arm that proptech has given it.
More and more property practitioners are turning to short-form video content – the current trend leader in the social media space, according to GWI’s flagship report on the latest trends in social media – as a marketing tool to meet potential customers on the social media platforms where they spend hours every day.
Good, Better, Video
GWI’s report shows that short videos are quick to create and tend toward the less polished, more spontaneous content people are after. Consumers on channels like TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and Facebook Stories are far more likely to use social media for creative inspiration. Short clips are a huge hit with Gen Z and 1 in 4 consumers watch a video made by a brand, each month. They’re also shared extensively on messaging platforms like WhatsApp, opening access to consumers who may not be on TikTok. Harnessing this trend to showcase their expertise and their properties to would-be buyers is the next step for an industry rapidly coming to terms with the need to adopt off-site ads and social media marketing.
Massaging the Algorithm
“For businesses – and property practitioners in particular – the change in the way the algorithms on these platforms function plays into the hands of those who can create compelling content,” says Flow Co-CEO and Co-Founder Gil Sperling. “The algorithms – once focussed on aggregating content from connections, friends and family – now draw far more on content that users regularly interact with to populate their feeds”. Sperling says that these short-form videos are incredibly addictive because it’s easy to consume scores of videos that the algorithm knows you’ll be interested in, in a short period of time. “The most successful short-form videos are also authentic – meaning they don’t need to be polished and produced by experts: a boon to property practitioners who can showcase their portfolio of properties more easily”. Using Flow’s tech to promote these clips can help expand their reach exponentially, finding those in the market at the right time.
Flow (which has been in the news recently after raising $4.5 million in a pre-Series A funding round) gives property professionals the ability to simply and quickly harness the power of complex social media advertising to target motivated buyers and sellers online, matching people and properties faster and helping agents boost their brands and businesses. The platform is helping property practitioners stay at the forefront of social media marketing trends like short-form video by constantly adding new features and integrations to the platform. Having already helped agents and agencies seamlessly, easily and automatically create targeted social media advertising with their existing listing information, the platform is now bringing together the addictiveness of short-form video with the power of its automated ad creation tools. This tech is set to help property practitioners connect with markets in new ways on platforms they know they need to be on – but aren’t sure how to market effectively, on.
“Our aim is to continuously build better creative tools, providing more access to social media channels, enabling agents to use them in ways that actually work,” says Flow Co-Founder and Co-CEO Daniel Levy. “An implicit understanding of the way social media platforms work and the ability to produce the technology that makes it simpler for property practitioners to access them without having an in-depth knowledge of how complex dashboards and algorithms work helps us to enable the industry with tech. That leaves property practitioners to focus on doing deals and becoming trusted partners to buyers and sellers, with our tech taking care of the marketing work”.
As more people start to trust social media platforms as sales channels – 35% of Instagram users will make a purchase on the platform in 2023, just behind Facebook and TikTok, both of which will see a purchase percentage of 37%, according to a Hootsuite study. That makes it essential for authentic businesses to form trusting relationships with consumers – particularly when it comes to an investment as big as a home purchase.
There’s no reason that the property industry shouldn’t be able to harness social media platforms to help the right homes find the right people.