4 Insights For Creating Engaging Real Estate Video Content in 2022
Over the last few years, social media has evolved from a place of static images and posts to one of dynamic video content, curated by user-influenced algorithms. It’s transformed the real estate marketing world, making anyone looking to advertise themselves or their agency online need to rethink their approach to be more engaging and interactive. This is overall a net positive, as it means better content that users will be more attracted to, but it does make it harder to know exactly how to build your agency’s social media marketing strategy. So here’s a few quick tips for creating engaging video content in 2022.
1. Vertical Videos
If you learned everything you know about social media back in 2010, you might scoff at the thought of vertical videos. But those days have passed, and now video content that doesn’t require users to shift their phone grip is the name of the game.
There are a few different aspect ratios that work in different ways across social media. They are:
- 1:1. These are square videos, like you’d see in your Instagram feed. They are ideal for in-feed advertisements and carousels. Just be sure not to directly post other ratios at 1:1, as a significant portion of the video will get cropped out.
- 4:5 and 2:3. Slightly taller than square videos, these also appear embedded in Facebook and Instagram feeds, though tend to be used for more natural content rather than paid advertising. There’s very little that differentiates 4:5, 2:3, and 1:1 from a stats point of view, but the taller ones do tend to perform a little better.
- 9:16. These are the videos you’ll see in Stories, Reels, TikToks, and Snapchats which cover your phone’s whole screen. They’re immensely popular across a number of platforms, and it’s a good idea to consider them the primary direction for your content.
Keep these in mind when planning your content, so you can film and export your videos in the correct aspect ratios before posting them.
2. Short Captions
Headlines and primary text captions are a hot topic amongst social media professionals, with the discussion ranging from engagement to accessibility to analytics and more. But the general consensus – which the stats seem to back up – is that captions are good, but keep them short. Ten words seems to be the limit, after which engagement drops off. But of course, keeping to your agency’s brand personality is more important than anything. Experiment with as many options as you can, and find the lengths that work best for your audience.
One other thing: always add closed captions to any videos that contain speech. On Facebook alone, the vast majority of the 8 billion videos watched daily are silenced. Adding closed captions creates viewing flexibility and broadens your reach, letting users see and understand your videos in any situation.
3. Be Aware of Video Length
Another modern change in social media user behaviour is that longer videos are starting to lead the engagement metrics. A few years ago, videos around 1 minute ranked the highest, with users simply looking for something to fill the time. Now, most users are looking for value and information – so anything which can provide that will get higher engagement, and naturally, more information-dense content will run longer.
2-5 minutes is looking like the sweet spot, though it depends on your audience. If you’re known for your property walkthroughs, you might find that anything over 3 minutes loses engagement. But if you’re an agent who educates your audience on the bureaucracy of property buying, you’ll need to convey a lot more information, and thus your audience will expect longer videos.
Regardless of the actual length of the content, the first 5 to 10 seconds matter the most. Capturing viewer’s attention and curiosity is paramount to keeping them engaged with your content, and if they feel your video is boring they’ll scroll right by.
4. Reach Across the Marketing Funnel
As a real estate professional, you likely have a solid grounding in the principles of marketing. One of those principles that relates directly to social media marketing is The Funnel. This is the process whereby a potential customer is slowly introduced to your services and “funnelled” towards a purchase. I won’t go too deep into it here, but the basic stages are:
- Awareness of you and your product;
- Consideration of its value to the customer;
- Decision to purchase.
By designing different video content for each stage of the funnel and using your chosen platform’s tools to control the content’s visibility depending on where the user is at in your funnel, you can ensure that you’re maintaining consistent engagement levels and providing the maximum amount of value. This also ensures you don’t overwhelm new viewers with messages or information they’re not ready for yet, which would quickly sour them on your product.
These are just a few of the many, many ways you can tweak and adjust your content to boost engagement across social media. But if it all feels like too much work, don’t worry: Properti is here to help. Check us out at www.properti.ai to see the work we do for real estate professionals like you.
