Lettings guru, Sally Lawson, is calling on agents to embrace social media trends to reach new audiences.
Keeping on top of the latest social media trends can give any business a way to reach new audiences - and lettings is no exception. At Agent Rainmaker, we use Reels - video posts on Instagram - and have a Tiktok account to create brand awareness. Your agency could benefit from doing the same.
I started my lettings career back in the early 90s, years before the very early social media sites had even been thought about. I understand it can be daunting to learn about algorithms and ads, reach, and Instagram Reels.
But social media is now used by the majority of businesses so you’ve got to learn how to stand out from the crowd.
1. Make sure you're presenting your content in the right way
The content you share is undoubtedly important, but so too is the way you present that content to your audience.
It really doesn’t need to be that difficult. Perhaps you’re thinking of sharing a picture from your next team day. If you simply record some video snippets instead and add audio to them, then you could reach many hundreds more people.
We reach between two and three times the number of people when we post video content on social media, compared to pictures.
2. Understand the algorithm to reach more people
You can influence who sees your posts in a variety of ways (so that you’re reaching potential clients).
The best way to influence how many people see your posts is to ensure you’re creating the type of content that we know are favoured by the algorithms in place on each of the platforms.
The teams who create these algorithms tell us openly how they work, which means there’s no excuse not to post content which is going to tick the boxes in terms of highest reach.
3. Recognise what type of content creates the most engagement
The research backs up what we have seen on our own sites. A social media marketing platform, Later, studied 81 million posts on Instagram. Its research showed that engagement on traditional posts - those featuring just one picture - dropped 44% in three years, which was directly attributed to the introduction of Reels.
Tiktok – where users can only share videos, not pictures or text-only posts – reportedly has an engagement rate 15% higher than most other sites.
It also saw a 100% growth rate between 2020 and 2022, boasting 1.6 billion users by the end of that period.
4. Reevaluate what works on older social media platforms too
Even the longer-established networking sites have shifted towards prioritising videos, with Facebook having started telling users back in 2019 that its algorithm would favour "original and high-quality videos."
LinkedIn users are five times more likely to comment on a video than a photo or text-based posts.
Even paid-for posts are more effective when they’re video-based. In fact, users spend three times as long watching them compared to the time they spend viewing static adverts on the site.
All of this is simple proof that your agency needs to start investing time in creating videos to reach a new audience - to keep ahead of your competition.
